Brent Larkin

1 week ago | cleveland.com | Brent Larkin

Measuring a city’s well-being involves rounding up the usual suspects. Jobs, schools, health, crime, poverty, workforce readiness, culture and access to recreation are all part of the formula. But the voting public’s involvement in a city’s political process is another reliable metric. History tends to prove that such involvement is an asset. When the middle class flees a city, so, too, does voter engagement in the political process.

3 weeks ago | cleveland.com | Brent Larkin

Let the voters decide. That’s the only truly equitable way to resolve with finality whether local taxpayers should finance $600 million of a new stadium complex for the Browns in Brook Park. Even if a popular vote on the $600 million cannot take place in Cuyahoga County until early next year, county voters should be allowed to determine if a single cent of county tax money can be used to finance a pricey covered stadium 12 miles from downtown Cleveland.

1 month ago | cleveland.com | Brent Larkin

The Greater Cleveland Food Bank’s 200,000-square-foot storage and distribution center opened in 2022 as after-effects of the pandemic were still pushing up hunger needs in the six counties the food bank serves. In the last fiscal year, the food bank served 424,800 needy Greater Clevelanders, “an astonishing figure when compared to the about 250,000 served in the years before the COVID pandemic,” Brent Larkin writes in his column today.

1 month ago | cleveland.com | Brent Larkin

For 16 straight years near the end of the 20th century, Ohio had governors from Cleveland who would never have allowed state government to act in ways that would harm their hometown. Democrat Dick Celeste and Republican George Voinovich were different in many ways. But both of them would find it difficult to win today in a state that once awarded them four consecutive landslide wins, Celeste in 1982 and 1986, then Voinovich in 1990 and 1994.

2 months ago | cleveland.com | Brent Larkin

CLEVELAND -- The lies seem more sadistic now. There’s a heartless quality about them, a sense that the liar’s intention is to inflict as much harm and suffering as possible. Bodies were still being pulled from the Potomac River when, without a shred of evidence, Donald Trump’s inhumanity moved him to blame affirmative action policies as the likely cause of a midair collision over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people.