How To Invent Money

Consider this part two on moving the Inventor's Hall of Fame to Canal Place; in the strange world of your taxpayers at work the news the Hall's $38 million dollar home has to move to smaller, lower profile digs comes 13 years to the day Inventure Place opened for business.

The time line is depressing to anyone who values a public dollar: millions poured in after millions to keep the doors open and convince northeast Ohioans, at least, to support the middle gear of the Hall of Fame Highway stretching from the Rock Hall in Cleveland to the Pro Football Hall in Canton.

Maybe the problem was both of those Halls could be seen from the interstate, while the only view of Inventure Place was the proliferation of brown-and-white signs that seemed to beg people to stop.

It didn't work.

Launched with much fanfare and attendance hitting a quarter-million as a high, only 40,000 attendance in the final year on South Broadway, all the wind taken out of the concrete-and-sail shaped landmark building that was supposed to illuminate and inform but instead hangs like a millstone long after the mill's closed.

In 1993, Jim Quinn of the Beacon Journal reported (sorry, no link without paid access to their archives): "...Akron is to become the center of a national network of new science education reforms...a national resource for corporate creativity consultants." Mayor Plusquellic was quoted as welcoming the crowd to "...the opening days of the 21st century for Akron...I claim this high ground for our future."

Now-deputy Mayor Dave Lieberth, identified back then as one of the early planners, noted the museum built was pretty much the museum planned. It is ironic to note in the archives that City Council considered two loans at the same time in April 1995: $1.5 million in HUD (federal) money for Inventure Place at the same time they were considering a $2 million HUD loan to help pay to renovate the Cascade Plaza Hotel by a developers group led by David Brennan. Council and the administration just closed to books on a deal to pay back some of the money. Small world, isn't it?

In a 1998 article Quinn reported local officials were hoping to get a shot in the arm from Uncle Sam after Inventure Place showed a $2.4 million dollar deficit for the first year of operation. By 2001 updates were being handled by Beacon Journal staff report bylines, noting U.S. Representative Ralph Regula was working on the fourth year of Inventure Place getting federal money to stay open, at a then-total of $11.5 million dollars.

If we had been Akron, West Virginia instead of Akron, Ohio U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd would have simply moved the U.S. Patent Office to Akron rather than keep in Washington, D.C. but Inventure Place plugged along until closing the Museum and now moving the Hall.

Maybe it is fitting the move comes today not as Beacon Journal front-page news but on a section front, and not even "above the fold" in the newspaper that once held enough sway to demand and get first dibs on publicizing each new class of honorees. Those first black-tie "look at us" celebrations quickly denigrated to the point where even supportive locals blew off taking the time; what once stood as a way to treat inventors like rock stars now represents the equivalent of Eric Clapton playing a weekday gig at a Portage Lakes bar. No longer international in scope, now a program that lives only as a tag-along to Akron schools.

Mayor Plusquellic says this isn't a failure, it's a new beginning and blames management of the Hall and Museum. Looking over the pages of archives from the Beacon Journal offers plenty of backing of his assertion, especially under the acerbic but aptly-named David Fink, who never quite grasped the fact that tending to the home fires mattered. Ask the Rock Hall 45 minutes up the highway, which figured out pretty quickly they needed to be part of the community because that was their only salvation once the trendy fell off.

The Hall folks tell us they are still committed to Akron and that Canal Place will be a better home, especially with the focus on their partnership with Akron public schools.

Some questions some would prefer we not ask:

- the City handed the Hall an "emergency loan" worth more than $6.25 million; at last count about a quarter had been repaid, but we need to find out if that's been repaid or is at least current. It's a good question to ask, especially given the recent history with Akron Thermal, the downtown Radisson Hotel and a handful of other businesses radically behind in their taxes. Would Joe Citizen Taxpayer get the same deal?;

- what is the full utilization of the building going to be? When the Hall moves out in August it leaves behind essentially a $38 million dollar downtown school building -- in a district that already closed Central Hower High a couple blocks to the east and is in the process of building much more efficient schools elsewhere. Now we'll be running school programs in a building that's big enough to house an airplane hangar?;

In the business world stakeholders (those holding stock) wouldn't think kindly on a venture responsible for tying up prime real estate for 13 years and spending a considerable chunk of money ($38 million) to build to wind up as a middle school project.

Should taxpayers be any different?