The Cleveland Port Authority wore no clothes on Thursday.   The King was completely naked – yet about half (including a rep of “first suburbs”) of the 19 adults who spoke to the 100 plus in attendance raved about the “BOLD PLAN”  

But there is no plan.  What was presented to the public was just vapid corporate speak jargon.   It said nothing to half of the speakers – yet said everything to others – like the first suburbs rep.    And the Cleveland Cuyahoga County Port Authority knows the plan is a hollow farce too.  Here’s one reason I can look into their heads and assure you.

The 13 page “plan” which I read online before the meeting had dozens of typos, and incomplete and garbled sentences.   If anyone from the Port Authority  (besides the board members there are 22 Board employees)  had “read” the “plan” online they would not have left it up on the web site with its crippled spelling and grammar.  When I saw a hard copy of the plan on the entry table at the meeting I grabbed it – wondering if anyone had corrected the typos and broken sentences.

The hard copy had not been corrected.

Although I knew the answer, after the meeting I asked Michael Wager (an attorney with Squire Sanders who is scheduled to take over from Mr. Carney as the Authority’s president in March 2008 and who had MC’d the meeting and who is also a member of the Cuyahoga County Energy Task Force – wind on Lake Erie) if he had actually read the  “strategic plan”  which the Authority had on it’s web site and which was handed out in hard copy at the “public meeting”.   Mr. Wager acknowledged that he had not ever read the “plan”.

And I can assure you that no one else who sat in front of the room had read the “plan”.  The  only topic which had even a shred of specificity was the mention of developing a container port, but there was no substantiation of the reason for a container port or reference to its economical feasibility.   The St. Lawrence Seaway can only accommodate ships 650 feet long and 77 feet wide – so any “container” ships on the Great Lakes will not be real ocean goers; the transit inland across the GL’s takes a week by ship while rail and truck takes 24 hours.   I think there is no future in a container port in Cleveland. 

The speakers who spoke the most cogently and factually did not wear dark suits.  Ed Hauser, who has more history with the Port issues than anyone in the room – buttonholed Mr. Carney and asked again for the results of the million dollar Port Study which has been in process for 9 years.  Ed’s right, we need the results of this publicly funded but still secret million dollar study before we can rationally assess the vapid “strategic plan”. 

The Port Authority and its constituents need to stop using the public with phony offers of including them in the process, when in fact the public has no specifics on which to reflect and react.  This meeting was useful for seeing the Port faces, but the strategic “public process”  is  hypocritical, and the ”strategic plan” is vapid 100% PR doublespeak. 

The Port didn't even take its own "stategic plan" seriously enough to proof read it for typos.  We shouldn't take it seriously either.  The PORT IS NAKED