Geneva schools looking into athletic facility
GENEVA — The Geneva Area City School District is continuing to plan for an athletic facility.
The board voted to bring on GPD Group in February, to help design the complex.
At a Wednesday GACS board meeting, Board President Michele Krieg detailed a presentation she heard from the firm at a Tuesday stakeholder meeting.
'We are very much in the infancy stages of this plan,' Krieg said.
The district has an agreement to play games at SPIRE Academy, which will expire in 2027.
Krieg said if the contract with SPIRE is not renewed and there is no athletic complex, there will be no district football, track or soccer.
'We cannot kick this can down the road any longer,' she said.
Krieg said there is a mistaken belief the district can go back to Memorial Field.
'Most of us know that that's not possible,' she said.
The district will need to do community outreach, Krieg said.
'Our approach to this has to be multi-facetted, and we have to have a very succinct and clear message about what we're doing,' she said.
Krieg said District Treasurer Shelley McDermott was concerned about relying on levies for the facility's construction, after a decades-old levy failed last November.
McDermott suggested the district apply for grants and find donors, Krieg said. McDermott was not present at the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings.
Interim Superintendent David Riley presented to the board on the possibility of redistricting its three elementary schools — Austinburg, Cork and Geneva Platt R. Spencer.
The school board, district staff and residents have been talking about redistricting how many students or which grades go to the district's elementary schools to alleviate population issues.
The district sent out a survey and had focus group meetings where people could talk about and brainstorm redistricting.
Riley said many parents preferred keeping their children at the school they were attending now.
'It's one thing to talk about moving kids around, but they're children first and foremost,' he said.
Krieg said the board has a lot to think about after hearing the presentation.
'This is a huge working process,' she said. 'There is absolutely no way that can happen next school year.'
Board member Brock Pierson said a strategy should be developed for redistricting before the project moves forward.
Board member Marti Milliken Dixon talked about committees the board formed to go through all district policies and see if they are consistent or need changing.
She said the committee has been looking to see if district policies are being affected by recent federal Executive Orders.
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The Washington Post did not lose licenses for any of stations, said Feldstein, author of 'Poisoning the Press,' a book about Nixon's relationship with the media. 'Trump is doing what Nixon would have liked to have done,' Feldstein said. 'Even Nixon didn't take it as far.' The differences between Nixon and Trump in their approach to federal enforcement and investigative power extends to their core motivations. Nixon, as Dean and other close observers of his presidency agree, wanted to retaliate against individuals or institutions he thought opposed or looked down on him. Trump certainly shares that inclination. But Trump's agenda, many scholars of democratic erosion believe, pushes beyond personal animus to mimic the efforts in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Turkey and Hungary to weaken any independent institutions that might contest his centralization of power. 'Although some of it was (motivated by) revenge, the huge difference here is most of what Nixon did was to protect himself, politically and personally,' said Fred Wertheimer, who served as legislative director of the government reform group Common Cause during the Watergate scandal. 'Trump is out to break our democracy and take total control of the country in a way that no one ever has before.' One telling measure of that difference: Trump is openly making threats, or taking actions, that Nixon only discussed in private, and even there with constant concern about public disclosure. Trump's willingness to publicly deliver these threats changes their nature in several important ways, said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee and former federal prosecutor. Simply exposing an individual or institution to such an open threat from the world's most powerful person, Dorsen noted, can enormously disrupt their life, even if the courts ultimately prevent Trump from acting on it — a point recently underscored by Miles Taylor in an essay for Politico. And because Nixon's threats were always delivered in private, Dorsen added, aides dubious of them could ignore them more easily than Trump officials faced with his public demands for action. Maybe most important, Dorsen said, is that by making his threats so publicly, Trump is sending a shot across the bow of every other institution that might cross him. 'Trump is legitimizing conduct that Nixon did not purport to legitimize,' Dorsen said. 'He concealed it, he was probably embarrassed by it; he realized it was wrong.' As the IRS pushback against the enemies list demonstrated, Nixon's plans faced constant resistance within his own government, not only from career bureaucrats but often also from his own appointees. 'He failed in getting key officials in the government to do what he wanted,' said Wertheimer, who now directs the reform group Democracy 21. If that kind of internal stonewalling is slowing Trump's sweeping offensives against his targets, there's little evidence of it yet. Congress was another constraint on Nixon. Not only did the administration need to fear oversight hearings from the Democrats who controlled both the House and Senate, but at that point a substantial portion of congressional Republicans were unwilling to blink at abusive actions. Ultimately it was a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative icon and former GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who convinced Nixon to resign during Watergate. By contrast, Trump today is operating with 'a completely compliant Republican Congress' and has filled the federal government, including its key law enforcement positions, with loyalist appointees who 'operate as if they are there to carry out his wishes, period,' said Wertheimer. As Feldstein pointed out, Trump also can worry less about critical press coverage than Nixon, who governed at a time when 'there were just three networks and everybody watched those.' That leaves the courts as the principal short-term obstacle to Trump's plans. In Nixon's time, the federal courts consistently acted across party lines to uphold limits on the arbitrary exercise of federal power. Three of Nixon's own appointees joined the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision that sealed his fate by requiring him to provide Congress his White House tapes. John Sirica, the steely federal district judge who helped crack the scandal, was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, federal district and appellate courts are mostly demonstrating similar independence. The New York Times' running tally counts nearly 190 rulings from judges in both parties blocking Trump actions since he returned to office. 'I think we've seen the largest overreach in modern presidential history … and as a result, you've triggered a massive judicial pushback,' said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group fighting many of Trump's initiatives in courts. 'I won't say democracy has won so far, because of the damage that Trump and his ilk have done, but I will say Trump lost.' But even if courts block individual Trump tactics, the effort required to rebuff his actions still can impose a heavy cost on his targets. And, on the most important cases, these lower court legal rulings are still subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court — whose six- member Republican-appointed majority has historically supported an expansive view of presidential power and last year voted to immunize Trump against criminal prosecution for virtually any actions he takes in office. So far, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals by ruling to restrain Trump on some fronts while empowering him on others. 'We haven't found out yet what the Supreme Court is going to do when … they get the really big cases,' said Wertheimer. Those decisions in the next few years will likely determine whether Trump can fulfill the darkest impulses of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign for his actions in office.
