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Volatile mixtures in City Politics
Toledo is famous. Ain’t nobody yellin’ “Holy Topeka!” when something extraordinary hits their shock-o-meter.
Nah, they yell “Holy Toledo!”, acknowledging the unique shock value of ol’ Froggy Bottom.
We be famous, all right. Some might say infamous. We hit the national and international spotlight on the regular.
Maybe too regular. Take the smoke-a-pocalypse this past summer. We had the worst air quality of any city in the world. Celebrate good times, come on.
The choking haze from the Canadian wildfires wasn’t our fault, of course.
But that wasn’t the only disaster that rocked the national consciousness tied to our hometown. It’s been the year of Unholy Toledo.
More bad news
You can also call twenty twenty six The Year of Bad Publicity. The smoke was just a tip of the bad news iceberg. It was preceded by the Old West End Festival shootings. And followed by the South Toledo explosion.
As if that wasn’t enough, now we have the chemical leak in North Toledo with its forced evacuations and shelter in place orders. It made headlines splashed all over national media. Heck, we were even an answer on the NPR comedy quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
That’s a call back to a blast from the past, when Trivial Pursuit included Carty’s infamous musings on moving the hearing impaired to a neighborhood by the airport.
We’re getting headlines and shoutouts for all the wrong reasons. And this time it’s not being caused by the addled brain of our esteemed former mayor.
Instead it’s indicative of ticking time bombs in our beloved home base. Gang rivalries erupting in a shootout on city streets. Aging infrastructure storing volatile industrial chemicals resulting in explosions and toxic plumes.
On one hand, we need to have a serious discussion about addressing the underlying causes of these. On the other, it begs the question. What other ticking time bombs are out there, waiting to go off? What can we collectively nip in the bud while there’s still time?
You da bomb
Here’s our list. Can we defuse these bombs in time? Neighborhood-rattling sinkholes.
Think the ongoing stink hole in South Toledo. And the one that swallowed a car several years ago. T-Town’s sewers are aging rapidly. There are other massive collapses waiting to happen.
We just don’t know where or when. Crumbling public budgets. This bomb is about to explode. Cuts in funding from state and federal sources have decimated the budgets of the county, the city, and school districts across the region. This leaves two stark alternatives.
Increase the tax burden on local taxpayers. Or gut public services. A classic Hobson’s choice. Rolling blackouts. This is the risk posed by unfettered development of data centers, which use massive megawatts of electricity that far exceed the electric grid’s capacity.
Local economic collapse. Ballooning fuel prices and high tariffs threaten the auto industry. The AI-induced stock market bubble is artificially propping up the economy and could pop at any moment. The world energy market is teetering. Health care is unaffordable. Inflation is up, unemployment is up, wages are stagnant. It’s a recipe for local economic disaster.
Chaos in the streets. Another slow burn that could turn explosive without notice. Economic pressure drives street crime. We’re awash in hand guns. ICE hasn’t overtly targeted Frogtown yet, but that could add another ingredient to the explosive mix.
That’s the short list. And the industrial chemicals are still out there.
On these notes of warning, dear reader, we beg, we plead, nay, we demand.
Let your voices be heard. Let them be heard like our future depends on it. Because it does.
