Lose Excess Wallet Weight!

1. Build Something You Don't Need!
As one of the poorest cities in America, Cleveland is blessed with many pressing problems: failing schools, crowded jails, short-staffed police departments, and skyrocketing foreclosure rates, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, fixing these problems takes a lot of thought, which can really hurt your head.

So in late 2003, the commissioners just said, Screw it — let's spend all our money on the least pressing issue. Which, of course, would be new offices for the county.

There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the buildings they were occupying on Ontario and Lakeside, except that they weren't big enough to house all county services — from food stamps to car titles — under one roof.

At the time, Mayor Jane Campbell was hoping to renovate the nearby convention center. By abandoning current county headquarters, the commissioners would be making room for this new development. It could be just as lucrative as the Euclid Corridor project, where 9,000 jobs have been promised to show up any day.

Two years later, the commissioners were ready to make a move. Okay, so it wasn't the best time to make a major purchase — they were already planning to spend $120 million on a new juvenile-detention center. But that's why God invented municipal bonds. It's not real money. It's taxpayer money!

2. Money Is No Object
First, the commissioners made sure to follow Newton's Law of Governance: Hire really expensive consultants. For approximately $3 million, the Staubach Company and a slew of advisers would make the whole process look official while ultimately picking the same developer commissioners wanted anyway.

Weirdly enough, the only two real contenders just happened to be huge campaign contributors: Sam Miller and Dick Jacobs.

Miller wanted the county to move into his Higbee building — left largely empty since Dillard's flight in 2002 — as part of his 574th attempt to revive the Tower City mall.

Jacobs, meanwhile, was trying to unload the former Ameritrust bank site, a cluster of asbestos-filled buildings at East Ninth and Euclid that have been vacant since 1995. Since no private entrepreneur would be dumb enough to buy the complex, he naturally turned to the people who were — even producing a brochure in 2002 showing how the commissioners would love their new asbestos-filled digs.

Of course, neither developer's proposal was cheap. Both planned to rent their buildings to the county on long-term leases.

Miller's company, Forest City, wanted to renovate the Higbee building, let the Port Authority buy it, then lease it back to the county for about $6.6 million a year. The total price tag was $117 million.

The Jacobs Group presented several options for the Ameritrust complex, all of which included a 940-car garage. The first involved keeping the historic rotunda, renovating the 29-story tower, and razing then rebuilding an adjoining tower, all at a cost of about $113 million.

This was the option favored by the consultants and Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones.

"In absolute dollars, we do not believe that the Jacobs proposal will be the least expensive alternative," Rob Roe and Chris Livingston of Staubach wrote in 2005. "However, we do believe that the Jacobs proposal offers the most comprehensive fulfillment of the county's objectives."

Jones extolled the Ameritrust site's easy freeway and bus access, and the opportunity to breathe life into a dead section of Euclid Avenue. "That corner clearly provides the best opportunity," he says. "That is a vibrant area with a lot of potential."

His colleagues, Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora, liked the site too, only they preferred that the project be way more expensive: Citing the asbestos and cramped floor plan of the old Ameritrust tower, they wanted to raze pretty much everything and build anew.

The Jacobs Group estimated the price tag would rise to $195.3 million.

Of course, no one ever fully explained why Hagan and Dimora just had to spend $195.3 million on some vacant, asbestos-filled buildings that no one else wanted. Neither commissioner returned our calls. And when we asked to see all communication between the commissioners and the Jacobs Group since 2004, we were informed that all such e-mails had been accidentally erased.

3. Impulse Buying Is Fun!
Once the Ameritrust site was selected, things started to unravel quickly. According to Deputy County Administrator Lee Trotter, the original lease arrangement dissolved into a "technical nightmare," so they just decided to buy the Ameritrust complex instead.