Falls riverfront project: impressive & tax worthy

WE READ with interest the big spread in Sunday's Beacon Journal about the impressive riverfront project in Cuyahoga Falls that will be an important amenity in the city's quality of life. For this, Mayor Don Robert should take a deserved bow. But before his head strikes his shoes, I believe he should host another Tea Party at the riverfront pavilion to remind his anti-tax friends that the handsome project is costing $1.8 million, with $640, 000 coming from the state, i.e., your taxes and mine. Without taxes there would be no riverfront showpiece in the Falls, no reason for the mayor to take a bow and no reason for the anti-tax crowd to rant. Trouble is, too many politicians won't admit how taxes - and only taxes - often make them look good.

Robart moment: Falls Tea party

WELL, THE folks at Cuyahoga Falls City Hall must be in a stage of extreme ecstasy today. A Tea Party event Wednesday evening drew thousands of protestors to damn the federal government and put an end to taxes, government programs, deficit spending and the Obama Administration. Republican Mayor Don Robart, one of the event's leading citizens as well as a government employe himself, told an interviewer that people are fed up with the "massive increase in government" and failed Obama programs like the stimulus package's "lack of effectiveness" and the "health care thing." He hoped the Tea Parties would continue to flourish.

From the reports I read, there was the usual amount of attacks on socialism, and a Hitlerian president, much of it inspired by medieval crackpots like Glenn Beck. But Robart was obviously out to inspire the crowd, without regard to the fact that he was biting the hand that has long fed his island-like political enclave. For starters there has been the flow of federal cash into community projects. And even his proud guest, the Cleveland Orchestra's summer visits to Blossom Music Center, depends on cash from the National Endowment for the Arts, for which it is ever grateful.

When the mayor starts obtusely condemning cash flow from D.C., he is clearly out of his league. He could prove me wrong, of course, and simply reject one more dollar from those...um... socialists in Washington.

FOOTNOTE: While the stimulus program was being declared DOA, two items might have caught somebody's attention when they weren't raising their fists at the Tea Party. Stimulus money created summer jobs for more than 13,000 Ohio young people. Oh, and Bill Seigferth, president of Akron Education Assn., reported that stimulus money opened 73 new teacher jobs in the city. And in the same batch, General Motors said the Cash for Clunkers program has been so successful that it will return more than 1,000 workers to their jobs in Lordstown.

The econmy isn't out of the woods yet, but are Robart and friends so blind not to see a little daylight that will mean a lot to other folks. The answer: Yes.