Cleveland Hopkins International Airport will get a new terminal and other improvements over the next decade.

Metro Health not only denies fired CEO Erica Steed's discrimination claim, it accused her of defamation.

And local Catholic leaders reacted to the first pope from the United States.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to IDEAS.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you for joining us.

The city of Cleveland will build a new $1.1 billion terminal at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

Enhance the parking options, rebuild the Regional Transit Authority red line station.

And in the short term, while that decade long project is happening.

Address dirty bathrooms and long security lines.

We got a glimpse of what a renovated Browns stadium would look like this week.

The team preferring to show off renderings of the Brook Park Dome complex they want, didn't release the lakefront, rendering it was leaked.

MetroHealth responded in a counterclaim lawsuit to allegations of discrimination made by a former fired CEO.

The health system says she was fired for cause and she has since defamed Metro Health.

And Cardinals chose a native Chicagoan to be the next pope, the first from the United States to lead the global Catholic Church.

Joining me to discuss these stories and more from Ideastream, Public Media reporter Gabriel Kramer, and from the Statehouse news bureau in Columbus, bureau chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

Hopkins will be getting a major glow up over the next decade.

The city unveiled plans for a $1.1 billion terminal that's set to open in 2032.

Other enhancements include more parking, a regional transit authority red line, Rapid Transit station.

Mayor Bibbs said in announcing the makeover that in order to be a world class city, Cleveland needed a world class airport.

He also acknowledged something that continues to be double the airport's reputation, not the terminal.

The urinals bathrooms are traveler's big complaint that they're filthy.

He said.

We've heard that.

We're going to address that in the short term as well as long lines at TSA.

But the renovation game will be rolled out in stages, starting with the new parking areas.

But what the big news was, is this terminal is not going to be where the old terminal is.

They're actually going to put it basically across the street.

Right.

So it's going to be what's called the currently the smart parking garage.

You know, I live close enough to the airport that I've never had to park there either.

So I'm not really super familiar with the parking situation there.

But it's the closest garage, the closest garage, which is kind of not exactly connected to the rest of the airport at the moment, but that will be turned into a new terminal and it will pop hope.

And then the other renovations will provide 1600 more spaces.

I guess the demand is there for that many people to park, although we're not going to be some of them.

Right.

We're going to be getting they're going to get capacity from 4000 to 6000 vehicles.

The terminal will replace the smart parking garage and then the orange lot is going to be where the new garage is.

There's all kinds of stuff going on there.

And when I look at these drawings, they talk about how architects do it evokes the water and all these other things.

And and it does look like it's bright and new.

And I got to tell you, every time I fly into another city, I get the impression that our airport isn't quite up to snuff with some of the others.

Yeah.

I mean, you think of it this way for a lot of people coming to visit Cleveland, the airport is their first welcome to the city.

The first thing they see before they visit the rest of the region.

So you want to be on a good foot when you travel to other places and whether it's even just for a layover or you're there for a sort of vacation or a trip in some airports, you know exactly where you are when you land in Nashville, Tennessee, which I have layovers there way too frequently.

You can tell you're in Nashville.

You really feel that aspect of Nashville while you're there.

So, you know, if the Hopkins is able to recreate that, I think it will bring a much more welcoming atmosphere to people who come to the city, which is, you know, something the city's been trying to do is get more people here to change perceptions that people may have got a thought from David, who's sending out an email.

And by the way, you can do the same as David did by sending email to SAIC at Ideastream dot org.

That's FOIA at Ideastream dot org.

That's the way for you to communicate with us during the roundtable.

And he says amid the recent reconstruction improvements at Hopkins Airport.

Question 1.1 They have never seemed to be able to solve the problem of dropping off and picking up passengers.

And in fact, that's one of the things that's addressed in this project, Gabe, which is a better inflow and outflow to the terminal right?

So I think of when you when you get to the airport now and you get dropped off there, they're off The people working, whether they're security or police officers are pretty strict about how long you can stay there and how long you can stick around there.

You go to some airports and they have an entire section just for drop off and they have a two hour section just for ride share, drop off just for right.

Your pick up.

And it's it's seemingly a much more efficient process.

So this will help alleviate a lot of those issues.

And it was when you get past the doors, you know, the hope from the mayor is that he's saying that, you know, some of the TSA lines will be shorter.

He's saying that he's getting a lot of complaints from passengers when he's in the TSA line of people saying, you know, the bathroom lines are too long, the bathrooms aren't as nice as they should be.

You know, for me personally, you know, when you go to an airport and they have behind the water fountain, they have this thing, you can put your water bottle and flip your bottle.

Right.

I don't know how many Hopkins has, but I can tell you it's not enough, Right?

Because I love those things.

And I'm always disappointed when I'm around Hopkins and can't fill my water bottle.

Another thought from David.

He said, I've never flown anywhere else that doesn't have any seating at baggage claim.

I've had to sit on the floor wheelchairs or on the rent a carts while waiting for baggage, or sometimes you kind of sit on the baggage claim and the belt comes by and then you got to jump up to give you a little something.

But they are saying that as part of this new concourse, there will be a new baggage claim.

One would assume perhaps there'd be some seating there.

Yes.

And when you think about how busy that airport gets, they had according to the airport the last year, the airport's all 10 million passengers coming through, which is the highest traffic they've had since 2008.

So 17 years later, this is the busiest airports ever been.

So definitely in need of some renovations if they plan on getting more and more passengers in and out of the door.

Now, in the meanwhile, we still have some unused capacity at the airport Concourse D, which was originally billed for the Continental Airlines Express and Connection flight.

Those that is essentially empty.

Is there any thought about that being part of this whole project?

I think you have to think that they are going to, you know, utilize as much space as they possibly can to, you know, provide more provide more terminals, provide more seating spaces, just more places for people to, you know, use whatever aspect of an airport they could possibly need.

We've seen a lot of renderings of a proposed Brown Stadium complex in Brook Park, but the Haslem Sports Group hasn't shared what a renovation of the existing lakefront facility would look like.

Cleveland Scene published an image this week, later confirmed as authentic.

Though a few years old by the Browns, Proponents of keeping the team downtown have said that the team should provide all the details and let the public look at the drawings of both and kind of help decide what a better deal is.

Because after all, half of the new stadium or the renovated one will be paid for with public money.

The rendering show is a glass enclosure on the south side of the stadium.

It's kind of cool looking.

It does look pretty cool.

I think it does.

What people are saying online is a kind of reminds them of the rocket arena and how, you know, it kind of is this big boxy glass structure.

But what you see behind this big boxy structure is an outdoor stadium that curre They have even created like storefronts and other businesses around in the rendering to make it to make people imagine what kind of business could come around the the place kind of like you see in the in the Gateway district downtown.

So yeah, it does look pretty cool.

I think it's still an outdoor stadium, which I think you have some people who are still excited about that concept because, you know, some people that's real football playing in the elements.

That's what football's for.

I saw this last week.

It should be in the elements.

There shouldn't even be seats.

Yeah, everyone should be standing there.

I will not show up.

I'll tell you that much.

I will not attend.

But yeah, so I think, you know, there's there's people who do get excited about that, but there's other people who, you know, do want that thing covered.

So it's different.

We have a note from Jeff who says, We've been hearing about a new stadium for weeks and the city is just now coming out with a rendering of a downtown renovation, as usual, coming in at the 11th hour to try to save $1,000,000,000 deal.

They're always being reactive instead of proactive.

And Jeff, I do want to note, this is not the city that's releasing something.

It's not the city that possesses them.

It's the owners of the team who are releasing their Dome stadium renovation plans in Brook Park.

Repeatedly, they had not.

And in fact, I know having talked to city officials and county officials, they said, let them show you those images because we've seen them.

They've been shown to us in meetings.

We don't have them.

But those are something we think the public would get excited about, too.

So here's a circumstance where Cleveland scene Vince Gregory got a hold of the image, put it out in front of the public that went viral and now the Browns have released it subsequently.

Right.

And, you know, like you said earlier, the people want to have a say.

People want to see all the options that are ahead of them, voice their opinions.

The Browns aren't running a democracy here, so they don't have to listen to fans.

In fact, the team has a history in 1995 of maybe making decisions that the fans don't care for and ownership, different ownership, and referencing the team leaving in 99 or announcing 95 that in 96.

So, you know, this is you know, this is a very top down decision.

That's that's that's the business of football.

You know, the the Haslam's came out and said we are committed to what's happening in Brook Park.

We are committed to working toward that.

They didn't want this rendering to be available.

But, you know, people got a chance to see it.

And it's you know, there's two of thought, Pete.

There are some people who really like the rendering.

Some people are roasting a little bit for not having a roof.

But it sounds like it's just an idea that people can attach themselves to.

But just an idea what you're hearing from Mayor Justin Bieber, from the county executive Chris Ronayne, who want the stadium to remain downtown.

There's a lot of infrastructure has already been completed.

The whole idea of a land bridge that goes over what the sure way is, which would then become a boulevard, was something that was the the Browns were a partner in.

And the whole idea of doing all this was a lakefront renovation the Browns would be part of.

And this was kind of a glimpse at that section of it.

Then the Browns decided we'd rather go to Brook Park, and what we heard from the county executive in the reporting is basically they want to go where they can control the commerce, the parking, all of that stuff, whereas necessarily you don't have all of the control of all of that downtown.

Right.

When you're downtown, there are people parking in the muni lot in the pit, and these aren't places that are owned by the Browns.

The Browns aren't able to bring in that revenue.

You know, they want to be able to be in the park and have this giant facility where they, like you said, they can control these things.

They can charge for the parking and bring in the revenue from the parking.

But, you know, looking back, I mean, in the last ten years since I started working here, every every year there's some new rendering or some new idea about updating that stadium downtown and providing some aspect with it and whomever is in charge of the city at the time, it's with the thought process of redeveloping that area.

People are constantly complaining that, you know, around the stadium there's nothing else to do and there's a lot of truth to that.

But every rendering that we've seen since then, or any idea we've had about updating that stadium downtown has been with the idea of of improving commerce around the stadium.

Right.

Do you think it's bad now?

You should have been here 30 years ago.

Yeah.

the Metro health system has finally responded to a lawsuit filed by former CEO Erica Steed, who claims she was the subject of discrimination in the hospital system, said she was dismissed because of performance, not her race, and filed a counterclaim, accusing her of defaming Metro Health.

We've had this is the second CEO, by the way, dismissed by Metro Health.

There's a lawsuit by Akron Boutrous that still pending as well.

Now we have this lawsuit from Erica Steed.

And finally, a response.

The response wasn't one of those tepid legalese response.

It was point by point and then went further and said, you defamed us, you shared trade secrets.

They went on the offense as soon as they got off defense.

Oh, absolutely.

And they even said that a year ago, literally a year ago, they discussed performance with her and said that she failed to address the issues highlighted by the board, failed to respond to the board, and did not provide the updates.

The board as required.

So there was an expectation a year ago that they and so then her and they say that she did not meet them and here we are.

Now, she noted that she thinks she was treated differently than other CEOs because she was subjected to a wide ranging, what they call a 360 review during her first years as CEO.

And they were not.

I had one of those things, and they are I mean, they're real, you know, you get real feedback.

And her complaint was that she was the target of discrimination and harassment by members of the board immediately when she got on the job, the hospital system said that's just not true.

Right.

They said, well, so she's saying that she had been under more scrutiny than any other CEO that they had had.

And past years.

You know, I think it may be hard to determine that if you haven't been in the hospital system to really see it.

As she got hired in 2022 after working at Mount Sinai in Chicago.

So I think that may be working against her in that regard.

But, you know, I think there's there's back to back CEOs having complaints against MetroHealth.

So sometimes, you know, where there's smoke, you start to wonder.

And both of those things, as we said, are still in the system.

Both of those suits are pending.

We'll obviously our health team, led by Marlene Harris Taylor, Justin Glanville, we have Taylor Wizner and Stephen Lengel.

They will be covering the any kind of developments on either one of those.

A bipartisan bill in Columbus looks to help Ohioans pay off their medical debt by lowering maximum interest rates to 3% per year and prohibiting hospitals, medical providers and third party collectors from reporting medical debt to credit agencies.

And I think some people, Karen, I don't know in their mind, thought this would be the kind of measure that, say, the city of Cleveland would do, which has forgiven debt for some of its residents and a more progressive type of move.

We have a conservative Republican legislature who also agrees that medical debt is a problem.

Yeah, and I think this is a relatable problem for a lot of people.

The Kaiser Family Foundation says even though about 90% of the U.S. has health insurance, there is still a significant problem with medical debt, even among that population.

And this proposal would not forgive any medical debt.

It doesn't buy out medical debt, which, like you said, Cleveland has done.

Toledo's also done some similar initiative to try to help relieve the crush of medical debt for some of its residents.

This would just try to make it a little bit easier for people who are struggling to pay back that debt by saying that you can't lose your home, you can't lose your income, and you can't your credit rating score if you are trying to pay back this debt.

And the goal is just to try to help people who are working on this.

And some of these debts are enormous, as many people will attest, trying to help them manage those debts without losing so much of their own savings, their own financial situation as they go ahead and do that.

Hmm.

So so what we have is an interest rate of 3% per year, which still sounds like you're you know, your debt is going up.

But yeah, as opposed to something, it could be much higher.

The idea of your credit score being protected to it is an interesting one because often you find people that are in some dire straits due to a necessary medical procedure for which they couldn't pay.

And then that goes on their on their on their record.

So this is something that's trying to to protect folks from that.

Yeah.

And the argument of that was made and this is a bill, again, from Representative Michelle Graham, who's a Democrat from Toledo, and Representative Jean Schmidt, who's a very conservative Republican from the Cincinnati Southwest Ohio area.

The argument of that was that people take credit rating hits because of choices that they made.

They overextended themselves because they bought a car they couldn't afford or something like that.

Medical debt is not a choice.

You don't have the option to say, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that when it's life saving treatment or something that you had no say in whether you were going to get this operation, You were going to have this injury, something was going to happen to you.

And so that's been the idea, protecting people's credit ratings, because obviously your credit rating is then used to determine how much you pay in interest on your credit cards, in your mortgage and in other areas of your life.

And so the thought was, let's make medical debt something that is not seen as optional, that somebody made the choice to do this.

But it's a requirement.

It's something that you that happened to you and you shouldn't be punished for that.

Ohio voters and not many of them passed issue two this week comfortably.

It's a constitutional amendment that renewed the State Capital Improvements program, which will fund infrastructure projects like roads and bridges.

Voter turnout, though, is estimated at a dismal 11%.

Karen, it's an off year, but still 11%.

Well, we always like to say it's an odd year now that an off year because there are elections.

There are elections every year.

So it's not necessarily right to say it's an off year because there is an election.

There was a primary this year.

In many cities, there are primaries for city councils and those sorts of local offices and of course, school levies and library levies, those were on the ballot.

But yeah, issue two was added to that.

And the I think the unofficial results show the turnout was 10.89%, which is really, really low.

I think that's less than a million people in Ohio voted statewide, which is like you said, it's it's pretty abysmal.

It's pretty dismal.

There were some communities that I think had a little bit better turnout because there were school issues.

How did those fare across Northeast Ohio game?

Well, we had some good news for the levees in Portage County.

We had Mogadore and Ravenna city school districts passed levees after having several years of failed levees.

But it looked good across the board, across much of Ohio.

You saw a lot of levees pass.

Not so great in Parma.

Promises schools new tax levy failed and that district hasn't had one approved since 2011.

And they've had so many so much difficulty getting one past there.

And and statewide, we had 99 school levies on the ballot and they passed, depending on some of them passed and had a little trouble.

Some of them had a little bit more trouble depending on the kind of levee they are.

Two thirds of the school levies statewide did pass.

There was a tie, an actual tie, 620 votes on each side in the Madison local school districts and school levy in Butler County, which is in Southwest Ohio.

So that's an idea that, you know, every vote does count.

So think about that.

More than 86% of renewal levies passed and more than 54% of new operating levies passed.

But it's those capital requests, the bond requests, those are the ones that just got hammered.

And so it really shows that the kind of levy does make a difference.

And people are looking at the kind of levy before they decide whether they're going to vote for it, apparently.

So a tie 622 620 and you think and you think your vote doesn't count.

Exactly right.

Exactly.

Absolutely does.

Yeah.

There wasn't much on the statewide ballot, as I mentioned, But there are other issues that are taking shape now, including attempted repeal of the higher education reform law known as Senate Bill one.

These kinds of proposals have Republican leaders still looking at reforms to make that process harder, including raising the approved threshold to 60% for constitutional amendments.

That was something voters already said no to in 2023.

Yeah, and it's never gone away.

I mean, I think even after that rejection by voters in August of 2023, which you might remember, that was a special election that lawmakers had gotten rid of August special elections, but brought it back because they wanted to vote on this.

And that was pretty soundly rejected.

But Republicans have still said they've made this claim that it's too easy to get onto the ballot in Ohio.

It's too easy to put your issue before voters, which groups and individuals who have done that and put their issues before voters will strongly dispute that, saying it costs a tremendous amount of money and time to actually get the number of signatures.

You've got to go through the whole process of gathering the initial petition signatures, going through the attorney general, the ballot board.

Then you've got to go gather signatures.

If you're doing a state law, it's like 250,000 signatures.

If you're doing a constitutional amendment, it's like 443,000 signatures.

And you have to gather more than that to make sure the ones you gathered are valid.

All of these things are part of that.

And there's still this idea, though, that it's too easy to access the ballot and that they want to make some changes to that.

The world's Catholics have a new pope, the first from the United States.

Cardinal Robert Prevost took the name Pope Leo the 14th.

But it's a surprise for many to have a pope in from America.

I don't think anyone really thought that that was going to happen yesterday, Gabe.

And we were all watching in the afternoon.

You got some reaction from Catholic leaders in northeast Ohio.

What did you hear?

So Edwin Molesky, the bishop here in Cleveland had said that, you know, having someone that you can relate to, someone who is from Ohio or from the Midwest, from Chicago, it's almost like you can because you can relate to them.

It's almost like you understand them culturally.

And, you know, Catholic people in the United States can feel a stronger connection and a stronger sense of pride in this person.

And I think that that culture connection might mean something.

I think if you're in the United States, the Vatican seems far away.

It seems like very foreign.

Oftentimes it's a person who doesn't speak English or.

English is not their first language.

And now you have somebody who English is their first language, though the communication might be even easier.

But I mean, think of it this way.

I mean, you have someone whose culture comes from Chicago, deep dish pizza, where you grew up in Chicago, Philadelphia cheesesteaks, where they went to college or Villanova University.

So, you know, it's it's easy to relate to that.

Absolutely.

Although in his opening remarks and prayers, he spoke Italian and Spanish and not English.

Yeah, which was interesting.

Obviously showing this this history that he has the Italian language where you studied in college.

Right.

And also the Spanish language where he was the the the cardinal in Peru.

I know it felt a little like the NFL draft.

I saw this thing on the Internet where they called it like the pope draft.

Right.

And people like, wait a minute, he knows that languages it's got to be this guy on the other end, like it's got to be an Italian.

And I know a lot of people are rooting for Luis Antonio tog He is the Filipino cardinal that some wanted.

And I know that you had you had your money on that.

When you talk about cultural connections you get excited about those people the same way that you know me and my cousins will cheer Manny Pacquiao to fight or hope that one of the NBA players who are Filipino, they find a way to win a Title V, the same way for the pope.

We treat it like a like a football game.

No one would have bet on that, though, would they, Karen?

Oh, no, we don't bet on everything here.

The Cleveland Metroparks is using dogs to sniff out the invasive spotted lanternfly before eggs hatched this month.

It's interesting to me they're just using these trained dogs.

They can sniff where it is and then boom, these things get eliminated.

Why is it so important for the Metroparks to find these spotted lanternfly before they're hatched and get rid of them?

Well, they're an invasive species, so with any invasive species, you'll know how they're going to affect you, the environment that we're in.

But these in particular, they leave this this substance behind and it attracts mosquitos and wasps.

So it becomes kind of dangerous.

Also, you know these things, if you haven't seen them, I use to have them in my backyard.

They're they're they start off real small in black, almost spider like.

And then they grow into like six times the size, these giant bugs that are bright red with these spotted wings.

And the thing about these bugs is they don't fly.

They jump, they jump abruptly and they will.

They're not afraid of you either.

They'll jump right at you.

So they're I don't think they have emotions.

Well, I wonder.

Well, they give me emotions and I agree.

So.

But let me ask about that.

So how do you then how do these dogs I guess they can do anything.

You sniff drugs, you can sniff.

You can tell when somebody's going to have a seizure.

How is it that they're able to to find these lantern flies?

And so it's apparently a nine month training process for these dogs and they get used to smelling birch and it's clove and cypress.

And apparently that allows them to sniff out these bugs, the egg masses.

And then and then people scrape them and smash them and kill the bugs as as juveniles.

That sounds they just smash them.

Let's give them credit.

What is what's the lineup?

Who are our furry friends that are doing this work?

So we have let's see, we have Argent, who is a German shepherd.

We have a black lab named Juno.

We have an Australian Shepherd cattle dog mix, Rio and Bronco and an eight year old cardigan Welsh corgi.

Yeah, that's Bronco.

Oh, that's Bronco.

Yeah.

So what a combination.

What a crew, you know.

Yeah.

Maybe they should settle for the cats.

It's like the A-Team.

Yeah.

Monday on the sound of ideas on 80 97w KSU.

Are your seasonal allergies starting sooner and lasting longer?

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I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching.

And stay safe.