That didn’t take long.

Less than 48 hours after it was revealed that the Ohio Ethics Commission issued an advisory opinion last year stating Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Bortz shouldn’t take part in decisions about a proposed streetcar project, a formal complaint has been filed with the commission.

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As anyone who viewed The Enquirer’s Web site Tuesday night or read the newspaper this morning knows, Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Bortz received an advisory opinion from Ohio ethics officials last year indicating he shouldn’t participate in any decisions about the proposed streetcar project.

Although CityBeat asked Bortz last week about any potential conflicts of interest involving the project, he didn’t disclose the June 2009 letter from the Ohio Ethics Commission.

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Cincinnati’s long-discussed streetcar system is a bit closer to reality today after City Council approved spending $2.58 million on the project.

The money will be used for planning and design work for the system. Its first phase would be a loop through downtown and Over-the-Rhine, with a later segment built to the uptown area near the University of Cincinnati and local hospitals.

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Mayor Mark Mallory last night announced during his State of the City address that the city has chosen the model and vendor for the first batch of streetcars.

The mayor's office today released details about the vendor, along with renderings of the streetcars Cincinnatians can expect to see traversing the 4-mile loop that will cover 18 stops connecting The Banks, Government Square, Fountain Square, Broadway Commons, the Gateway Quarter and Music Hall.

According to the release, the vendor, CAF USA, has produced light rail vehicles for Pittsburgh, Sacramento and Houston and streetcar vehicles for the international cities such as Besançon and Nantes, France; Belgrade, Serbia; Antalya, Turkey; Stockholm, Sweden; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Spanish cities Zaragoza, Granada, Sevilla, Bilbao and Vitoria.

Officials in February broke ground the Cincinnati Streetcar system, and the city hopes to add additional phases connecting the Uptown area near the University of Cincinnati once funding is secured.

The following are renderings released by the city:

As additional information becomes known, an allegedly impartial poll about Cincinnati's streetcar project touted by The Enquirer becomes more suspect. A person who took the poll says the questions seemed like “propaganda,” while the pollster violated the accepted standards of the polling industry.

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In this week’s Porkopolis column, I wondered how Cincinnati Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls felt about “being continually used as a human shield” by City Councilman Chris Bortz on an issue of a potential conflict of interest.

Apparently, the answer is, “Not too good.”

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A labor impasse between managers of Greater Cincinnati's Metro bus system and its transit workers appears to be near an end.

Members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 627 voted Tuesday to accept a new three-year labor contract with the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA). The final tally was 409-49.

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Greater Cincinnati made the list of the Top 10 cities in the United States with the easiest and most affordable commutes.

In a ranking complied by Kiplinger.com and released today, the Cincinnati-Middletown Metropolitan Statistical Area ranked no. 7. To make the list, an area had to have a population of at least 1 million people and a low congestion cost, which the site defines as a measurement of wasted time and fuel calculated by the Texas Transportation Institute.

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In an attempt to end the controversy about whether some Cincinnati City Council members might financially benefit from the proposed streetcar project, the city solicitor today sent a letter to the Ohio Ethics Commission asking for a specific opinion about the project.

City Solicitor John Curp sent a four-page letter to the Ethics Commission, along with five pages of diagrams about the streetcar project’s likely route.

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Duke Energy's approval and cooperation was considered to be essential in advancing the highly anticipated Cincinnati streetcar project, and Wednesday the company announced it isn't willing to cooperate.

In a letter to Mayor Mark Mallory dated Feb. 8, Ohio and Kentucky Duke Energy President Julie Janson stated that Duke changed its mind after a year and a half of negotiations and that it wouldn't cooperate with the city's requests that Duke move utility lines downtown to make way for the streetcar's tracks. According to Janson's letter, the lines must be moved a minimum of eight feet from the edge of the streetcar before any progress can be made in the plan's implementation. Duke estimates that the relocation and replacement of the infrastructure would cost somewhere around $18.7 million, but City Manager Milton Dohoney said that estimate hadn't been verified by anyone else.

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