How much of our taxes, exactly, have we squandered on the Medical Mart to date? Today in
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cuyahoga County taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the convention center complex, to lure travelers to town. How much has the Global Center for Health Innovation cost?
We’re talking about former Med Mart, which officials want to sink another $46 million into, on Today in Ohio.
Editor Chris Quinn hosts our daily half-hour news podcast, with impact editor Leila Atassi, editorial board member Lisa Garvin and content director Laura Johnston.
You’ve been sending Chris lots of thoughts and suggestions on our from-the-newsroom text account, in which he shares what we’re thinking about at cleveland.com. You can sign up for free by sending a text to 216-868-4802.
Here are the questions we’re answering today:
With Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish seeking to spend $46 million on the failure that is the Medical Mart/Global Center for Health Solutions, we set about finding out how much this loser has cost taxpayers since the idea first came up. What’s the bill?
Has FirstEnergy really gotten back into politics after saying it was pulling way back, in light of its $60 million in bribes in the HB 6 Statehouse scandal?
We were shocked when the county engineer suddenly realized the Memphis Road bridge was in such bad condition it had to be closed immediately, and we set about to find out if there are other bridges where the engineer might be surprised. What’s the word?
Does a Cleveland City Council resolution to remove the FirstEnergy name have any value whatsoever, given that council resolutions are non-binding and involve no official actions?
It must be FirstEnergy day. A third story. Did another former ranking Ohio Public Utilities Commission officer stick it to the people of Ohio to help FirstEnergy collect millions it did not deserve? Has this commission ever once represented the little guy?
Did Amazon fire a Northeast Ohio employee because he was trying to organize a union?
We’ve got new presidents at Cleveland’s three major colleges, and reporter Bob Higgs talked to them to see if they have plans to collaborate. They don’t always. Will these three?
How are some civic organizations trying to make downtown Cleveland’s main parks and open spaces better used?
What’s the penalty for the people who cut down and stole a 200-year-old walnut tree from the Metroparks.
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Read the automated transcript below. Because it’s a computer-generated transcript, it contains many errors and misspellings.
Chris: [00:00:00] It is hard to believe that we are heading into Memorial day weekend. It feels like 2022 just started. And summer is NY it’s today in Ohio. The news podcast discussion from cleveland.com and the plain dealer. I’m Chris Quinn. The LA women, as one of our listeners is called you Lisa Garvin, Layla Tassie, and Laura Johnston.
You like that moniker Layla, that LA women.
Leila: I hadn’t heard that.
Laura: That’s cool. I feel like that’s like California girls. Like we should all be like tossing our hair back in a convertible. Like, you know,
Leila: I feel a lot cooler than I am.
Lisa: One of the best albums ever LA woman by
Chris: the doors. Well, there you go. That’s what one listener’s referring to you as let’s get going.
We got a great story to start off with with Cuyahoga county, executive Armen, Buddhists seeking. $46 million on the [00:01:00] failure. That is the medical Mart global center for health solutions. We set about finding out how much this loser has cost taxpayers. Since the idea first came up, Layla, what’s the. Well,
Leila: Katelyn Durbin, huge shout out to Katelyn this morning.
She probably is still recovering from this. She spent months on this analysis, and so the closest G was able to come to pinning down the actual cost to taxpayers. I have this boondoggle of a building over the last nine years is between 90 million and 144 million. And of course the county is poised to spend even more this summer, as much as $46 million more to officially.
The global center with the Huntington convention center to make the two conjoined facilities, the convention center of our dreams in type county. Um, so here’s how Caitlin figured out the costs. Officials estimate that the global center costs about 12% of the total. $465 [00:02:00] million convention center, construction project.
So if you take that same percentage and apply it to the construction and management of the property over the last nine years, it brings the global centers final bill to around 90 million. But that calculation doesn’t include. The whole ground floor of the complex, the Cuyahoga county convention facilities, development corporation, and consultant.
Jeff Applebom considered that ground floor to be part of the convention center. It’s sold as part of the convention package it’s described as the front door to the, to the convention center. So if you add that to the first floor, the add that first floor back in, cause you know, it’s that beautiful atrium to the med Mart and everything.
Well, the global center, I mean, You know, if you add it back in accounting for the building’s full footprint of 235,000 square feet, the final costs increases to 144 million. So there’s where we have that range. And the majority of that money was spent on [00:03:00] construction and debt. And Caitlin explains the nitty gritty of what line items she added into that calculation in a, in a separate post that’s linked to her story on Cleveland next.
Chris: All right. At least I know you want to get to why you think spending more money is a good idea, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The, the, the idea that the first floor shouldn’t be included with Jeff, which Jeff Alvin Palm was pushing in this story is preposterous. He’s saying that the real estate purchase of the old sportsman deli and the parking garage would have been done anyway, because the convention center would have stretched into that corner.
And I’m throwing the flag. I do not believe they would have been taken. If it weren’t for the medical Mart, the medical Mart was the four story building going on that corner. The whole reason to take down that very popular restaurant, which did not want to go away was for the medical Mart. If there had been no medical Mart and just a convention center, they wouldn’t have taken the corner, they would have fit it into the rest of the space.
That’s a four story building. The medical Mart is a four story building. [00:04:00] Everything that went into building it counts as what we have wasted on this ridiculous white elephant that we’re now stuck with. I got to
Laura: agree with you on that one floor.
Leila: You have, you have the institutional memory of this too, cause you weren’t
Laura: covering, covering that.
I think the front door is not that I think the front door is on Lakeside where it says Huntington convention center world.
Chris: Yeah. That was such, that was such, I was so glad he said it because every reader looking at it, I’m sure it was laughing at it. He said, oh, that’s, uh, I, I, I disagree with this. This is part of it.
It’s like, no, it’s not. It’s a four story building. You can’t pedal that nonsense to. The public. It’s just silly the idea to it. At the very last minute we were trying to get the operational cost and all along, they’re telling Katelyn, you can’t separate those out. You can’t separate those out. And when they realize we’re doing the story anyway, all of a sudden Friday afternoon, they hit her with a bunch of papers to say, They’re not [00:05:00] losing money in operations, but we haven’t had a chance to drill into it.
We put it into the story, but I’m, I bet that when we drill into it, we’re not going to find that that’s accurate. Yeah. She,
Leila: she threw the, the bone, you know, she, she included the, the information they gave him. Um, she, they, they were trying to make the case to her, that the global center, while not a huge moneymaker, hasn’t been a money pit.
They gave her documents suggesting that it’s, it’s meager rental income from tenants essentially. You know, do does cover its operating costs. So there was a net loss of $3,000 in 2017, but then there were profits of 130, 2,400 17,000 in 2018 and 2019. Some of those profits went to bio enterprise though, which was managing the facility at the time.
And, and it wasn’t clear at all how much that ate into their profits. So it could have been zero left over afterward. Who knows? I don’t know.
Chris: The other thing. They, they claim that the bill, the whole thing [00:06:00] came in under budget. Right? Remember they, they claim that the sole project…
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