Where's Our Bailout? County Treasurer Jim Rokakis Says It Straight

As Congress feverishly debates proposals to bail out Wall Street, questions continue to arise about to help Main Street cities like Cleveland.

Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis – who sounded the alarm about foreclosures well before this issue grabbed the national media spotlight – wrote in a Plain Dealer editorial this past Sunday: “We hear a lot about bailing out banks and protecting investors. We hear little about the innocent victims of the current financial mess. Cities like Cleveland, awash in vacant properties that erode their tax bases and bust their budgets ... What will be done about us – you know, Main Street, Cleveland?”

In his editorial, Rokakis suggests several long-term remedies to get us out of the housing recession that our country faces at this time, including:

• Responsible government regulation.
• Changing the basis of executive compensation from one that rewards short-term gain at the expense of long-term consequences.
• Allowing state and local governments to protect themselves (Cleveland passed a law against predatory lending several years ago, Rokakis says, but was not allowed to enforce it by the state legislature).
• Keeping people from leaving government service, then becoming lobbyists and taking obscene amounts of money from the people that they were supposed to be regulating.

As news develops, we will continue to post analysis of the proposed bailout and how it will affect homebuyers and owners on our blog. Stay tuned.