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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > May > 04
Monday, May 4, 2009
Editorial: NASA can’t blow off Air Force or Dayton
Sweet.
That would have described the situation if Gen. Lester Lyles had stayed in the running to head NASA and had been tapped by President Barack Obama.
Last week, though, Gen. Lyles, who formerly was commander of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, took his name out of contention.
He said he would take too big of a financial hit to come out of retirement and go back into public service. He was widely reported to be on a short list of possibly just four people being considered. Gen. Lyles has been leading a major study on the country’s future in space.
A board member of DPL Inc., Gen. Lyles knows Wright-Patterson and the Dayton community well. With the Defense Department pushing to move the Air Force more into the realm of space, having someone in the highest place at NASA who is intimately familiar with Wright-Patterson would have been a great connection to have.
Moreover, there’s also this:
NASA is retiring its three space shuttles. Dayton’s National Museum of the U.S. Air Force wants one. How great would it have been to have a former Air Force guy, who had spent time here, running that agency as it decides where those spacecraft will go?
If only the stars had aligned.
The competition to get one of the coveted three-winged space vehicles is intense. A reported 20 museums and educational institutions are making pitches. The Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in Washington is unquestionably going to get Discovery; that leaves just two.
As appropriate as that decision is, the Air Force is arguing that it’s also a no-brainer to put Atlantis here, because that shuttle carried military payloads.
The competition includes the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The shuttles are scheduled to be retired in 2010. Once that happens, NASA wants them moved to places where they’ll be accessible to the public. The hitch is that the receiver institutions must have $42 million to pay for the delivery, decontamination, restoration and so on.
The Air Force Museum thinks the Air Force can get a shuttle to Dayton as cheaply as anyone can move them, and it has the experts who will ultimately be called on to help direct efforts to put the spacecraft on display, wherever they go.
But merit will be only part of the consideration. Politics always counts for something, and members of Congress are going to bat for their communities. (U.S. Rep. Mike Turner has gotten agreement from all of Ohio’s congressional representatives to back the Air Force Museum’s bid.)
Some members of Congress are all over President Obama for not having named a NASA administrator yet (like he hasn’t had other things to do). Fourteen members of the House of Representatives from Florida, Alabama, Texas and California — all of which have NASA facilities — have sent a letter saying the president needs to make a choice.
Florida lawmakers are especially trained on the decision. That state could lose 3,500 jobs associated with the Kennedy Center because of the five-year gap between the shuttle retirement and when the space agency puts up its next generation of manned rockets.
But the attention goes beyond parochialism. NASA is at a crossroads about where it’s going to go and how it will get there. When the shuttles stop flying, for instance, this country will be dependent for five years on Russia for access to the International Space Station.
The point is: The next NASA administrator will have big issues on his or her plate.
That raises the possibility that the most connected people in Congress may need to be appeased on the least weighty matters — say, with a space shuttle.
To assure that it gets what it deserves, the Air Force Museum has to be aggressive in raising money and be creative about how it will pay to get a shuttle on view.
Partnerships — a hallmark of Dayton — are the only way it can do that.
Meanwhile, the politicians have to keep their eye on who’s buttonholing the new person after the NASA administrator is named.
And the Air Force has to keep fighting the fight.
One of the shuttles belongs to that service — and here in Dayton.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History, National Politics, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Federal bailout not a fate to be envied
When Washington decided — under President George W. Bush — to bail out not only the banks but the auto companies, immediately people started joking about how they, too, would like to be bailed out from, say, their credit-card debts.
But if they look now at GM and Chrysler, they might not be so sure.
Chrysler is going into bankruptcy, from which its top executive seems to think it will emerge in a good position. But it had to merge with Fiat
, in a deal that analysts are saying leads to Fiat’s dominance. And more than half of the company may be owned by the United Auto Workers union, or, rather, a UAW fund that deals with health benefits. The stock is in lieu of billions owed to members in health benefits.
And the company is shutting down production for a while, having already jettisoned many thousands of employees. And the CEO is on his way out. Dealerships are expected to close. The company’s financing arm has been cut out of the action. Suppliers, such as Dayton’s Behr Thermal Products, are watching with bated breath.
As for General Motors, it’s still struggling to meet the demands of the country’s new president, hoping to avoid bankruptcy. Pontiac is gone. Saturn may be gone. Dealerships are slated to go by the droves. Plants are being shut. The CEO is long gone. The company was a behemoth no more when the government stepped in, and it is becoming much smaller.
Much of what is left could end up being owned by a UAW fund. And nobody can say there aren’t still more blows ahead, before the government is out of the picture. In the end, both companies might survive and thrive. If so, they’ll have to repay the government money in some form.
President Barack Obama said at his press conference last week that, despite his extraordinarily aggressive role so far, he has no interest in running any auto companies. The claim is credible. Government ownership of auto companies has never been in the platform of the Democratic Party or the dreams of the party’s liberals.
Nobody knows whether the union is any more interested in ownership. For the union fund to own stock would be of little comfort to the thousands of workers in Dayton — more than in any city outside of Michigan — who have lost their GM and Delphi jobs over decades.
Nor would the presence of the UAW in management necessarily secure the jobs of present or future workers. If a company’s products aren’t selling, any owner must come to terms with that, making painful decisions.
Meanwhile, nobody knows how much the stock will be worth.
Given all that — plus the fact that running companies and running unions are very different businesses, potentially at odds with each other — the union might want to rid itself of the stock as soon as buyers can be found.
As for the corporations, they’ve been forced to act, in huge decisions, in accord with the interests of taxpayers, as those interests are understood by the president.
It’s not a model that anybody — management, unions, taxpayers, Democrats, Republicans — would want to see become a norm in the American business world, even if it was the least bad approach available.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
Scott Elliott: School helps kids grow up, catch up
David White thought he had a great idea when Dayton Public Schools asked the innovative principal to launch a school for dropouts in 2006.
He’d hook the kids with video games, he thought. Students would run their own company while brushing up their basic skills; in teams, they would develop educational video games and try to sell them to school districts.
The video game concept, it turned out, was a flop.
The Dayton Technology Design High School, on the other hand, has blossomed. Like any good entrepreneur, White, over three years, has refined his program, kept what worked, discarded what didn’t, and shown results.
In a recent Dayton Daily News story, staff writer Anthony Gottschlich reported the school has grown from 60 kids the first year to 130 and has sent 60 students to college. That is extraordinary considering the kids the school targets are at the highest risk for failure. Most have dropped out of school and have a history of arrest and juvenile offenses.
Even so, last year 83 percent of kids who enrolled stuck with the program, up from just 50 percent the first year. Recently relocated to the former Dayton Public Schools administration building at 348 W. First St., the district-sponsored charter school next year will add a third grade level to the program aimed at preparing kids for college-level work.
The staff’s intense support — helping kids grow up and learn to be adults while catching up academically — helps keep students on track. But the other big draw is the chance to start and run a money-making business.
That part of the initial school concept White kept when the video game idea crashed and burned.
“Out of the original 85 kids, we only had about five that wanted to do video games,” he said.
Instead, the revamped program allows the kids to choose their own small-business ideas. Teams write a business plan, create a sales pitch, launch the operation and manage it.
Some examples:
— After last fall’s windstorm, a teacher who lives in Greene County chopped up fallen trees on his property and brought in wood pieces that students shaped and finished into cutting boards to sell.
— One team has 17 contracts for their lawn mowing service.
— Students combined a science fair project studying vegetable growing methods with a business that cuts those vegetables up for salads and sells them at nearby businesses during lunch time.
Later this month, this year’s teams will present their plans to a panel of business people, who will rank them and pick a winning team. Teams also are entering the University of Dayton’s business plan competition.
“We try to unleash creativity and problem-solving,” White said.
In doing so, the Dayton Technology Design High School is getting even the most discouraged kids excited about learning and their futures — kids who, but for White and his staff, might have been headed for serious trouble.
“I can’t see how we are better off locking a kid up for two years than reforming them through education,” White said.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
