Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July > 25
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Editorial: ‘Baby Vanessa’ needs a parent
There isn’t a judge in his or her right mind who is going to give Benjamin Mills Jr. his biological daughter, a 2-year-old named Vanessa who has spent her entire short life with a California woman who’s trying to adopt her.
But the process of formally getting to a decision is making the courts and other authorities appear as if they’ve lost their minds.
Mr. Mills has four other children, none of whom is in his custody, two of whom are being raised by his mother. He served time in prison for domestic violence against his daughter’s birth mother.
Despite this track record, he has filed for custody of Vanessa, thereby throwing a legal wrench in Stacey Doss’ efforts to finalize a private adoption of Vanessa in California, which the birth mother initiated.
Meanwhile, Montgomery County Children Services has been drawn into the legal tug-of-war, and the agency has paid several thousand dollars to fly Mr. Mills to California for supervised visitation of the child.
Mr. Mills has chosen to exercise every right known to man and fathers to prevent his child from going to what, by all appearances, is a good home. And taxpayers are paying the bill. He has Legal Aid lawyers in Ohio and California.
Legal Aid of Western Ohio, which assists low-income individuals with civil legal matters, makes choices every day about what kinds of cases it will and will not take. Just because you ask for help doesn’t mean you get a free lawyer. Judgments are made about the importance of a case, the chance of prevailing and the magnitude of an alleged injustice.
While terminating parental rights is serious business, Mr. Mills and his lawyers have to know that he can only be obstructionist, that he doesn’t have a prayer of gaining custody. And he’s hardly the ideal candidate to make the case that parental rights are sacred.
Also worth considering is that Mr. Mills is pressing his case against adoption in California, not just Ohio.
He can be given his day in court, but he doesn’t have to be assisted in his effort to go to the mat in two places — there and in Montgomery County.
In truth, lawyers on both sides are doing what’s called “forum-shopping.”
Ms. Doss, who has known almost from the beginning that Mr. Mills was opposed to the adoption, wants to be heard in California because her attorneys believe that California’s law is more favorable to her than Ohio’s. They argue that the case should be resolved there because that’s where the adoption papers were filed, adding that Ms. Doss filed them before Mr. Mills went to court in Montgomery County.
Mr. Mills and his lawyer, on the other hand, are here in Ohio, and they want to make this a custody battle rather than an adoption battle. That distinction matters because even if he loses custody — with Ms. Doss possibly getting Vanessa — he’d still be in the picture.
The child couldn’t be put up for adoption without his consent. Or he’d have to have his parental rights terminated, which is a long, torturous process.
Mr. Mills has done all the right things to protect his rights, including adding his name to a registry that requires he be notified if a child he believes he fathered is put up for adoption.
(That registry was created to make it easier to adopt a child when, typically, the father has disappeared. It puts the burden on a biological father to say he has an interest in a child, rather than on the would-be adoptive parents or birth mother to get the man’s permission. The theory is that if a father is so uninterested that he didn’t know he got someone pregnant, or if he has so little contact with the birth mother that he doesn’t even know she’s pregnant, then he forfeits his right to object.)
It’s also not Mr. Mills’ fault that this case has dragged on for so long, with judges punting decisions back and forth between two states.
A custody hearing is set for Thursday, July 29, in Montgomery County Juvenile Court Judge Nick Kuntz’s court. That might not go forward, though, because Judge Kuntz could decide to wait to see if a California court of appeals orders a lower California court judge to proceed with the adoption hearing.
A lot of time, money and emotion are being wasted trying to decide a case that has unusual wrinkles. Let Mr. Mills be heard in California, let him object to the adoption there and let that judge pick.
There’s no splitting the baby.
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Ellen Belcher: Regulators can’t fix Grand Lake St. Marys
You can say a lot of things about Grand Lake St. Marys.
You could, for instance, argue that what has happened there is Ohio’s Hurricane Katrina. No, the bacteria explosion hasn’t killed anyone; the debacle is man-made; and the devastation isn’t nearly as sweeping. But there are the questions such as: do you rebuild, should you rebuild, can you rebuild.
Just as there were people who said New Orleans shouldn’t be brought back, at least not in its old form, there are people who think Ohio’s largest inland lake will cost too much to save or simply isn’t compatible with the concentration of nearby animal farms.
You also could liken the toxic algae jungle that caused authorities to tell everyone to stay away from the lake to the BP disaster. The ecological and economic damage isn’t as widespread, but ask the people who own marinas or restaurants or have property on the lake if they feel the Gulf fishermen’s pain. Certainly, the tension between agribusiness and property owners and recreational users at the lake is not unlike that between the oil industry and those who depend on the Gulf waters.
You could also say that Grand Lake St. Marys’ comatose state is that community’s Sherwin-Williams fire. In 1987, a Sherwin-Williams paint warehouse that had been built near Dayton’s wellfield caught on fire. It burned for a week because dousing it would have sent toxic chemicals flowing straight to the drinking water source for several hundred thousand people.
The wellfield could have become worthless. The cleanup after the fire cost between $10 million and $12 million.
Two years prior, the Los Angeles Times had run a front-page story trashing Dayton’s drinking water, saying it was alarmingly polluted. But it took the fire to really gig people into admitting that it was insane to have an industrial park so close to such a sensitive and precious resource.
A year after the fire, Dayton passed a wellfield-protection ordinance that limits the kinds of businesses that can locate near its wellfields, and suburban jurisdictions followed suit. (Water doesn’t recognize governmental boundaries.)
The wellfield-protection rules restrict development on and near the wellfields, and they established a system that limits the amount and kind of chemicals that can be used in the area. Incentives and a loan fund were created to help businesses switch to less hazardous processes and products. And a surcharge was put on ratepayers.
Because of the rules, certain kinds of businesses have been turned away from the restricted areas; some companies have been moved, using money from the surcharge. Lawyers have defended the rules against companies looking to skirt them.
Dayton’s regional compact — its carrots as well as its sticks — is an international model, one that people from around the world have come here to learn about. Today the drinking water quality is excellent.
If Grand Lake St. Marys is going to come back to life, it’s going to take this sort of regional, multi-jurisdictional effort.
Another point worth remembering is that it wasn’t the federal or state government that ultimately provided the protection for Dayton’s seemingly boundless aquifer. (Ninety million gallons of water can be pulled out of the aquifer every day, and that registers as barely a sip.)
The regulators were certainly hounding Dayton — which was the water retailer. But ultimately the rules, backed up with incentives, were decided and written by local people — environmentalists, chamber of commerce reps, farmers, business owners and government types.
Distant regulators can only do so much, even when they think something is going terribly wrong. They can throw around their weight, but, in the end, for a problem like Grand Lake St. Marys, it’s the local people who are going to have to come together to get creative and decide if they want to bring back — or bury — the lake.
In Dayton, walling off thousands of acres to certain kinds of development wasn’t easy. But the alternative was to live with the possibility that if a spark went off in the wrong place, an entire region’s drinking water would go up in smoke. A decision that, at the time, was controversial now looks only sensible.
Grand Lake St. Marys isn’t on fire, but it may as well be. It will take local people taking a stand to get everybody to understand what must be done.
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