I  will confess up front - I don’t know the deep background. Nevertheless, I was struck by a comment attributed to Fanny Lewis, Cleveland City Councilwoman, in today’s CPD article on locating the Myers U. fieldhouse.  It seems that Myers U wants to locate its fieldhouse on the same piece of land that Lewis has been promoting for  a jail to house nonviolent criminals.  Ms. Lewis is quoted as saying, “We have more men in prison than we have in college so there’s a need.”  This may, very unfortunately, be true; but aren’t we hearing from all sides that education, from pre-school on is a huge problem in Cleveland; that to compete locally, nationally and globally, we have to provide better education to everyone. If we want to reverse this proportion, shouldn’t we be favoring the school’s needs?   The fieldhouse for a school should be as close as possible to the main campus. Cleveland does not lack for empty space.  In seven years of searching for a place to build this type of jail in Cuyahoga County, is the location on Chester at 49th the only viable alternative?

Thank you, Ed, for your detailed analysis, without which the average citizen, even one who is interested in ODOT’s I-90 upgrade, may just read the Plain Dealer reports and never question the propriety of  where we, the public, stand at this point in the process. As you have pointed out, ODOT is not following its own Planning Development Process.  Even without reading the many paged PDP manual, which is available online at ODOT’s site, a little logical thinking would suggest that something is amiss if the public comment  period ends after, and the economic impact studies are not completed before, ODOT has selected the engineering firm to work on possible bridge designs for its preferred alignment (All emphases above and following are mine.)