Cleveland now ranks as the poorest big city in the United States

By Ohio Capital Journal Staff

Tommy Greer, 34, fishes in the Cuyahoga River with a background of downtown Cleveland in this
2014 photo. (Photo by Jeff Swenson/Getty Images)

Cleveland had the highest poverty rate among large U.S. cities in 2019, overtaking Detroit, according to data released by the U.S. Census bureau last week. The data for the ranking is from 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated problems related to poverty in Ohio and around the country.

The Cleveland-based Center for Community Solutions reported in a post Monday that although Cleveland’s overall poverty rate fell from 33.1% to 30.8% from 2018 to 2019, Detroit’s rate fell faster and is now just barely below Cleveland’s at 30.6%.

“These estimates are close enough to be within the margin of error — but no matter the rankings, it is clear that Cleveland is a high-poverty city,” the Community Solutions center noted in the post.

In 2019, more than 114,000 people lived in poverty in Cleveland, including 37,700 children and nearly 12,000 older adults, the statistics show.

Cleveland remained dead last among large cities in child poverty, with 46.1% of children in the city living in poverty in 2019.

“More than 6,500 of those adults in poverty in Cleveland worked full-time for the full year, but did not earn enough to propel them above the poverty threshold,” the post noted.

The post said the 2019 data shows a continuation of another concerning trend: an increase in poor seniors. The number and share of people over age 65 who live in poverty grew in Cleveland to 22.7%. Meanwhile, Detroit’s senior poverty rate fell to 18.8%. Cleveland rose one spot from being third-worst in older adult poverty to second, tied with Boston, Massachusetts,  and Tampa, Florida. Only Miami, Florida is worse.

As shown below, poverty estimates fell for all other age groups between 2018 and 2019.

“These changes are not statistically significant, and the data was collected in 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting economic downturn,” the post noted.

Ohio is the only state with more than one city with a population of more than 300,000 in ranking in the top 10 poorest big cities with Cincinnati maintaining its ranking at sixth.

“Even before COVID-19, this data shows that thousands of our neighbors struggled last year during a time of record unemployment,” the post said. “Today, there are more than twice as many unemployed people in Cuyahoga County as there were a year ago when this data was collected.”

About 40% of Ohioans report either they, someone in their households or both have lost a job since March 13.

“Early information suggests that federal assistance, such as stimulus payments and extra unemployment benefits, kept many of those people from falling into poverty during the first months of the pandemic,” the post concluded. “But as that extra help expired over the summer and thousands of Ohioans are still unable to find work, we suspect that poverty may rise quickly. Similar data for 2020 will not be available until next fall.”

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This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here.

Cleveland, Columbus among 11 cities White House privately warns must take “aggressive” action against coronavirus

New red flags about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak come after Trump focused on upsides in televised briefing

 By Liz Essley Whyte, Reporter and Alex Ellerbeck, American University Fellow

 

This article about coronavirus aggressive action was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom based in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, warned state and local leaders in a private phone call Wednesday that 11 major cities are seeing increases in the percentage of tests coming back positive for COVID-19 and should take “aggressive” steps to mitigate their outbreaks. 

The cities she identified were Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

The call was yet another private warning about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreaks given to local officials but not the public at large. It came less than a week after the Center for Public Integrity revealed that the White House compiled a detailed report showing 18 states were in the “red zone” for coronavirus cases but did not release it publicly.

Increasing test positivity — an indicator that a community does not have an outbreak under control — should be expected in areas that reopened and grew more relaxed about social distancing measures, said Harvard epidemiologist Bill Hanage. He said the warnings and data from the White House should be made public. 

“This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet,” he said. “The best way to deal with a crisis or a natural disaster is to be straight with people, to earn their trust and to give the information they need to make decisions for themselves and their communities.”

Birx told hundreds of emergency managers and other state and local leaders that they should act quickly to stem the outbreaks. Among her recommendations were to trace the contacts of patients testing positive for COVID-19 in areas where test positivity is going up.

“When you first see that increase in test positivity, that is when to start the mitigation efforts,” she said in a recording obtained by Public Integrity. “I know it may look small and you may say, ‘That only went from 5 to 5-and-a-half [percent], and we’re gonna wait and see what happens.’ If you wait another three or four or even five days, you’ll start to see a dramatic increase in cases.”

Birx said the federal government was seeing encouraging declines in test positivity in places like Phoenix and San Antonio but warned that the outbreak in the Sunbelt was moving north.

“What started out very much as a southern and western epidemic is starting to move up the East Coast into Tennessee, Arkansas, up into Missouri, up across Colorado, and obviously we’re talking about increases now in Baltimore,” she said. “So this is really critical that everybody is following this and making sure they’re being aggressive about mitigation efforts.”

It’s unclear who heard the warnings and was invited to the call, which was hosted by the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and closed to the press. Baltimore and Cleveland were two of the cities Birx warned were facing rising test positivity, but a spokeswoman for the Cleveland mayor’s office, Nancy Kelsey-Carroll, said they did not participate in the call. And Baltimore health department leaders didn’t know about it, agency spokesman Adam Abadir said in an email. That city today announced a mask mandate and new restrictions on indoor dining.

The test positivity rates may not have been news to some elected officials. For example, Pennsylvania already publicly reports that data by county.

Birx’s warning came a day after President Donald Trump resumed his televised coronavirus briefings. The president offered a rosier picture of the pandemic than Birx, focusing on examples of improvements in the fight against the virus, such as better treatment with the drug remdesivir.

Her call also came the same day that Democratic Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor that he and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi had insisted on greater data transparency in a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Schumer said they would push for legislation to “ensure that COVID-19 data is fully transparent and accessible without any interference from the administration.”   

And on Tuesday, former CDC Director Tom Frieden and colleagues released a list of data points they would like states to publish in real-time, standardized, to give officials and residents better information.

“It’s not just people who are holding office who need to make decisions,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, on a call with reporters. “The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we’ll be.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Birx’s warnings, nor did it answer repeated questions over several days from Public Integrity on why it had not made the “red zone” report public. Birx said on the call that the weekly report had been sent to governors for four weeks. One staffer for a governor said his boss received only the section of the report related to his state, not the entire report.

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CPT | Cuyahoga Politics Today:

The Cleveland Way

Yet another study has identified Cleveland as being at the bottom of the pit when it comes to quality of life. Or as the mayor might say, the b***hole of the nation. WalletHub, a financial services website, announced this week that Cleveland residents are the most stressed in the nation. We rank first — i.e., worst — when it comes to "financial stress". We have the highest divorce rate, the second highest poverty rate, and are third worst when it comes to "health and safety stress".

Had the surveyors factored in police misconduct, we'd have been a runaway winner.

Let’s cut to the chase. Making our condition worse is that the three public issues roiling the nation right now — the economy, the pandemic, and systemic inequality/police misconduct — all weigh most heavily on black people, and Cleveland is a majority black town. So black people are out of work and without financial resources, going untested and getting sick, hospitalized, and dying from coronavirus, and soon to be evicted, on the street and subject to the whims of hostile “safety” forces organized to contain the unruly and the unwanted from invading or disrupting the peace and comfort of the mostly white enclaves that circle the urban core and its first ring suburbs.

Rank these issues — we listed them alphabetically — however you want in terms of salience. They all cry out for being addressed systemically, which means elected officials need to be part of the solution.

Cuyahoga’s most prominent public officials are county executive Armond Budish and Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson. While these gentlemen have enjoyed near-unanimous establishment support, it's hard to envision two more pedestrian and disconnected chief executives. 

Budish has never embraced the idea of holding Ohio’s second-most powerful elected office — as the position was touted during debate over county reorganization in 2009. And his stature has shriveled since he so badly mismanaged the county jail in ways that contributed to a string of inmate deaths under conditions decried as “inhumane” by federal monitors. He has been effectively a lame duck for the past two year, a status unlikely to change over the next two years.

Some politicians might draw strength from being effectively immune to the voters and find courage in seizing moral high ground. Alas, Budish was characteristically timid and indecisive last Friday as he practically begged county residents to wear masks. It’s understandable that his mask edict was devoid of teeth: the county has few resources to even throw a scare into the selfish unmasked. But odds are he could have assembled several dozen area mayors to line up behind a bolder plea.

Which brings us to Frank Jackson. Frank calls me every couple of weeks, usually just before six o’clock dinnertime. His recorded voice informs me that he is about to speak to Cleveland citizens and that I should stay on the line. His tone is both intrusive and flat, so devoid of warmth and energy it’s like a declaration that he hates the imminent engagement with the people who have repeatedly voted him into office.

Frank has been either mayor or council president since the 20^th century. Whatever ambition or drive or fire he might have had in 1999 has long since dissipated. He is the Decider-in-Chief at City Hall who acts on the premise that if voters don’t like what he’s doing, they can vote him out. Short of that, don’t call or petition him with concerns about a living minimum wage, or lead abatement or budgetary concerns that money should be allocated to basic human needs instead of plush digs for corporate elites [Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Sherwin-Williams tax breaks].

Catering to the wishes of the political donor class might be acceptable if Clevelanders didn’t have to live with these realities: a water department that mis-bills city residents, shuts off their water, puts liens on their property, and then forecloses and kicks them out; a health department that supports a resolution declaring racism a public health crisis but is itself thoroughly indifferent to its own longstanding hospitality to that very virus; a top Jackson administration official, James McGrath, who first as police chief and then as safety director [he retired last month], tolerated and condoned, and perhaps encouraged, all manner of felonious behavior from police officers sworn to protect and serve the people.

Or, failing that, in pandemic times, say maybe every hundred years or so, calling upon those fat cat friends to say, hey, we have a problem here, can you help us out by testing a few hundred thousand people so we can try and keep as many of them alive as possible?

Cleveland is justly celebrated for being home to three of the nation’s top medical systems. The quasi-public one, MetroHealth, got millions from in COVID money from the state but has yet to figure out how to test the masses.

The other two — Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals — are huge behemoths, owners of acres and acres of tax-exempt properties, and possess such great wealth that one might think their status as nonprofit entities meant they would step forward in times of great crisis to at least test the black and brown people who live all around them.

We don’t know if the mayor has called upon these friends in times like these. We do know they have yet to step up in any meaningful way to help those most in need. And we know that no one in City Hall — not the mayor, or any of his wannabe successors on city council — have called them out for their indifference.

As we reported this past week, a few entities — some black churches, Greater Cleveland Congregations, Neighborhood Family Practice — are trying heroically to stand in the gap. Their efforts are heroic but are dwarfed by the need.

Is there one elected official willing to call out the mighty Clinic? To be sure, they would be swiftly reminded, “that’s not the Cleveland way”.

Perhaps “the Cleveland way” is why we sit atop virtually every index of misery.

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CPT | Desperate Times: Dark Money, Gatekeepers and the Public Square, Part I

Cuyahoga Politics Today

Cleveland's Crumbling Political Order

The emergence of "dark money" in this year's mayoral campaign is a harsh but illuminating case study on how the intersection of race, power and privilege in Cleveland retards the region's redevelopment into a first class twenty-first century metropolis.

Ironically, this object lesson of primitive politics is on display front and center this week as Cleveland hosts not one but two national conferences focused on smart cities and intelligent planning for urban communities.

We will have more to say about our national visitors in a companion post, but suffice it to say here that they are some of the brightest minds currently operating on the cutting edge of technology, urban planning and intelligent design. Stepping outside their conference headquarters to experience our downtown vibrancy, the more attuned can hear disturbing echoes from the local corridors of power emanating from our airwaves, unlike the soothing welcomes they are receiving from official local representatives.

Like most big cities, a status Cleveland now holds more in memory, longing and pretense, our direction and pace are largely set by the interplay between our business and civic leaders. In healthy communities, these forces are complementary competitors. Like Howard and Hampton, two of the nation’s best historically black universities, they battle fiercely but enjoy both a mutual respect with the understanding that beyond the struggle on the playing field, they each share a common interest in the other's prosperity and well-being.

More than a century ago, Cleveland was at the national forefront of municipal leadership. We had nearly one million residents within our borders. We had a progressive mayor, Tom Johnson, who left a successful business career to run for public office in service to his community — not just to his class. While Johnson is justly celebrated today for his bold, visionary and courageous leadership — his statue adorns our Public Square — his former business associates at the time vilified him for daring to represent the public interest at the expense of their immediate profits.

Mostly since then, it seems that our business community has made it a cardinal principle to ensure that organic leadership in the public interest would never reemerge. The dominance of that first principle has coincided with Cleveland's steady decline ever since 1930.

Cleveland's population growth was fueled first by middle and Eastern European immigrants who came to toil in the filthy factories, foundries and refineries that forged the area's wealth. The unhealthiness of those sweatshops and the griminess of the teeming masses in their ethnic central city enclaves led people with means to seek greener pastures. Even Millionaires Row did not escape the exodus as wealthy Clevelanders moved outward to create some of the world's first and finest modern suburbs: Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland.

In so doing, they had to abandon direct control of city politics. By and large, good government forces refocused on emerging suburban city halls, replaced in Cleveland City Hall by waves of competing ethnic politicians sent downtown from their respective enclaves — Little Italy, Slavic Village, Collinwood, Clark-Fulton, and so forth — to gain public power to improve their neighborhood's and living conditions.

A tacit bargain was struck between the business community and the ethnics. The latter could run the city politically but would not interfere with the city's powerful money making apparatus, which was slowly becoming more corporate, with the attendant development of powerful legal and financial service muscle centers.

Cleveland ethnics developed a unique and powerful "Cosmopolitan" political machine, best exemplified by Frank Lausche, who blazed a trail to stunning success as judge, mayor, governor, and ultimately US Senator. (George Voinovich would follow Lausche's Cosmo path a generation later, but even though he took some of his rough and tumble homies along to ride shotgun, his saddlebags always carried a corporate agenda.)

Black people, eventually to become the area's largest and most indigestible ethnic group, were initially barely a blip on Cleveland's municipal radar. Restricted initially to the city's Central neighborhood, they were only a minor irritant in the civic arena until a modest immigrant from Alabama, John O. Holly, began agitating for equity in 1935. Seemingly overnight he organized 10,000 working class black to support his contention that black lives mattered. Under the banner of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, his Future Outlook League forced dozens of businesses in the central area and then downtown, to begin desegregating their workforces by hiring Negroes.

Holly's intrusion into how the city did business had political overtones and fostered the business community's resort to gatekeepers, respectable black people whose primary chore was to keep their unwashed and rebellious kinfolk under control.

This quasi-colonial system has been in place ever since, with continuous refinements that extend until the present day. Its use was instrumental in the undermining of the opposition to the Q deal, and can now be seen in the ferocious effort to derail the populist challenge to City Hall that threatens to put neighborhood native son Zack Reed from sitting in the mayor's seat.

What Cleveland’s civic leaders continually fail to understand its that its adherence to a post-colonial reliance upon a gatekeeper mentality retards our entire community, keeps us in a defensive stance, limits our attractiveness to immigration from anywhere, makes us wholly ill-equipped to compete for Amazon HQ2, and ultimately undermines our most earnest efforts to enter world class competition even at the middleweight level, notwithstanding our enormous public assets.

We approach today the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as mayor. We are right to celebrate that achievement: Cleveland was the FIRST big city in America to elect a black man as mayor.

(Richard Hatcher was elected mayor in Gary, Indiana the same night in November 1967; however, Gary barely registered on the roster of the city’s larger cities, Its 178,000 citizens ranked it #70 in 1960, while Cleveland came in as the nation’s 8th largest city, with a population of 876,000. 

Today, Cleveland has shrunk to a ranking outside the top fifty cities, with a population of about 385,000, placing it below such lustrous venues as Tulsa OK, Arlington TX, Colorado Springs CO, and Mesa AZ.)

The Stokes era at City Hall, 1967-1971, busted open the old order. Black people, confined almost exclusively to the overcrowded neighborhoods of Cedar-Central, Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant, used their concentrated mass to break down decades of exclusion, and to bring a measure of meritocracy to the public space. The establishment, which had long resisted such a development, embraced it in the wake of Stokes’ near-election in 1965, and in fear of the tumultuous conditions erupting nationwide in places like Newark, Watts, and Detroit.

Those were exhilarating years for black people in Cleveland. Doors were kicked open on every front as black people found new opportunities in employment, housing, and the civic space. There was opposition all along the way, but led by Carl and his brother Lou, who became Ohio’s first black Congressman in 1968, the black community stuck together and persevered.

While the Stokes years at City Hall led to unquestioned improvement in the quality of civic life for all Clevelanders, certain problems, most notably in the justice and public education systems, proved intractable even as significant progress was made in other arenas. Hardcore resistance to public school integration was tolerated and even supported by key elements of the business community, and the promise of the Stokes years quickly waned. And when an ambitious, audacious inner city ethnic westside kid named Dennis Kucinich rode the unrest into City Hall, all hell broke loose.

Kucinich was mayor for only two years, every day of which seemed as tumultuous as what we currently observe in the White House. The business community found George Voinovich, a Cosmo Republican, retook control of City Hall and community politics, and found complicit partners it could control with a multifaceted system of financial controls in the form of salaries, grants, contracts, and other more nefarious fiscal tools.

Today, Frank Jackson sits in City Hall as the embodiment of that system. A good man, conscientious, diligent, he is the virtual embodiment of a political metronome. Super dependable, predictable to a fault, he can be counted upon to support almost every business community initiative, irrespective of its merit or the disproportionate aspects of its benefits and burdens.

Jackson has done a lot of good during his unsurpassed twelve years as mayor, but almost everybody knows and believes the baton should be passed.

And therein lies the problem: the natural stream of selection has been corrupted, choked with pesticides, and clogged, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless primarily as a direct consequence of the gatekeeper system that restricts access, development and advancement of talent, ambition, and potential in the civic, commercial and cultural spaces that matter in Greater Cleveland.

In tomorrow’s post, we will talk more about the gatekeepers. We’re likely even to name at least a couple of the most obvious ones.

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Cleveland in dire need of a mayor with energy and fresh ideas; one candidate has both

Now is the time

Clevelanders will go the polls tomorrow to decide which two men will advance to the November election that will determine the city's next mayor.

Tomorrow's nonpartisan primary takes place in the most dynamic and fluid civic environment this city has seen since the election of Carl Stokes precisely one half-century ago.

In the eyes of some, the primary election will be a referendum on the twelve-year run of Frank Jackson and his administration. He is clearly running on his record, one that has many commendable and noteworthy accomplishments. He steered the city firmly through several tough years of the Great Recession that began in 2008. He has presided over what is slowly becoming a more vibrant downtown. He worked smartly with Republicans to bring their national convention here and helped create the conditions for its smooth execution.

Jackson is seeking an unprecedented fourth four-year term that would make him the longest-running mayor in Cleveland's 221-year-old history. When he announced he would again be a candidate, he said he was running because there was no one else who was both qualified and willing to run.

what qualities should our next mayor have, and who among the candidates has the best combination of those qualities?

That claim was untrue. The names on tomorrow's ballot would be very different had the mayor declared his intent to retire. The mayor's decision to run again was essentially a declaration that his leadership is indispensable.

It isn’t.

What's more, the voters know it.

After 12 years, Jackson fatigue is rampant throughout the electorate, and a major reason why he is apt to receive a small slice of tomorrow's vote.

The city's next administration must be characterized by energy and fresh ideas. 

If voters act on their anger and despair, which more than 20,000 of them did when they signed petitions protesting the giveaway of tax monies to expand Quicken Loans Arena, here's the real question they should ask before marking their ballots: what qualities should our next mayor have, and who among the candidates has the best combination of those qualities?

Cleveland has some glitzy bells and whistles. We’ve got a marvelous Playhouse Square, cool chandelier, captivating pro sports teams, a bevy of world-class institutions, and the incomparable University Circle.

But we are consistently mired at the bottom of every quality of life index, in large measure because we are bamboozled into offering public support for private gain and bragging about our charitable nature. We presume ourselves to be liberal because Democrats are everywhere in office, though liberal policies prevail nowhere. We are stuck in conservative trickle down bootstraps muck.

The city's next administration must be characterized by energy and fresh ideas. That energy comes, believe it or not, from the people. Citizen energy is what propelled Carl Stokes to victory fifty years ago.

Mayor Jackson waves at cars
along MLK Blvd. last month

Frank Jackson may still call the Central neighborhood home, but he has become a captive of downtown interests, isolated from the daily struggles of most citizens. His distance from the city is illustrated by the most iconic image of his campaign: the mayor standing detached at intersections in tailored clothing and waving at passing traffic.

Not by coincidence, Jackson detests the two candidates most identified with the people's energy: city councilmen Zack Reed and Jeff Johnson.

We like Zack. He's the hardest worker on city council, and along with the ageless Mike Polensek, the most impassioned. His report card on the failures of the Jackson administration is by far the most biting of all the candidates' critiques. But Reed's signature issue is safety, and student of government that he proclaims to be notwithstanding, he hasn't the foggiest idea how to pay for any of his proposals.

We like Jeff also. We believe in redemption and second chances. But, sadly, Jeff's time passed long ago. He followed Mike White into city council and then into the State Senate. He should have run to succeed White in 2001 but he was fresh out of federal prison. He got back on track but the train had left.

We think the fourth major candidate in this race is the under the radar Brandon Chrostowski. He's lucky in that his typical male indiscretion occurred early enough in life not to derail him. And he was smart enough to learn from it and find his passion in public service.

Four years ago Brandon started a series of nonprofit entities that most famously includes a French restaurant that offers fancy food with zealous service at high prices. It's become a multi-million dollar operation with impeccable accounting from which he extracts only a modest income.

Brandon Chrostowski at the 2d annual
Northeast Ohio Re-Entry Business Summit on April 21,
an event he founded to provide opportunities for returning citizens. 

But the most important product of his enterprise is not satisfied customers; it is redeemed lives. Edwin's Restaurant and Leadership Institute helps people reclaim their lives. It invests in people who have been convicted of felonies and sent to prison. They learn soft skills and marketable skills in the food service industry, find jobs, become productive members of society, and stay out of jail. Their recidivism rate is under 2%.

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We have attended several mayoral forums and listened carefully to all nine candidates. (Madalone skipped the ones we attended but we tracked him otherwise.) Chrostowski, a white guy, is one of the only two candidates we heard express actual belief in the potential of Cleveland citizens. This is huge in a city with a population that is largely black and brown, disproportionately under-employed, over-policed, poorly educated, ill-housed, malnourished, in bad health, trapped in dangerous environments, with diminished transportation options, and too often denied opportunities because of these circumstances or past conditions.

If you don't believe in the people you profess to be helping, then guess what: whether you are on a public, private or nonprofit payroll, whether you work in the ‘hood, in corporate, or in Congress, you are less than honest in what you do, and the people — be they addicted, infirm, or just stuck at the bottom of the ladder — know it.

A smart truck driver I know likes to remind me of a verse from the Gospel of Luke. It may be the only one he knows, but it should give comfort to those who may be see Brandon’s resume as slight:

"He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much..." [Luke 16:10].

Chrostowski's campaign has been ground level in message and method. He sensibly would fire Flask and McGrath, who epitomize the indifferent or hostile shadow of public safety in Cleveland lurking behind the police chief. He would establish a series of job training centers around town that would focus on making residents more employable. And his third priority is to address public school performance and to accelerate Cleveland's lagging pace towards becoming a universally savvy tech community.

Chrostowski is not an ordinary politician. He voted for neither Trump nor Clinton. But he has taken an old-fashioned approach to campaigning, crisscrossing the city with a dedicated team targeting likely voters. He tells me he's been in every ward knocking on doors.

Mike White used a similar approach in 1989 to finish a surprising second in the primary and launch his twelve-year mayoralty. It would be good for Cleveland if Chrostowski can follow that route and help to end one.

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