Photo By Matt Borgerding

One of the problems with plans to sell certain buildings owned by Cincinnati Public Schools is the effect on the already limited green space in the inner city, according to Ty Provosty (right).

The only thing they seemed to know for sure was that money gets attention. An alarmed group of about 25 Over-the-Rhine and Pendleton residents, entrepreneurs and property owners raised their hands Sept. 7 in a pledge to scrape up the $23,000 it could cost them to sue Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS).

Chris Rose, who owns property, raises two kids and plans to open a business in Over-the-Rhine, offered to help put together a fund-raiser.

"The lawsuit's the only way these people are going to understand," he said.

The first thing the Greater Over-the-Rhine and Pendleton Schools Coalition wants the school board to know is that they've had it with decisions made behind closed doors.

They've been riled ever since CPS chucked painstaking plans the community drew up for the neighborhood and its schools in favor of recommendations from Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), a two-year-old private, nonprofit development corporation headed up by many of the city's business elite.

'Go look it up'
Washington Park Elementary School had been slated to move to a Central Parkway location, but 3CDC decided the site would better suit a new School for Creative and Performing Arts (see "Taking Over the Park," issue of July 14-20, 2004). Instead, 3CDC chose a site for Washington Park called Mercer Commons, a cluster of 22 historic, mostly vacant buildings sandwiched between Vine, Walnut, 13th and 14th streets.

Then the school board recently moved to begin immediately considering the sale of 16 school buildings that don't fit into CPS' 10-year, district-wide plan. Two of those buildings, the current Washington Park and SCPA , either include or abut green spaces that might lose out to commercial redevelopment (see Porkopolis, issue of Aug. 24-30).

"People who don't live in the city don't get that green space is fundamentally important in an urban environment," said Ty Provosty, the Pendleton Neighborhood Council president and architect who ran the Sept. 7 meeting.

The board's rush to consider the sales was prompted by a rider attached to the new state budget allowing CPS to bypass a law requiring that surplus buildings first be offered to charter schools. The waiver, which expires Dec. 31, allows the schools to be sold to commercial interests.

But the waiver includes three ridiculously specific criteria because it was meant to apply to just one school near Columbus, according to coalition lawyer Tim Mara. CPS' interpretation of the rider is too broad, he says.

Coalition members think CPS is moving so quickly to sell to commercial developers because it wants to thwart potential competition from charter schools, something school board member John Gilligan previously told CityBeat.

But CPS spokeswoman Janet Walsh says it's the best way to get the most money for the cash-strapped school district.

"We'd be very disappointed if legal action materialized, because we really feel that it's in the best interest of our district and our taxpayers to at least explore this window of opportunity that we have to potentially sell property that is no longer needed for schools," Walsh says.

The board hasn't officially declared those 16 schools surplus properties and is still only investigating their possible sales, she says.

The board's loose interpretation of the waiver's specific language is one of two components of the proposed lawsuit. But even more frustrating is the board' reluctance to turn over relevant documents, which violates the Ohio Public Records Act, Mara says.

Walsh also rejects charges of deliberate obfuscation.

"We are a public institution and we do our business in public, and anyone is very welcome to come to our board meetings," she says.

But Mara says the board refused his requests for documents showing how those 16 schools comply with the waiver's specific requirements.

"The response we got from the school board is, 'Go look it up at the county courthouse,' '' he says.

He estimates a title search would cost at least $1,000 per school, while the cost of obtaining copies of documents from CPS would be much less.

Coalition members also believe Mercer Commons is too dangerous for a new Washington Park School. Pendleton resident and architect Ken Jones gathered police statistics comparing crime around Mercer Commons to the area surrounding Rothenberg Preparatory Academy, where they'd prefer CPS focus its plans for an Over-the-Rhine elementary school.

Depending on the category of crime, in the first seven months of this year the Mercer Commons reporting area logged between two and six times the calls for service as the area around Rothenberg.

But Walsh says crime around Mercer Commons is drawn by vacant buildings that would no longer be vacant once the school moved in.

"Unfortunately the current Washington Park site also has issues," she says. "We certainly would not move forward on a proposal to create a school if we thought the environment would be unsafe for students or our staff."

'I'll chip in'
Many coalition members want CPS to renovate Rothenberg first, then reassess Over-the-Rhine's demographics, believing declining enrollment might make Washington Park School unnecessary. That could save the historic buildings on the Mercer Commons site from demolition, they say.

Not everyone at the meeting agreed. Pat Clifford, who runs the Drop Inn Center homeless shelter, thinks plans for a second elementary school in Over-the-Rhine shouldn't be tabled.

"The common myth is that, in the indeterminate future when everything is so gentrified -- which we've been of course waiting for for the last 20 years -- there will be no kids, it'll all be empty nesters, et cetera, et cetera, so we won't need as many schools," he said. "That's a nice theory, but in actuality we now have more kids than Rothenberg can handle. What if your theory of development doesn't happen?"

Either way, coalition members were doubly upset to have just recently learned of the board's June 27 decision to put Rothenberg's renovation on hold. The delay is for financial reasons but won't be as long as coalition members think because the board restructured the phases of its facilities plan, Walsh says.

Members of the coalition are also upset by the disparity between the prices CPS paid to acquire land for the new SCPA and Mercer Commons and the price it's asking for the old SCPA. Drawing from numbers reported in the Cincinnati Business Courier, Jones estimates that CPS paid $35-$36 per square foot for the Mercer Commons land and $41-$42 for the new SCPA's parcels.

But CPS might be offering the old SCPA property for a little as $9 per square foot, Provosty says.

"Let's start saving our $9," he said at the meeting. "I'll chip in mine, I tell you."

Walsh doesn't know where he got that number.

"My understanding is there's not an asking price out there," she says.

Provosty later explained that he found a minimum bid price of $3 million for SCPA on a leaked document generated by CPS and a real estate agent it hired.

"We didn't invent those numbers," Provosty says. "Those are the numbers from them."

The document lists the minimum bid prices for Washington Park and Vine Elementary schools as $1 million and $450,000, respectively.

The minimum bid price for Winton Place Academy, whose potential sale also has the Winton Place community up in arms, is $650,000. The Over-the-Rhine coalition hopes to hook up with the disgruntled residents in that neighborhood.

The tension of gentrification runs through the conflict. Some aren't impressed by the coalition's green space concerns. Sarah Poole of Pendleton wrote in an e-mail that she's infuriated by "most of them caring more about trees and places for their dogs to poop, than caring about what's best for CPS and the neighbor people and kids."

Provosty bristles at similar characterizations.

"I think really, fundamentally, they're trying to paint our coalition into 'save-our-green space, we-like-our-front-lawn,' " he says. "First and foremost it's about the safety of the kids, and second it's the lack of fiscal responsibility."

Mara suggested that the coalition give the school board until Monday to respond, while he prepares the lawsuit. ©