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Jane Goodman (Ward 4)



Jane Goodman - Councilperson (Ward 4)
Phone: (216) 291-0442
janegoodman@jgoodworks.com



NOW ONLINE, GO TO MY FULL WEBSITE, www.janegoodman.com, for more info and THE FULL CALENDAR OF WARD 4 ACTIVITIES, "Coffee with the Councilwoman" dates and SPECIAL EVENTS. It's still growing, soon to include an interactive forum, blog and social networking page. 

SAVE THESE DATES! 

 

HomeBASE - Home-based Business Association of South Euclid Meeting - SE-L Library, Tuesday, June 15th 6:30pm
 

 


 

 

Now that the elections are over, we can get back to business! 
You may have noticed the activity at Cedar Center. We've been removing the contaminated soil from around and below the former dry cleaners' shop. Next we'll fill in the basements and look for design drawings for Phase 1 from Coral Co.

Fall leaf pickup is underway. To find out where the suck-em-up truck is working call 216-381-0402. If it's after hours, there will be a recording saying where the crews will be working the following day. For more info, call between 8am and 4pm.

Please patronize our local businesses and support our neighbors:


• Enjoy the last beautiful fall days at Sanctuary on Green, stop for soup and tea and bakery at the Tea Studio and get your holiday shopping underway, at 1936 S. Green. Open 11-5:30 Thursday through Sunday.


• Get your bagels and shmear from the Bagel Shoppe on Warrensville between Verona/E. Antisdale and Wyncote/Grosvenor, perfect for any morning, but especially for reading the Sunday New York Times. 


• A bowl of gumbo is the perfect way to warm up an autumn afternoon, and the kind Junior makes at Battiste & Dupree is the real deal. 


• THE BEST HOLIDAY GIFT for the grannies and bubbies is always a current family photograph. Not from your little camera, a REAL family portrait done by our own favorite professional photographer, Joseph Pollack. Studio on Cedar just west of Green.

 

 


 

 

YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR HOME WEATHERIZATION and/or HOME HEATING ASSISTANCE If your income has dropped to (or has been for a while) under $21,660 for a one-person household, $29,140 for a party of two (it grows by about $7500 for each additional person in the household) then you can get HEAP to help with energy bills and free weatherization work to seal and insulate your home through HWAP - Home Weatherization Assistance Program. Weatherization will lower your heating and cooling bills. To apply for free weatherization, go to development.cuyahogacounty.us/en-US/weatherization-assistance.aspx WINHEAP can make it easier to pay the bills. Applications are taken from August 1 thru May 31. Call HEAP toll-free at 1-800-282-0880 or download the application at www.development.ohio.gov.

 

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SOUTH EUCLID+GREEN BUSINESSES=ECONOMIC GROWTH

Hi, on another beautiful day on the Freshwater Coast (I learned this morning that it's fine to call our region the North Coast if you're just talking to United States of Americans, but not so fine in the context of the Great Lakes, with Canadians in the room.) I spent the morning at the Great Lakes Science Center, learning a bit about some wonderful initiatives going on around Lake Erie that could make Ohio and its North Coast a center of new freshwater and renewable energy industries and technology. Senator Sherrod Brown was the key speaker, and he's pretty excited about the opportunities.

 

How might South Euclid benefit from these opportunities? One point that's made over and over is that it's not all that hard to shift from making one thing to making another...so instead of making gears for truck transmissions, we could make gears for wind turbines. And someone's going to make a fortune making simple-to-install rooftop wind energy units – ten fortunes if the units are really quiet – and others are going to make good livings installing them. 

Same with solar. Think about this: Toledo used to be the biggest glassmaking center in the world (think Libbey, Corning, etc.) so they figured "heck, if we could make glass for windows, we can make glass for solar panels"...and now that's what they're doing! 

Our city's employment is geared toward education (Notre Dame) and healthcare (UH and a lot of Clinic employees) but we have machine shops, printers, and dozens and dozens of freelancers – writers, artists, webmasters, videographers, salesfolk, and many home business operators, including the area's longest-running sewing machine repair expert. 

There's a huge new market out there for green things and things made greenly. And we have plenty of empty retail and office space...anybody ready to create something?






NEW NINE MILE URBAN WETLAND ATTRACTS TOURS AND BIRDS

Mayor Welo, City Engineer Andy Blackley and I were honored to host Friends of Big Creek as they came from the west side of the Cuyahoga to tour our new wetland, the first of its kind in the state. Yvette Bolender from Biohabitats, the designer, was here to talk about the project as the group gathered on the new recycled-plastic-lumber deck between Friendship Circle and Koehn's Sanctuary on Green.

Members of the South Euclid Citizens for Land Conservation and Friends of Euclid Creek came to see the incredible growth the plants have made in just a year. Jim Heflich of Laurel Hill, whose home overlooks the wetland and who is an avid birder, gave us a short list of the birds and animals that frequent the area, including a healthy dragonfly population.

 

An even better view of the entire length of the installation can be seen from the newly-opened outdoor tea room next door at 1936 S. Green, where Victoria Koehn serves light fare and home baking and a huge selection of teas. Stop in now, while the weather is nice and the leaves are turning.

 

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OUR NEW DISCOUNTED NOPEC ELECTRICITY GENERATOR (SUPPLIER) IS

GEXA ENERGY

If you received a letter from First Energy, DON’T BE CONFUSED, and IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE THE DISCOUNT, DON’T DO ANYTHING. DO NOT OPT OUT.

 

First Energy will still deliver it through the wires, and bill you, and maintain the power lines and provide emergency service. But the actual electricity will be coming from Gexa, and their rates for the supply portion of the bill will be lower than if you stay with First Energy as supplier. 

 

But only if you don’t “opt out.” If you have opted out already, during that 21-day window, because you didn't understand the ridiculously confusing letter, you can opt back in, at no charge, at any time.

Call Gexa at 1-888-223-9292, Monday  through Friday, 8am – 7pm ET, and tell them that you mistakenly opted out of the NOPEC offer, but you want to be part of the NOPEC deal, they will reinstate you at no charge (they don’t charge you to join.) And CEI won’t charge you either. It would help if you have your Illuminating Company customer number. They were very nice when I called.

If, for some reason you want to continue to have First Energy both generate and deliver your power, then you can opt out, but you need to do it within 21 days from the date on the letter you received, and you will pay more. If you wait until after the 21 days to opt out of the NOPEC deal, you’ll pay a $25 exit fee.

 

For MORE INFORMATION AND ANSWERS, go to
www.gexaenergy.com/NOPEC/

 

Or you can call Councilwoman Goodman at 216-291-0442.

NOTE: Gexa Energy gets a portion of the electricity it supplies through WIND energy, a source that is not only clean but renewable, as opposed to dirty, polluting and non-renewable coal (there is no such thing as “clean coal.”) Ohio, especially northeast ohio, is developing a major industry making the turbines and steel poles for wind energy, which is already starting to bring green jobs to the region and will make us the center of this new industry. If we can make cars, we can make wind generators. So staying with NOPEC and Gexa is supporting green jobs in northeast Ohio!




SUPPORT OUR HOME-BASED BUSINESSES

 

South Euclid is a home-based-business-friendly community, and I mean to keep it that way. We have so many hard-working, talented people in our city, and with the economy barely moving, it's important that we help people prosper. I started HomeBase, the Homebased Business Association of South Euclid, to help people do business with their neighbors.

 

We have artists and writers, landscapers, appliance repair people, painters, Mary Kay ladies, accountants, party planners and PR people and so many more professions! 




I need your help! I want to promote your business. Do you have a home-based business you'd like your neighbors to patronize? Download the form from http://www.homebizsoutheuclid.com and send it to me, fax it to 216-291-4323 or put the information in an email to janegood@jgoodworks.com and we'll get you in the directory!

RAINBARRELS!
CLICK HERE for a list of places to get recycled plastic drums.


NINE MILE CREEK WETLAND

CLICK HERE for info and a pictorial progress report on the Langerdale Retention Basin project.

 

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SUSTAINABILITY SUMMIT SETS STAGE FOR A NO-WASTE FUTURE

Imagine a world where every single thing thing that's made can either be recycled or composted, and where any "waste" or byproduct is actually the raw materials for another product or process. Nothing is waste, and since this loop is endless, and closed, we don't have to drill or mine or dig for nonrenewable resources. And we're not using up those resources so that they aren't available if future generations need them. That's the vision of sustainability. The traditional definition is: "to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

 

I spent three days at the Cleveland 2019 Sustainability Summit last week, working with 700 other people from all kinds of backgrounds and businesses to fashion a ten-year plan to make Greater Cleveland the country's leading green, sustainable economy. That means a whole slew of new jobs building, installing and maintaining alternative energy systems as small as a treadmill-powered TV and as large as a windmill farm on Lake Erie. It means a local food system that doesn't rely on shipments of goods from other continents to meet our basic needs all year 'round. It means new technologies and tech jobs devising fuel efficient transportation systems, energy monitoring meters and all kinds of innovative packaging and delivery systems. Imagine the possibilities.

 

 I was at the Summit to see what other local governments were doing to bring these new ideas and new initiatives to their cities. I found that there were only a few elected officials present, and it turns out that South Euclid is, indeed, leading the way. One of the most important points made there was that sometimes governments' best strategy to move things forward is to get out of the way and allow innovation to happen. That's what we did with rainbarrels and pervious paving...we removed the obstacles in our building and housing codes to allow these best practices.

 

So, of course I'm going to nudge the folks at Coral Co. to include all possible sustainable practices in the new Cedar Center, and I'll be introducing legislation to add provisions for wind-generation of energy on both the small and large scale, so if someone wants to install a wind-generation system they don't have to jump through hoops, we'll be ready for that (and solar, too.) Stay tuned!



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CEDAR CENTER...MORE THAN JUST A SHOPPING CENTER

Tonight at Council meeting we passed a measure giving Mayor Welo the go-ahead to sign the development agreement with Coral Co., finally setting in motion the redevelopment phase of the project. That will start the clock on getting preliminary site plans for where buildings and sewers and power and water and such will go. Then come the design plans, and the planning commission review period and architectural review board and public hearings (which require advance notification times) and in the meantime the site gets decontaminated and readied for building.

It's really exciting, not just because we'll have neat new restaurants and retail, greenspace and such, but because of what this development will do to make the whole southeast corner of our city a magnet for new residents looking to be part of a revitalized neighborhood and city, and a reason for longtime residents to stay.

We usually think of economic development as only having to do with commercial projects or office space, and the actual CC property will lead with those elements.

But the financial investment and incentives being directed toward green building and sustainable housing and energy projects like the ones we're gearing up to bring to the neighborhoods north and east of CC provide a fantastic opportunity to make updating our housing stock and our neighborhoods a new economic driver.

People want roomier, more convenient homes than what we have in "bungalowville." We can make those houses not only more user-friendly but also greener, more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly, all of which make them more marketable.

So when I say I want to improve our neighborhoods, this is one of the ways I mean to do it – green updates and community gardens and elbow room to spread out a little. I think we could make this area the place to go to see all the new green technologies and materials and designs. And as the work gets done, contractors learn and train workers in green jobs, putting up solar cells and installing geothermal heating/cooling systems and rooftop windcatchers.

The timing couldn't be more perfect, now that CC is gaining speed just as the demand for sustainable housing is starting to take off.

I know, it seems like we've been at this Cedar Center project a while. We have been. Previous Councils and administrations have been, too. There was a lot of groundwork to be done to get us just to this point. It also seems like you can't take one step forward without first passing some seemingly-disconnected legislation that the state or county or federal government requires us to have in place that gives us the legal right to take that step. In other words, a lot of the legislation couldn't be passed until we first passed other legislation – designations, declarations, it's mind-boggling.

And, of course, if you want to use OPM (other people's money) for basic infrastructure improvements, and we do, there are more forms and layers of legislation that have to be on our books before we can go to this funder or that agency for money to pay for things like removing asbestos or cleaning up contaminated soil where a dry cleaner's use to be. Buying the properties, negotiating with dozens of owners, took years. Waiting for tenants to find new space took more. Careful demolition, environmental cleanup and site prep, going on now, takes more. But you can see, it's happening.

The new Cedar Center might not be as grand as our grandest wishes for it were a few years ago, when the market and the economy were robust. And it won't all happen at once, as it might have done back then. Under the current economic circumstances, it will come in phases, first restaurants and retail, and residences will come last. It will give us time to work on the neighborhood revival. Time is on our side.

 



FEBRUARY 26, 2009

Please Turn Off the Key
To protect the health of our residents and visitors, especially the youngest and oldest, we're expanding our ban on engine idling to all vehicles, not just big trucks. The worst idling, and therefore the worst heart and lung damage, goes on in front of schools and in and around school buses, and it is directly connected with increased childhood asthma. So we're putting a stop to it. 

• Idling DOESN'T save gas. Ten seconds of idling uses as much gas as a mile of driving. 
• Turning the engine off and on DOESN'T waste gas if you're idling for more than ten seconds.
• It's NOT better for the engine to idle than to turn it off and back on. Idling engines run cool, leaving crud in the engine.

This doesn't cost money, it saves money. It doesn't even take any effort on your part. And idling is allowed to keep you comfy when the temperature is below freezing or above 85 degrees. If you're cold, wear more layers. 

Just turn off the darn key!

 



Be well,

Jane




 

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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