As Laketa Cole prepares to leave Cincinnati City Council for a state government job, sources say she’s settled on Wendell Young as her replacement.
Multiple sources at City Hall and within the Democratic Party are talking about Young’s apparent selection and expressing surprise because he has ran unsuccessfully in three City Council elections and finished in 14th place in 2009’s balloting for the nine council seats, behind fellow Democrats Greg Harris (10th) and Bernadette Watson (11th).
It's finally over and done with.
After years of criticism by his opponents and at least one similar attempt two years ago, the Cincinnati Democratic Committee voted this morning to un-endorse City Councilman Jeff Berding. CityBeat first mentioned the current effort in early July.
As widely predicted during the past week, Greg Harris was formally selected today to take the seat on Cincinnati City Council that was vacated when John Cranley resigned.
Some rank-and-file Democrats — including a few Democratic candidates for Cincinnati City Council — are angry with first-time contender Laure Quinlivan’s campaigning tactics, and are letting the party’s chairman know.
Quinlivan’s detractors dislike her public criticism of other Democratic incumbents on council, as well as her recommendation for voters to use “bullet voting” so their choices have more impact.
A community group known for its controversial and antagonistic tactics is asking other neighborhood organizations to take a vote on whether they support Cincinnati's proposed streetcar project.
In a recent e-mail sent to leaders of the city's network of neighborhood councils, John Sess, president of the Westwood Civic Association, wants to gauge sentiment about the project. Sess states he will be "keeping tracks of the results," presumably to lobby city officials to reconsider the project.
As part of CityBeat's continuing election coverage, we’ve once again sent a questionnaire to the non-incumbent Cincinnati City Council candidates to get their reactions on a broad range of issues.
Nine of the 14 non-incumbents chose to answer our questions. Others either didn’t respond or couldn’t meet the deadline.
During the next few weeks, we will print the responses from the non-incumbents to a different topic each time.
Today’s question is, “Do you support or oppose the city's streetcar system as currently planned and financed?”
With the city of Cincinnati facing a $50.4 million deficit next year, the city's top administrator is recommending City Council end a property tax rollback that's been in effect since 1999. Even eliminating the rollback, however, won't prevent some cuts in city services.
The deficit estimate is considerably larger than the $30 million amount predicted by the city's budget director three weeks ago.
Despite all the fiery rhetoric and political grandstanding at a special City Council meeting Thursday evening at the Duke Energy Center, residents might not notice much of a difference if the city manager decides to lay off 138 people in the Cincinnati Police Department.
Even with proposed layoffs, the Police Department’s staffing level still would be within the range that Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. said was sufficient just a few years ago.