The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) has seen increases in bus and transit ridership for nine months straight, and the number of riders on the Red Line in January was the highest since 1988.

Yet this month, the U.S. House of Representatives is considering a surface transportation bill known as H.R. 7 that would eliminate dedicated federal funds for public transit across the country.

RTA is advocating against the cuts by working with Representative Steven LaTourette and other members of Congress to promote an amendment that would restore federally guaranteed funding.

"If you leave it up to chance that public transit gets funded, that's a big chance to take," says Mary McCahon, RTA's Media Relations Manager. The change would require agencies to lobby for federal funding each year, she says. "We provide 200,000 rides per day, and federal funding is our third biggest revenue source."

McCahon says that while the bill has been tabled, it is scheduled to come back to the floor of the House of Representatives for further discussion this week.

RTA's increased ridership is due in part to higher gas prices and ongoing Innerbelt construction, McCahon says. Improved marketing efforts, partnerships with businesses and the popularity of the Health Line are also factors.

For more information about H.R. 7 and the ongoing federal transportation bill debate, visit the RTA newsroom or American Public Transit Association website.


Source: Mary McCahon
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Since its inception in 1915, Cleveland Play House has been focused on nourishing new works of original American theatre. Yet until this season, it was staging the latest contemporary plays in an older, inflexible building that was largely unsuitable for its needs.

Yet thanks to CPH's recent move to the newly rebuilt Allen Theatre complex, the nonprofit finally has a truly inspiring, state-of-the-art home. The complex contains not only the rebuilt, 500-seat Allen Theatre, but also two smaller performing spaces that can be customized to suit CPH's artistic needs.

Now, on top of a hot season that is already drawing big crowds to its impressive, new abode, CPH is debuting the New Ground Theatre Festival. The weeklong celebration of new works, which will take place from May 3-12 and has an even greater emphasis on original theatre, was formerly called FusionFest.

"Our new quarters are fantastic for a festival like this one, so the name just seemed appropriate," says CPH Artistic Director Michael Bloom.

Highlights include a performance of In the Next Room (Or the Vibrator Play); a staging of Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, a Tom Stoppard satire that features a collaboration with the Cleveland Orchestra; solo shows by former Daily Show correspondent Lauren Weedman and rapper-evolutionist Baba Brinkman; and a weeklong residency with Quiara Alegria Hudes, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has also been awarded the 2012 Roe Green Award. The culmination of the New Ground Theatre Festival will feature a public reading of Hudes' new play.

At the center of the entire festival will be CPH's crowd-pleasing, new home, which Bloom says is the perfect place to see new, original theatre. "The fact that these are new spaces demonstrate that we have a strong commitment to new work."


Source: Michael Bloom
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Nearly 60 percent of newly-created jobs require a postsecondary degree, yet only six percent of Cleveland residents hold an associate's degree and just eight percent hold a bachelor's degree.

This stark statistic is one of the driving forces behind the fledgling Higher Education Compact of Greater Cleveland, an unprecedented collaboration among 15 colleges and universities, 25 nonprofit organizations, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and Cuyahoga County. This new effort seeks to boost the number of college graduates in Northeast Ohio.

"Every day, there are 3,000 jobs that the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and Summa Health Center can't fill," explains Lee Friedman, CEO of College Now Greater Cleveland, a member organization of the Compact. "If you can't increase educational attainment, then you can't fill jobs. At some point, if these organizations can't find talent, then they can't grow."

While this lofty goal is hardly unusual or unique, what makes the Compact stand out is its regional approach towards addressing the higher education gap. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson is increasingly touting the benefits of addressing such problems on a regional level. Cuyahoga County has not historically been involved in education, yet Executive Ed Fitzgerald has joined the Compact. Until now, the colleges and universities involved in the Compact also have not worked together to seek a comprehensive solution to the problem.

"It truly takes a village to help students get to school and graduate from school," says Friedman. "Many of the young people we're helping are first generation college students who don't have anyone to help them get on that path. The commitment of these university presidents is truly best in class."

The goal of the Higher Education Compact is to ensure that students are ready for, have access to and graduate from college. To achieve this goal, leaders will create student-focused action plans, educate the community on why college is important, help students become college ready, link them with scholarship and financial aid opportunities and create a College Success Dashboard that measures results.


Source: Higher Education Compact of Greater Cleveland, Lee Friedman
Writer: Lee Chilcote

As the number of local bike commuters continues to increase, so too does the number of savvy entrepreneurs who serve and service them. In recent years, a mini boom of bike-based businesses has developed across Northeast Ohio, including frame builders, messenger bag makers, rickshaw drivers and an indoor bike park that attracts visitors from throughout the Midwest.

The newly minted nonprofit Bike Cleveland will bring together Northeast Ohio cyclists through cycling events, educational programming and advocacy work, says Jacob Van Sickle, the group's new Executive Director. The group also will provide area cyclists with a unified voice in transportation planning across the region.

Over the course of the next year, Bike Cleveland plans to focus on prioritizing bike investments in the West Shoreway project, collaborating with the City of Cleveland to update and prioritize its Bikeway Master Plan, creating fun biking events and advocating for cyclist-friendly policies throughout the region.

One of the group's first advocacy projects will be to rally against HR 7, the transportation bill that has been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives. That bill would eliminate dedicated funding for transportation, cut funding that helps to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians, and shortchange funding for repairing existing roads and bridges and improving roadways for cyclists.

For several years, Cleveland's cycling community has been fragmented among different organizations. The launch of Bike Cleveland last summer and now the hiring of Van Sickle unites cyclists under a common banner for the first time.

Van Sickle says Cleveland's energized cycling community has a lot ot be proud of. The 2010 American Community Survey shows that .8 percent of Clevelanders now use a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation to work -- a figure well above the national average of .53 percent. This is a 280-percent increase over one decade, giving Cleveland the highest 10-year increase in the country.

“I am looking forward to working with current and future Bike Cleveland members, and the greater cycling community, to continue to grow the cycling movement in Greater Cleveland," said Van Sickle in a press release.


Source: Jacob Van Sickle
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Local writer, speaker and entrepreneur Craig James has some big ideas. In fact, he is a regular contributor to NEOtropolis's "What’s the Big Idea" segment on PBS. He and his partner Sue James formed CatalystStrategies, which helps organizations best communicate their message, market and meaning. In this "Letter to Cleveland," James pens an open letter to the city he loves.

On Tuesday, February 7, Global Cleveland opened the doors to its Public Square welcome center. The organization is tasked with attracting and retaining talent to the region from around the globe, with the goal of adding 100,000 people to the region. Fresh Water photographer Bob Perkoski was at the ribbon cutting.

Liz Maugins of Zygote Press remembers the moment in 2008 when she realized just how fragile her own organization's existence was in Cleveland's ever-shrinking nonprofit ecosystem. Like many nonprofit groups, she was looking at fewer philanthropic dollars during the worst recession in decades. Meanwhile, many foundations were stressing collaboration or proposing outright mergers.

"Like a lot of nonprofit leaders, I was freaking out and wondering what would come our way," recounts Maugins, who worried that her small nonprofit would be wiped out by the tidal wave of the national recession. "So I started sending out messages to other arts leaders to see if they were feeling the same thing."

Not surprisingly, other nonprofit leaders were losing sleep over their situations, too. Yet rather than retreating to their own private islands to struggle in maudlin isolation, Maugins and her colleagues banded together for survival.

"The number one challenge was that we had no exposure, especially with the dwindling arts coverage locally," says Maugins. "Yet we knew that our arts organizations were doing amazing things with education and other programming, and we're the economic engines of our neighborhoods."

Today, Zygote and 27 other groups in Northeast Ohio have banded together to form the Collective Arts Network (CAN), received a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and produced a magazine-style journal touting their work. Ten thousand copies have been distributed to galleries and other hotspots in the city.

Next up, the CAN group is working on other kinds of collaboration, including programming, events and sustaining the journal as a quarterly publication.


Source: Liz Maugins
Writer: Lee Chilcote

If you fancy yourself a fan of Cleveland and its offerings, you have doubtless been asked for a recommendation or three. Having lived and worked in town for 20 years, Nina McCollum considers herself an unofficial tour guide, dispensing advice on everything from food and shopping to arts and entertainment. In preparation for a visit from an out-of-town friend, McCollum has devised her dream weekend in Cleveland.

PlayhouseSquare's latest string of successes may be a tough act to follow, but a Cleveland real estate developer is willing to try. A newly-consummated deal to convert a prominent office building into 102 apartments will fuel the growth of this arts-rich neighborhood, which in recent years has also welcomed two major theater renovations and new restaurants.

K&D Group, the largest privately-held owner of apartments in Northeast Ohio, has inked a deal with the nonprofit PlayhouseSquare to buy the Hanna Building Annex, which is located at the corner of Prospect Avenue and E. 14th Street. The developer plans to convert it into 1- and 2-bedroom, 600 to 1,200-square-foot apartments that will lease from $725 to $1,500 per month.

PlayhouseSquare plans to relocate existing tenants into the Hanna Building next door. The deal includes leasing back ground-level retail space to PlayhouseSquare. The nonprofit development corporation hopes to fill the space with much-needed amenities such as a dry cleaner, wine shop, small market or pharmacy -- in short, the kinds of services that serve a residential neighborhood.

Art Falco, CEO of PlayhouseSquare, says the project is critical to the future of the neighborhood. “This will allow us to continue to brand PlayhouseSquare as not only an entertainment area but also a residential neighborhood," he says.


Source: Art Falco
Writer: Lee Chilcote

The prevailing impression of regionalism that has been bandied about Northeast Ohio for the better part of a decade is all wrong, says a collaborative group of area nonprofits. While the consolidation of countless municipalities is useful, it is not intrinsically regionalism. True regionalism, they argue, is defined by economic activity -- not political boundaries.

While we pride ourselves here at Fresh Water in having crisp, professional prose, the truth is, without art, a feature is just font on a page. Pictures tell a thousand words, we're told, but the best ones simply leave us speechless. Every masthead and feature image since we launched this pub over a year ago has been shot by Fresh Water shooter Bob Perkoski. Here is a collection of some of his finest work.

When Fresh Water launched in September 2010, we promised to highlight Cleveland's most progressive and creative people, businesses and organizations. But more importantly, we endeavored to place those subjects against the most compelling backdrop of all: Cleveland and its wonderful neighborhoods. Each Thursday, our readers are invited to dig a little deeper into this city we call home. What follows is a list of the 10 most-read features of the previous 12 months. Looking at the subject matter of those stories, it's clear that the most important topics to our readers include neighborhood development, sustainability and transportation, and, of course, food and booze.

Dwellworks, a company that provides a suite of services for the relocation, real estate and mortgage lending industries, has announced plans to relocate its own corporate headquarters to the historic F. W. Woolworth building in PlayhouseSquare.

"We fell in love with PlayhouseSquare and wanted to be a part of the revitalization of downtown," says Gene Novak, CFO and Executive VP of Dwellworks. "It's hard to say enough about the reception and welcome we received from PlayhouseSquare, the City of Cleveland and Downtown Cleveland Alliance."

That reception included a financial incentives package from the City of Cleveland and a presentation from Downtown Cleveland Alliance to the entire Dwellworks staff about the benefits and logistics of moving downtown. Dwellworks secured a forgivable loan through the Vacant Property Initiative Program and a grant based on new job creation through the Citywide Business Grant Program.

PlayhouseSquare Real Estate Services also obtained federal and state historic tax credits that lowered the cost of renovating the office space by one-third.

Dwellworks plans to move its staff of 30 to 40 employees downtown initially. Its appraisal services department will stay in Warrensville Heights for the remaining two years on its lease. Yet Novak says that the firm is already studying plans for a Phase II that would centralize its operations in the heart of downtown Cleveland.


Source: Gene Novak
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Long a destination that appealed primarily to small-town families in search of "big city" fun, Cleveland has ripened as a travel destination. Today, it's not just trade shows that are drawing folks, but also the growing LGBT scene, Broadway-quality theater and high-profile dining. Thanks to the efforts of Positively Cleveland, the region's convention and visitors bureau, "Cleveland Plus" drew 30 million visitors last year, who supported 163,000 jobs and dropped $13 billion in economic impact.