I'll have more tomorrow when the full article comes out, but this is certainly not good news for the region.
Cleveland and Shaker Heights are no longer in the running to land OfficeMax Inc.'s new global headquarters.As had been feared by local leaders, the giant office supplies retailer said today that its 1,300 corporate employees split between Shaker Heights and Itasca, Ill., will consolidate in the Chicago area. The company is considering several sites there and expects to decide by October.
The announcement ends an underdog bid by a regional coalition that included Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell, Shaker Heights Mayor Judy Rawson and various civic organizations.
It also severs the last local thread of a company founded in Cleveland in 1988 and drains the tax pool in Shaker Heights, which annually receives more than $1 million from OfficeMax.
With all the talk of "brain drain" over the last few years, actual job drain will prove to be worse. I'll be waiting for the Plain Dealer to run another "Quiet Crisis" series. Maybe next time they'll acknowledge that the crisis ain't so quiet.
PS...For a moment I will step into the role of psychic. Within 12-18 months, Bank of America will move the MBNA jobs out of the region. If this does happen, it will be tantamount to dropping a nuke on the Cleveland job market. By the way, I think this is a good reason to regionalize the Cleveland Metropolitan area. Time to get things together, n'est ce pas?
Comments (1)
Funny that you should talk about regionalizing the government of Cuyahoga County now. Forty years ago when I was an undergraduate at CWRU I took a class on urban politics in which we analyzed that very same issue. Of course, Cleveland Clinic hadn't metastasized yet to absorb the entire east side of Cleveland yet at that time, so Cleveland really was in decline. The continued bleeding of jobs in the financial services, aerospace, and auto industries have just completed the job, particularly when you count in all of the small businesses which support those large industries. You have no idea how many small firms produced specialty tools, dies, and fixtures for the large firms. Those small businesses all die when the large corporate customer moves its production facilities to China or even Georgia.
Now that the pain is being spread across the entire group of towns and cities in the Western Reserve, talk renews about regionalizing government. Why bother? Forty years ago it might have made some difference. Now, it's only an attempt by the suburbs to salvage something from the wreckage when they abandoned Cleveland proper long ago.
Posted by PrahaPartizan | August 15, 2005 11:08 PM
Posted on August 15, 2005 23:08