|
|
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
|
|
|
|
Home
»
|
An earful on earmarks
Blog entry: March 12, 2010, 11:08 am | Author: SCOTT SUTTELL
A few thoughts and links on a Friday: If you're all whipped up in an anti-earmark frenzy, consider this.As lawmakers are looking to ban earmarks for private companies, The Washington Post checks in with some companies, including one from Northeast Ohio, that are defending their efforts to secure federal money for what they deemed worthy projects.
"I understand what the debate is about. But I think that, as Congress reviews the policy on appropriations, there's an opportunity to differentiate those like ours, which are looking for a win-win use of taxpayer dollars," says Benson P. Lee, president and CEO of fuel cell company Technology Management Inc. in Highland Heights. (You can find a Feb. 1 Crain's story about the company here.)
Technology Management received a $500,000 earmark to commercialize a biofuel system.
Mr. Lee tells The Post he has never donated to U.S. Rep. Steven C. LaTourette, who secured the earmark to commercialize a scalable, 1-kilowatt fuel-cell system operating on biofuels. He says he went the earmark route because his small, 20-year-old company was consistently losing out on government contracts to large businesses with big lobbying budgets.
Next American City magazine's Spring 2010 edition runs a comprehensive and laudatory feature on Cleveland's efforts to return vacant land to productive use.
The process called “Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland” is unique for the level of cooperation among foundations, government agencies, nonprofit organizations and private citizens, Next American City says, and is producing a vision for greener, more cohesive neighborhoods.
“We're talking about pushing people together into dense urban nodes,” says Terry Schwarz, interim director of the Urban Design Collaborative. “We're coming up with a way of managing the landscape enough so it looks like an intentional wildlife corridor. It makes the spot where development occurs obvious.”
Financially strapped states including Ohio are getting more aggressive with tax scofflaws, The Wall Street Journal reports, in the hope that stepped-up enforcement and the posting of the names of delinquents online will push more people to pay up.
Ohio is among the states mining Internal Revenue Service data for leads, The Journal says. Such efforts “are designed to augment states' efforts to attack budget deficits that are projected to swell to a combined $55.5 billion for the fiscal year beginning July 1, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures,” the newspaper reports.
All the efforts to track down tax scofflaws help ease the burden for those who pay on time, even if just a bit, officials tells The Journal.
"The taxpayers of the state of Ohio are the ones who really benefit if you bring in revenue," says Vaughn Lombardo, executive administrator of the tax discovery division in the Ohio Department of Taxation.
Apartment REIT Associated Estates Realty Corp. is among the stocks recommended by Jay Leupp, senior portfolio manager at Grubb & Ellis, in this story and accompanying video from CNBC.
“We're in the early stages of a three- to five-year recovery in commercial real estate and in general. … Things aren't quite as bad in commercial real estate as a lot of the press has put out over the period of time,” Mr. Leupp tells CNBC.
Hope he's right.
You also can follow me on Twitter.
|
|
|
|
Subscribe
Print
E-mail