A coalition of Ohio business groups has joined a growing chorus in support of diverting nonviolent criminals from state prisons to save money in the next state budget.

Nine Ohio-based chambers of commerce on Dec. 20  released their ideas for tackling the state’s estimated $8 billion budget shortfall.

Their recommendations also include allowing state agencies to operate more like charter schools, with more flexibility over employees and more control over their budgets. They also support state officials reviewing the tax benefits that some of their own member businesses receive.

The groups say their recommendations could save the state an estimated $1.4 billion in its next two-year budget.

The participating metropolitan chambers of commerce include: Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, Columbus Chamber, Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, Greater Akron Chamber, Greater Cleveland Partnership, Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Youngstown-Warren Regional Chamber.

A press release by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce said  the report, titled “Redesigning Ohio: Transforming Government into a 21st Century Institution,” includes the following recommendations:

• Adopt budgeting for outcomes as the underpinning for the government redesign plan. Rather than making incremental changes to the status quo, this approach focuses on what matters most: purchasing outcomes that drive citizens’ value. Programs that do not contribute much to those outcomes are no longer included in the budget.
• Establish charter agencies and entrepreneurial management as “bureaucracy busting” measures to save money and/or increase revenues while increasing creativity and flexibility for managers.
• Make state agencies that provide support services to government accountable to their customers, and use the power of competition to drive innovation and improvement.
• Reduce state regulatory enforcement costs by designing regulations that achieve the same outcomes as their predecessors but are easier to comply with and, as a result, decrease the likelihood that they will be violated.
• Implement a comprehensive tax expenditure review to regularly examine the 122 distinct tax expenditures – credits, exemptions and deductions – that amount to $7.7 billion in lost state revenue annually. Also, reduce or cap costly real property tax rollbacks.
• Adopt civil service and compensation reform that will give managers freedom to manage their people; link public employee compensation to performance; and bring state pensions into line with private sector realities.
• Reduce the costs of the public pensions system through changing contribution formulas, consolidating redundant systems and increasing cost sharing of some benefits.
• Improve Ohio’s health insurance value equation by using the state’s bulk purchasing power to help drive down healthcare costs.
• Significantly reduce prison system costs by directing more nonviolent offenders away from adult prisons toward non-residential community-based monitoring and treatment.
• Establish new structures on the state and county levels and provide both carrot and stick incentives and assistance to promote local government efficiencies, sharing of services and consolidation.

The Lucas County Republican Party (LCRP) will host a Central Committee meeting Dec. 22, according to documents given to Toledo Free Press.

The agenda includes “appointments of the chairman’s recommendations to committee” and “recognition of committee members who went above and beyond their duties for the LCRP.”

The meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Omni, 2567 W. Bancroft St.

Members are told to RSVP to (419) 482-0506 or admin@lucascountygop.org. An e-mail to the LCRP administration as well as a call to LCRP Chairman Jon Stainbrook to confirm the meeting were not returned.

Related story: Libbey could meet wrecking ball in February

Toledo Mayor Mike Bell said he recognizes the importance of Libbey High School within the community and is open to suggestions on how to save certain portions of the structure.

The mayor has been approached by several individuals within the community to save the building and he is still investigating if there is a way to save some of the structure’s newer sections, said Jen Sorgenfrei, public information officer for the city.

Bell has expressed interest in preserving the basketball facility, football field and skills center for community use. The biggest obstacle is heating the facilities once the main structure is demolished. As of now, the project is cost prohibitive.

“Bell understands the importance and symbolism of the school within the community and stands behind that. However, we have a fiscal responsibility to live within our means,” Sorgenfrei said.

The mayor is not making a commitment to saving the school, but is open to suggestions on how to fund some of the projects.

A group of concerned Libbey High School alumni and community members will present the Toledo Public Schools Board of Education with petitions to save the school building from demolition.

The petitions ask the board that Libbey High School building be maintained to benefit the community.

“We’re looking for positive things to come from the whole property, looking beyond the idea of just a community center,” said Susan Terrill, Libbey Alumni Association member and Libbey advocate.

Terrill said the South End needs a central community building as the YMCA and now Libbey have been closed.

The petitions will be presented to the board Dec. 21. More than 700 signatures have been collected, Terrill said.

In addition to presenting the board with petitions, Libbey alumni and community members will meet Dec. 27 to discuss ideas to stop demolition of the Libbey building. The meeting is at 6:30 p.m. in the South Branch Library, 1736 Broadway.

Libbey could face demolition as early as February.

Previous coverage:

Libbey could meet wrecking ball in February

Three years ago, Marion Jones taught her oldest son how to pray again.
He asked her to show him when she revealed she had breast cancer. The now 58-year-old told her sons about death and sickness, and about her faith.
“When you hear the word ‘cancer,’ you think of a death sentence,” Jones said. “But there are new technologies that make it better for us. I don’t look at it in a negative manner; otherwise I think I might just as well give up.”
Jones has hardly wavered — after at least seven different treatments, various surgeries and frequent chemo-therapy rounds, she takes every day as it comes. She makes lists to keep herself busy and cooks dinner for her siblings who live with her. She sings hymns to herself and breaks out the sewing machine to fix up her sisters’ clothing.
Jones is one of the 12 to 13 percent of women in the United States struck by breast cancer, a statistic that the medical community has combated for years. New technologies that Jones mentioned evolve so quickly that local oncologist Tim Kasunic, M.D., has noted major changes recently.

Marion Jones

“Five years ago, every woman with breast cancer greater than 1 centimeter would automatically get chemo therapy,” said Kasunic, who works with the Toledo Clinic. “Now less than 50 percent do.”
The shift has to do with a more personalized approach to cancer treatment. Doctors used to treat cancer as if it were identical in everyone’s bodies, but recent molecular testing technologies have helped doctors see the biological differences in different patients’ cancers.
The testing, a three-year-old technique, determines whether the patients have a high, low or medium risk of reoccurring cancer cells so that the doctor can personalize their treatment plan, Kasunic said.
Since then, doctors have been able to understand why some patients have more aggressive cancers. These types of patients were discovered to have a receptor on their cancer cells called HER2. Scientists created a drug that blocks the receptor called Herceptin.
Now, Kasunic is testing whether adding a newer drug called Tykerb will make treatment more effective.
The new drug is exciting because it is a pill, while Herceptin has to be dosed through IVs every three weeks for a year, he said. That study is one of 14 that the Toledo Community Oncology Program is conducting for breast cancer treatment.
Another major change has affected Kasunic’s work in the past month. A new drug called Halaven hit the market in November, which extends a terminal patient’s life expectancy.
“It could be the difference for a given patient to make it to the next holiday or the next graduation,” said David Cox, director in US Medical Affairs for Eisai Incorporated.
Eisai is the company that introduced Halaven. The design for the drug came from a sea sponge.
Scientists discovered that sponges off the coast of Japan had anti-cancer agents 18 years ago. They developed a synthetic model of the molecule, conducted tests and found that patients who took the drug lived about two and a half months longer than those who took standard medications, Cox said.
Jones said fighting cancer has been just as much psychological as it has been physically straining.
Michelle Cocchiarella is a breast health nurse at Flower Hospital who helps patients through support groups, particularly focusing on survivorship programs. Support groups range from things like educational sessions, to patient-to-patient chats to engaging activities to help others, she said.
“We’re finding more and more that people want to give back and do something for other cancer survivors and patients so we have classes where they make cards and give them to people who are going through treatment,” Cocchiarella said.
Another personal struggle has to do with post-treatment self-esteem. Women often come with questions about how recovering from their illness will affect their sex lives or their personal appearances, she said. Thus, specific programs for skin and hair are offered.

MORENCI, Mich. — The mother of Andrew, Alexander and Tanner Skelton said Dec. 20 she believes her boys are still alive somewhere and pleaded with anyone who might have them to return the missing boys to her.

In front of a small group of reporters this afternoon at Morenci United Methodist Church, Tanya Skelton said her intuition still tells her “that my boys are alive and that they’re with someone they know.”

Tanya Skelton (photo by Erik Gable)

“In my heart, I have as a mom not felt that my children are gone,” she said, sitting in front of photos of the boys taken during a trip to Harrison Lake State Park. “I feel they’re out there alive somewhere. I just don’t know where.”

The boys have been missing since Thanksgiving, and their father, John Skelton, is being held at the Lenawee County Jail on parental kidnapping charges. Investigators have said the information that have developed so far does not lead them to expect a positive outcome in the case, but Tanya Skelton said she still has hope.

“I have never felt that they’re not on this earth anymore,” she said.

She pleaded with anyone who might have the boys to “call 911 or take my children to the nearest police or fire station, hospital.”

“Even a fast food restaurant,” she said. “You could tell them to stay together and to go inside and say ‘we’re the three missing boys,’ and I know that my boys can do that.”

“Please bring them home,” she said. “Their mom and their sisters, their grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles are waiting.” Tanya Skelton has two adult daughters.

Asked what she would like to say to her sons if they could hear her, Skelton tearfully replied: “I love you boys, I miss you and I want you to come home.”

Skelton described the last day she saw her sons before their disappearance.

“We were up fairly early,” she said. “They were going to spend the day with Grandpa and Grandma, my parents, and their cousin, and play all day and then their dad was going to pick them up there.”

Alexander William Skelton, Andrew Ryan Skelton and Tanner Lucas Skelton

Skelton said she felt no hesitation about sending them to their father’s house.

“They had been going with him on a regular basis, so I?wasn’t concerned about that at all.”

Skelton said she had family coming and had contacted her husband to ask about picking up the boys early. He told her that wouldn’t be possible because they weren’t home at the time, and she agreed, thinking nothing of it.

“Three o’clock came, I went to the house and he wasn’t home,” she said. “And that’s when I found out he was at the hospital.” John Skelton was taken to the hospital after a reported suicide attempt.

Skelton said she doesn’t know what to think about her husband’s statement, which he made Dec. 16 during a contempt of court hearing in the Skeltons’ divorce case, that he gave the boys to an unnamed organization.

“The first I had heard of that was in the courtroom,” she said.

However, she said she doesn’t believe his claim that he doesn’t know where the boys are now.

“I think he knows where they are,” she said.

Skelton said she has not asked to speak with her husband, but would be willing to do so if investigators thought it would help.

“If the FBI wants me to, I will, but right now, I’m doing what has been asked of me.”

Asked whether she thought John Skelton was capable of killing his sons, she shook her head and said “no.”

“The John I knew, and was in love with, would not,” she said. “That’s all I can say now.”

She said she has not spoken with any members of her husband’s family, and said she did not have a good relationship with his parents.

John Skelton’s parents have accused her of abusing the boys and said their son took them away to keep them safe. Tanya Skelton said those claims are untrue.

“I love my children,” she said. “I would give my life for my children. I have never hurt my children, nor would I ever hurt my children.”

Tanya Skelton said she doesn’t know why her husband would have taken the children, “other than to hurt me.”

“But along the way he’s hurt more than just me,” she said. “He’s hurt my family, his family. He’s hurt the whole country. He’s hurt their friends, friends who have to wonder at night where their friends are.”

She said she’s heard from one mother whose son is so afraid because of the Skelton boys’ disappearance that he has to sleep in his mother’s bed at night.

“I’m an adult, so if you want to hurt me, hurt me,” she said. “But leave my children and the other children out of it.”

Kathye Herrera, a friend of Tanya Skelton’s who has been acting as spokesperson for the family, said the boys’ disappearance has caused fear and uncertainty among many of the children who know them. She recalled a girl at church asking why a father would take his children away.

“And how do you tell a little 4-year-old?” Herrera said. “Because we don’t understand.”

Asked whether she believes she will ever forgive her husband, Tanya Skelton said: “As a Christian, eventually, yes, I will.”

With Christmas approaching, Skelton spoke fondly of past holidays with her sons, and said there will be presents under the tree for them. She said Christmas with Andrew, Alexander and Tanner is always “lots of fun.”

“My boys are full of life,” she said. “They’re all boy, and it’s loud and busy.”

She said her sons have never needed the latest, most popular toy to have fun.

“Give them a shovel, a spoon, a stick — it doesn’t matter, they’ll dig a hole with it,” she said. “And then they’ll find water and their dump trucks and the rest is history.”

Skelton said it will be a quiet, emotional holiday if the boys are still missing at the end of this week.

“I just want my boys home for Christmas,” she said.

Kimberly Smith holds up the piece of paper that is the only thing keeping her from bankruptcy: an application for extended unemployment benefits. She’s not happy that she needs it. And she’s upset that it was nearly taken away.

“I do deserve it,” the 49-year-old says. “I’ve done everything I could to try and get a job. I tried to get back into the retail industry. I made the effort to, at my age, go back to college.”

President Barack Obama extended unemployment benefits for Smith and millions of other Americans when he signed tax-cut legislation Dec. 17. It helps people who have been out of work more than 26 weeks but less than 99 weeks, though the benefits vary greatly from state to state.

They could be just about anybody. People with college degrees and people with no higher education. People who have resorted to living out of their cars. People who have cashed out their retirement savings. People who once held six-figure jobs and people like Smith, who was laid off from her job as a department manager at a jeweler’s a year and a half ago.

What unites them is the bitterness in their voices as they talk about how badly they need unemployment benefits — to clothe their children, to pay for heat, to save their homes from foreclosure.

“My options are to not pay my bills, have my house taken away, have creditors on me,” says Smith, a mother of two in Lyndhurst, Ohio, who has been supporting her family on an unemployment check that amounts to $477 a week before taxes.

In Ohio and the 24 other states with unemployment rates of at least 8.5 percent, the unemployed can receive benefits for up to 99 weeks. In other states, they get less than that — in some cases as few as 60 weeks, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The new law restores, for 13 more months, the 99-week maximum. It also renews federal programs that extend benefits beyond the 26 weeks that states always provide. Those federal programs had expired Nov. 30.

For unemployed people who spoke to The Associated Press across the country, the extension is a relief, but a shadow of the relief a new job would provide. They are frustrated not only with their struggles to find work, but with the accusations — on TV, even by protesters outside the office for food stamps — that they’re lazy, that they’re not trying hard enough.

Right now, there is nothing Smith would like more than a job. Anything to get her out of her living room, where she spends her days trolling the Internet for jobs while the snow piles up outside.

Before her job with the jeweler, she spent two decades working for a fashion retailer that ended up leaving northeast Ohio. After her most recent layoff, she tried to change industries.

There are jobs in the medical industry, people told her. So she went back to school and became a certified medical assistant. Weeks blurred into months. And still Smith cannot find a job.

“We, the middle class, are just trying to keep our heads above water,” she says. “And you know what? We’re drowning.”

“They have no idea”

“If I hear one more senator, congressman, TV pundit or whatever…”

Theresa Christenson can’t finish the sentence before breaking into tears.

“It really gets me when they say ‘you lazy people’,” says Christenson, who lives on $1,720 a month in unemployment insurance benefits and what’s left of her dwindling 401K. “They have no idea how depressing that is when you have been beating your head against the wall, trying to find work. Every time I see that or read it, I just start crying. They have no idea.”

Before she was laid off from a quality assurance job at Yahoo! in July 2009, Christenson, of Burbank, Calif., earned around $100,000 a year. The 58-year-old has managed to hang on to the 4-bedroom house that she co-owns with her sister, where they’ve lived for 22 years. Without the extension, she expected to lose the stucco, one-story house that looks like every other house.

She knows she’s better off than others, but depression has set in during the long, hard months of fruitless searching.

“People who have lost their homes and are now living out of their car — my heart shatters for them,” she says. “I’m very, very thankful for the extension.”

Yet she says she’s disgusted by the deal between Obama and congressional Republicans that made the extension possible — a deal that preserved tax cuts for the wealthy as well as the poor.

“I hate the cost,” she says. “That we got it at the cost of millionaires and billionaires getting to keep their money and stay at the same tax rate.”

Winter to outlast benefits

The furnace broke down not long ago in Tina Price’s ranch home in Southfield, Mich., so she resorted to plugging in space heaters to keep her children warm. The 36-year-old mother of two young boys doesn’t expect much of a Christmas this year.

Her unemployment benefits were cut off in November and she’s been unemployed for about 92 weeks. She took a buyout from American Axle several years ago and hasn’t had steady employment since.

“I was just able to get them boots,” Price says of her children. “I’m just trying to keep my utilities on. There is absolutely nothing I can do at this point.”

The biweekly unemployment checks worth about $670 will last a few more weeks thanks to the new extension. But not enough to get her family through the winter.

“I’m still struggling to get things right,” she says. “My bills are sky-high because I have not been able to pay them — the light bill, gas bill and water bill. I try to keep agreements with the utilities.”

Price still receives state assistance to buy food. Friends, family and “generous people” have also been helping, she says. She’s taking information technology classes as part of a career retraining program.

“I think everyone, right now, is stressed out,” she says.

Savvy, 60, striking out

Mike Bryson left Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed, heading south for greener pastures in the form of Maryland’s electronics and computer industry. He found a job there but returned when it ended, and has been out of work since August 2009.

Bryson has experience and education — he recently attended a technical training center and has many computer certifications — but the 60-year-old believes his age has made it more difficult to find a job. He’s sent out hundreds of resumes.

“Right now, I’m computer savvy, Internet savvy, degreed, certified,” he says. “And I can’t find anything.”

Bryson was homeless and lived in his car for a while before finding the McKees Rocks Employment and Training Center, where he now works about 20 hours a week, making minimum wage and, ironically, helping other people improve their resumes and find work.

He still qualifies for about $200 a month in unemployment benefits, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet. He has no health insurance and fears what will happen when his car, which has more than 200,000 miles on it, breaks down for good.

“I want to work. I want a job. I’m tired of this,” Bryson says. “I have a car that’s breaking down on me everyday. I can’t live like this.”

Layoff after layoff

Without the unemployment extension, Joan Niedhardt would have lost the roof over her head to foreclosure. She is living through her third bout of unemployment since 2004, when budget cuts cost her a $65,000-a-year job as an information technology project manager in state government.

“I am my only means of support,” says Niedhardt, of Bel Air, Md., who has been unemployed for the past six months. She desperately needs her current unemployment benefits, which would have run out next week.

She has worked as a grant writer, a public relations executive, a project manager, a web designer. After losing her job in state government, she went back to school for another degree in business management and computer science and a certification in web graphic design.

The other stretches of unemployment lasted nine months and two years, respectively.

Because she is overqualified for many jobs and nearing retirement age, Niedhardt suspects that employers worry she will leave for “something better that hasn’t come along in over six years.”

“I’d be perfect as a government contractor or employee, but most of the open positions require a current security clearance,” she says, “which you can’t get without an employee sponsor.”

A tree with no presents

Zyola Nix is grateful that her 3-year-old daughter is too young to remember this Christmas in years to come. The 40-year-old single mother, who was laid off in March from a job in electrical mechanical design, put up a Christmas tree in their one-bedroom apartment. But there aren’t any presents beneath it.

“I don’t have an actual gift I can give her,” says Nix, of Denver. “For my daughter, it’s going to be like any other day.”

Nix worries about finding work in the aerospace and defense sectors, which have suffered from cuts to federal programs. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and astrophysics, “which is cool-sounding on paper but doesn’t do much in the workplace.”

She’s grateful for the benefits extension — she gets about $1,600 a month, half of what she used to make. But she’d rather be working.

Reluctantly, but out of necessity, she’s gone to sign up for food stamps twice. Each time, Nix had to pass protesters who told her to get a job and stop mooching off the government.

“I don’t think some people ever could understand. I don’t think they have the capacity to understand,” she says. “They have an image of what an unemployed person is like, and there is no way to change that image until that person experiences true unemployment. And most of them never will.”

Associated Press Writers Meghan Barr in Cleveland, Shaya Tayefe Mohajer in Los Angeles, Corey Williams in Detroit, Jennifer C. Yates in Pittsburgh, Thomas J. Sheeran in Cleveland and Alex Dominguez in Baltimore contributed to this report.

Walking through the malls of Dubai, you could easily find yourself getting into the holiday spirit. Christmas trees, beautifully wrapped gifts, (artificial) snow, images of Santa Claus and Christmas carols surround you. At the Mall of the Emirates, you can watch as young people, bundled up in their warmest coats, ride the ski lift to the top of an indoor mountain and from there ski or snowboard to the bottom, much like the skiers in Vermont or New Hampshire.
At home, we have a Christmas tree that my wife Elaine has decorated with small ornamental camels, giving it a true Middle Eastern look. In a few days, we will stock up on groceries needed for a somewhat nontraditional Christmas dinner with a few friends and colleagues.
At this time of year we tend to look back at the past 12 months and take stock of our experiences and relationships. This year has been very special in several respects. We continue to make new friends here in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. My job as Provost of Zayed University puts me in a position to meet many of the leaders in government and business.  A steady stream of international dignitaries and delegations find their way to the U.A.E. and the university, where I introduce them to our students and faculty.  Some of these visits result in meaningful international partnerships that enrich the experience of our Emirati students.
During the past year, we have had several Toledo friends and colleagues visit us in the United Arab Emirates and we have thoroughly enjoyed showing them the sights of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Taking them to the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and the Dubai Fountains at its base is always a thrill. Our children and grandchildren have also made the trip to the U.A.E. It is truly a place worth visiting.
I find my work at Zayed University challenging and rewarding. We are building a new “billion dollar” campus in Abu Dhabi that may well be one of the most beautiful university campuses in the world. We are on schedule to move to this iconic new campus in July and August. This has been a unique learning experience for me.
More than 90 percent of our students are young women. They are bright, motivated and ambitious. It is wonderful to think how these students will soon leave college as graduates and make their mark in a world that is now opening up to them and where they can use their knowledge and talents to improve their communities and their country. Every single one is an advocate for peace.
Being here in the Middle East brings a wholly new perspective on world events. I often find myself somewhat disappointed with the Western press because of its slanted coverage of this region of the world.  I regret that the United States is not more visible here in the U.A.E. and I sometimes think we, as Americans, are not projecting a positive image here through the media, movies, and our foreign policy.
One of our biggest challenges as Americans, I believe, is to gain a better understanding of the Arab and Muslim world. As an educator, I would give this a very high priority.  We need to find ways to broaden our relationships and friendships in this strategically important region of the world. A hand extended in friendship here is almost always warmly reciprocated.
I’ve never liked long Christmas letters so I will end with Christmas greetings to our friends and colleagues in Toledo and Northwest Ohio. Elaine and I are happy and healthy and we wish you the same for the holiday season and the New Year.

Dan Johnson is provost and COO of Zayed University, United Arab Emirates and president emeritus of UT.

Mayor Mike Bell told Councilman D. Michael Collins a request for information related to the proposed merger of fire services with the Village of Ottawa Hills, is seen as “attempting to interfere with decisions of Chief Michael Wolever” and “It is totally inappropriate, not to mention a violation of Charter Section 30.”
Both communications were obtained by Toledo Free Press on Dec. 20.
Collins made a request for public information to the Bell administration on Dec. 19 asking for:

• The annual reports for the past three (3) years that are used to define the risk and justifications for equipment and staffing in each of the 17 fire stations.
• The inventory of what equipment and apparatus found in Heavy Squad #7 that are exclusive to that unit.
• The number of working fires in the past (3) years that Heavy Squad #7 did not report to the scene, which each year reported out as an individual yearly report for service.
• The study and or evaluation records which support moving Heavy Squad #7 from Franklin and Bancroft (Station 7) and an explanation as to how the study was conducted.
• The number of runs Heavy Squad #7 made to Districts 2 and 5 in the past (3) years as reported on a yearly basis.

He also stated as a part of his request,  that he acknowledged it was a last minute request and was not being made to challenge the administration on staffing issues.  Collins said the information was necessary so that members of council would have the information to evaluate the outcomes of the legislation.
In the city’s response, dated Dec. 20, the Mayor additionally said, “As the Chair of the Public Safety, Law and Criminal Justice Committee you have had ample time to examine the proposed agreement with the Village of Ottawa Hills and to ask questions.  For the reasons stated above, we will not be responding to your request for information.”
The Mayor also reminded Collins that he is a member of City Council and not the Chief of the Department of Fire and Rescue Operations.
At the Dec. 16 Public Safety, Law and Criminal Justice Committee, Chief Wolever, in response to questions by Collins on how the decision was made to as which piece of equipment would go to Ottawa Hills, said, “We do that by doing a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment, and we do that on a regular  basis, throughout the city, presently.  That tells us the types of runs that we respond to, the numbers.  It allows us to better determine if the equipment we have in an a particular area is appropriate.”  Wolever said that the assessment was part of the accreditation process for Toledo’s Fire Department.

Later during the committee hearing, Wolever in response to a question on the risk assessments by Councilman Tom Waniewski said, “We do a major one every year, but when we move a piece of equipment, such as Truck 5 when we moved it into 25′s, we  look at it quarterly to ensure that if we made a big mistake we can jump on it earlier rather than later.”

Section 30 of the charter for the city of Toledo states, “Except insofar as is necessary in the performance of the duties of his or her office, no member of the Council shall  interfere, directly or indirectly, with the conduct of the administration or directly or indirectly take any part in the appointment, promotion, or dismissal of any officer or employee in the service of the City other than the officers or employees of the Council and except insofar as Council confirmation is necessary to fill a position as required by this Charter.  Except for the purpose of inquiry, the members of Council shall deal solely through the Mayor regarding the administration.”
Toledo Free Press contacted the office of Mayor Mike Bell on Dec. 20  for clarification on the public record availability of the assessment documentation that Wolever referenced on Dec. 16.  No response was received prior to publication.

On Dec. 21, Jennifer Sorgenfrei, public information officer for Toledo said via e-mail, “The information that Councilman Collins requested is contained in the ‘Vulnerability and Public Risk Assessment’ manual. This information is not public record as it contributes directly to the Toledo Fire and Rescue Department’s planning and preparedness for Homeland Security and Terrorism Response efforts and releasing the information contained within creates potential and opportunity for public harm.”

Cardiothoracic Surgeons for Northwest Ohio and The Toledo Hospital are now ranked among the nation’s top 12 percent of providers for heart surgery. The ProMedica surgical practice and hospital received the highest designation, according to the comprehensive three-star rating system developed by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS).

Cardiothoracic Surgeons was compared to more than 1,000 surgical groups for quality and clinical excellence, according to the STS, a non-profit organization representing more than 6,000 surgeons, researchers and health care professionals worldwide.
“What we are doing is recognized as being among the top 12 percent in the country,” said Dr. Donald Crescenzo, a member of Cardiothoracic Surgeons for Northwest Ohio.
“It vindicates what we’re doing for our patients with the entire critical care staff. We deliver the complete spectrum of cardiac care in a safe and affordable environment,” he said.
“We are able to achieve a higher quality of care due to our ability to develop a collaborative approach at ProMedica which fosters it as an institution,” said Dr. Chris Riordan, another member of the cardiothoracic surgical team.
Patients are usually identified by their cardiologists as candidates for open heart surgery.
The cardiothoracic surgical team evaluates patients based on surgery needs and survival rates.
Members of the surgical team collaborate with the cardiologists to determine the best way to treat their cardiac patients. The team has a good working relationship with the cardiologists at ProMedica, Riordan said.
The four-member cardiothoracic surgical team performed 720 open heart and 350 lung surgeries at Toledo Hospital in 2009, averaging from three to five surgeries a day.
Half of those surgeries are scheduled or elected surgeries, while the other half are patients coming in with critical or urgent needs that are rated class one or true emergencies, Crescenzo said. He was seeing three cardiac patients on the morning of his interview for this article.
The cardiothoracic surgical team meets once a month to review its ratings from the data that is available anytime through the National Adult Cardiac Surgery Database at Duke University.
As the largest such registry in the world, it covers about 90 percent of more than 1,000 surgical groups in the U.S. that perform cardiac surgery, according to the STS.
“We look at our data regularly to see how we’re doing with our patients and how we compare on national and international levels,” Crescenzo said.
“When patients enter our doors, they can feel confident that they will receive the very best care from one of the nation’s leading medical groups,” said Dr. Michael Moront, senior partner in the surgical practice.
All four members of the team are board-certified cardiothoracic surgeons with 12 or more years of experience who trained in nationally recognized programs.
Consumers can compare surgical groups with national benchmarks for surgery survival, complications and other measures compiled by an independent source at the website www.consumerhealthreports.org.