PAlexander

Bortz doesn't like Qualls. Like the vast majority of local politics, it is personal. If Bortz tries to run as a Republican (which he is) in the 2nd district, he is going to get crushed. You've got to have real anti-abortion credentials to win as a Republican out there. If he runs as a Democrat, his anti-Obama past isn't going to help him.

Phase IIA actually looks decent, way better than the present buildings (Lager House excluded). The thing that still baffles me is that they are building, again, a parking garage on top of a massive parking garage. Once the streetcar goes in the City needs to stop lending a dime to any projects that waste above ground space on parking. Lets hope they can convert that above ground parking space in Phase IIA asap.

"Grassroots support" is hilarious. Take a look at who is actually making those donations. I bet he has twice as many out-of-state donors than all the other Council candidates combined. If he's smart he pre-purchased TV time. Winburn always raises a ton from the people who own JTM, and usually the Lindner crowd as well.

Alright, we can save the ad hominem for those who really deserve it. Clearly Greg is not a die-hard, do whatever it takes, supporter of the streetcar (as illustrated by his email to John that he would not vote for the $17 million). If you want a member of council who wants to write a blank check for the streetcar, then don't vote for Greg. However, a candiate can be honest say that, if elected, he will do what he can to make sure the project is successful, while at the same time hesitant to vote for additional spending. Yes, as in the case of the recent vote, additional funds could be necessary to make the project a success. And certainly additional funds will be required for the extension to Uptown. We can't count on Greg to vote for either, and I am okay with that. I support candidates that think critically. I think many of us will agree that Chris Seelbach fits that profile. I appreciated the fact that he did not immediately commit to voting for the 17 million and sought more accountability. If Greg gets on council, perhaps he can be persuaded on such a vote, perhaps not. Either way, he will seek accountability and will make a reasoned and informed decision, based in no way on political opportunism. This is a man who has done solid work for the Strickland administration, and has shown true ability leading the Strive Partnership. Perhaps I am biased because Greg is a friend. But I trust him implicitly to lead our city on council. I get that there is a fear that the loss of a pro-streetcar majority could endanger the project, but I implore anyone reading this to cut through the rhetoric and just talk to people who know Greg. No personal offense is intended to anyone, but it is perfectly reasonable to regard this as a weasely answer. If your position is one where you claim to support the project but also say that you would have taken an action which would have killed the project, then a reasonable person can view this position as one which is designed to appeal to both the pro- and anti- streetcar constituencies. It's also reasonable to say you trust the guy because of other stuff he's done. If a politician wants to try to appeal to as many constituencies as possible to get elected, he's welcome to try. If he wants to appeal to a narrow constituency to get elected, he's welcome to try that as well. After all, that's how you get elected. Frankly I don't care if a politician is taking a position I agree with as a cynical way to get my vote, or if he's doing it because he sincerely believes in the position. The only thing I would care about is whether he would actually follow through on the position he takes. Landsman might be the St. Francis of Cincinnati politics; he might have phenomenal ideas for City issues that I don't know anything about. But I know plenty about the streetcar project; I pay a lot of attention to it and because of that I presume not to need Landsman's intellect for this issue. He's probably a lot smarter than I am, but he's made the wrong choice here: 1) because the streetcar project is the best purely City project in decades (that definition allows me to remove setting up 3CDC from the list) and anyone who would waste the much greater than $17 million already spent on the project by not allocating the $17 million necessary to finish it is making an enormous and an obvious mistake. I don't mind that he's tried the "cast the widest net" strategy. But it's lost him one vote.

I would never expect such behavior from a Libertarian!

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but the way Smitherman is plugging Cranley seems obvious that Cranley has pledged the vice-mayor's position to him.

Really? You really believe that? Well, OK, then. ::drops mic, walks off:: If you can find a purely local issue that was the primary cause of an local individual candidate's success since Portune's Commission win v. Bedinghaus around the issue of the Bengals lease I'd be happy to revise my opinion. It's a perfect example of how Cranley has misjudged the Streetcar issue from the beginning and simply won't admit he's wrong out of pride. Instead, he's doubled down, insisting that being anti-Streetcar is a political winner when in fact is has verifiably lost, TWICE. My quick internet search was unable to reveal any fundraising totals from 2005 but this seems to be playing out similarly now, with Qualls as Mallory and Cranley as Pepper. What would really be interesting is to see the fundraising totals for 2009; I bet Wenstrup outraised Mallory still even though everyone knew he had a snowball's chance.

Cranley will just isolate himself more and more from regular Democrats with this outlandish positions, like Pepper did when he started proposing harsher city marijuana punishments during his mayoral run. There is no popular constituency for the MLK exchange- it's driven purely by businesses, property owners and construction companies.

This "solution" to the financial crisis is hilarious- basically, "If we just made more people's retirement less secure we wouldn't be in this situation." That's obviously not the answer. The answer is to fix unemployment. My solution would solve the unfunded pension issue by not giving special, preferential treatment to city employees. Solving unemployment would also help but that's another discussion altogother. My only point is that pensions are a horrible investment for a city to be making. 401k is matching is much less risky for the city and lets people control their own destiny. It doesn't let you control your destiny when you're set to retire after a lifetime of doing everything right and the market crashes leaving your 401k worth far less than you had planned. Defined benefit pensions don't do that. And pensions aren't meant to be an investment for the company or municipality.

This "solution" to the financial crisis is hilarious- basically, "If we just made more people's retirement less secure we wouldn't be in this situation." That's obviously not the answer. The answer is to fix unemployment.

Maybe I didn't make this clear, but my point was that local issues don't effect local races at all, ever. The only issues that effect local races are up-ballot issues that have a down-ballot effect on the local races. If it's just a local election, like this year, "issues" aren't going to matter, at least because you can't boil them down and remove them from candidate personality/likeability or voter demographic profile tendencies. For example, the typical anti-streetcar voter isn't voting simply on that issue, they also are the typical Republican or anti-liberal voter. In fact, the only identifiable issue voter in this election is the pro-streetcar voter. Once again, local politicians would love it if getting behind an issue meant they could guarantee votes. But that's not the case. In reality, it's all about how much advertising you can throw up on TV. Why do you think PG did so well his first attempt? It certainly wasn't because he could be identified with any particular issue. The reason why the TV advertising rules all won't matter in this race is because the candidates are so well known. Pepper vastly outspent Mallory in 2005 and Pepper is a far more likeable candidate than Cranley in any race. The liberal/conservative demographic is what decides this.

^Exactly. Compared with other bond instruments these guys rate, municipal debt is extremely safe, yet quite often rated far lower. If you don't think that's due to the ratings agencies and private debt issuers getting cozy in order to market toilet paper to pension funds etc. that are required to buy AAA rated stuff, then you're kidding only yourself.

^^It seems like you're basing you're expected outcome on what you fear will happen. That's really a strange notion. Most local elections aren't decided around local issues. Local politicians would LOVE IT if they were. But the fact is voters generally aren't paying a ton of attention (understandably so), and so those sorts of contests end up being contested around personality and higher ballot (read state & federal) issues. Once again, local fundraising doesn't move the way you're implying. The guys giving Cranley money aren't going to give any to Qualls regardless, and she's probably not even going after it. Finally, Cranley is trying to paint Qualls as the incumbent and himself as the outsider. It's a questionable position for him to take; he's obviously just as much of an insider as she is, and if you presume that voters pay attention to these sorts of things then you might want to ask yourself why you presume that the majority of voters fall for misrepresentations that you don't. I'm not trying to be a dick; it really sounds to me like your opinion is based on the idea that you've got some insight that the majority of voters simply can't get. I think that is a dangerous presupposition to have in any field of analysis.

^Well, my analysis is based on the idea that the basic political division you see in the nation ends up playing itself out on the local level, even if the candidates end up being members of the same party. Point 1 is simply wrong: Pepper polled 13,321 votes in the primary whereas Mallory polled 13,106; the next closest candidate was Winburn, who polled 8,976 votes. Point 2 and your proceeding sentence implied that black voters naturally vote for black candidates- this presumption is highly questionable (good example is 2010 Alabama gubernatorial primary where the black candidate, who took a more conservative position in the primary to position himself for the general, got crushed by the more liberal white candidate); even so, it's an absolute fact that black voters vote for white candidates more frequently than white voters vote for black candidates, simply because there are far more white candidates running for offices. Those Winburn votes were just as likely to go to Pepper as to Mallory. Point 3 implies that local election fundraising is based on momentum, once again, a highly questionable position for which you've offered no facts to support. It seems to me that local political fundraising is based far more on the candidate's personal set of contacts than anything else. In addition, city council campaigns talk about momentum in terms of fundraising, as there is no primary or any other objective metric to use as a basis of comparison before the election. And fundraising prowess translating into votes is mitigated by party affiliation and candidate profile (e.g., Wayne Lippert raised a lot of money but got crushed because he was of the wrong party and was relatively young), which is precisely my point about there being two relatively stable groups of voters in the City. Finally, Point 4 is a conclusory statement for which you again offer no proof. Once again, my thesis is that there are two rather stable groups of voters in the City, which follow the general nation-wide trend of liberal/conservative (even if those terms don't truly apply for local races, they work as a stand in that basically gets the point across), and that trend will play out in this election as well. Here is the data: 2009: Mallory (liberal) 38,645 v. Wenstrup (conserv.) 32,424 2005: Mallory (liberal) 36,200 v. Pepper (conserv.) 33,664 2001: Luken (conser) 47,755 v. Fuller (38,494) Basically 2005 is the tipping point for general liberal dominance in Cincinnati elections. But that doesn't mean you don't have to work every election!

So one of the main culprits in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, whose monopoly (tri-opoly?) is legally sanctioned, is once again undervaluing municipal debt?

^^Once again, I suspect that the percentages will play out similarly to the Pepper-Mallory race, but Qualls wins in November with three points more than Mallory in 2005.

While I don't really understand why David Mann is running for council, unless he's really angry about all the selling of parking assets that's been going on (his office was in the Kroger building, so between the present parking plan and the sale of the Kroger garage at an enormous discount he's probably had an upfront view of it), I doubt he's going to be anti-streetcar. His stated platform is entirely conventional. I wonder what his thoughts really are on the City's finances. Increasing funding for neighborhood business districts is always popular, but that's not going to improve City finances. They definitely seem to be perpetually out of whack, most likely because of the depressed economy. The thing I'd like to know is how the City plans to build out the streetcar after the initial phase. The only way the City can really improve its balance sheet is on its on initiative is to take depressed areas (such as OTR) and inject enough capital into them so that you have people making decent salaries living there. This is obviously the plan but unless some sort of increased property tax is dedicated to further streetcar build-out; or unless SORTA or the streetcar SORTA subcommittee or whatever creates a real estate portfolio along the routes, or some combination of the two happens, public transit projects are forever going to be at the mercy of the feds, the state, and the local h8trs.

^That's a good point about the potential lack of revenue. I'm mostly concerned with 1) the silliness of it. If the sale or lease goes through, then that means the value is there. But because the City already runs the meters, they have the capacity to collect all that new revenue just as well as any leaseholder. So the advantage of the lease is just as substantial up-front payment, which isn't an actual advantage to the City, but instead only an advantage to the current iteration of City politicians. 2) The City should be creating a plan to eliminate parking spaces once the streetcar goes in, at least in the streetcar zone, a la Munich.

This is because Donovan had an "R" next to his name and way, way too many people show up at the polls to vote for president and vote a straight ticket on everything else without doing any amount of research. The guy who was naturally next in line, the clearly better candidate, and (on the topic of this thread) lives downtown near the streetcar route, is out because of a letter next to his name on the ballot. ^Then why didn't such a trend hold up for Treasurer, Prosecutor, or Clerk of Courts?

I'm sort of surprised that so many people on this board think a priori that adding more representatives would mean more poor decisions. While the independent mayor probably did lead to sticking with the streetcar project, the reason it faced the hurdles and dwindling council support that it did was the result of 1) the ability to directly make charter amendments, and 2) politicians like Smitherman using it as an issue to increase visibility. Have you considered that perhaps the difference between the council term and mayoral term was just as essential to the success of the Streetcar? I don't know if it was, but if you're argument is that the Streetcar is an example of Council + Mayor at its best, then logically one wouldn't want to disrupt the system that produces the optimal result. Second, the situation we had before the strong mayor, where the mayor was the top vote-getter, was an unmitigated disaster. And it only existed for about ten years, and was done in order to prevent less scrupulous council members from blocking out others. Prior to the Luken-Blackwell alliance, being Mayor had little relevance and was shared every two years or so. Food for thought.

I didn't mean for you to draw this conclusion from what I wrote. I was talking about words in the context of democracy, in getting citizens involved in shaping and making (albeit small-bore) decisions for their neighborhoods. I don't really get why moving from 2 year terms to 4 year terms is supposed to change the amount of money spent on elections. Yes, they'll be fewer elections held, but the constituency is still the same. So you still have to run the same race, which would imply the same amount of money. Except now, prospective candidates will only get a shot half as often, potentially increasing the amount of money spent, because there are fewer chances to break in. If you don't like people spending money to run for office, wards, and more of them, are the only way to fix it. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tv when your constituency is no longer the City but rather a neighborhood (or something like)? I disagree with this analysis. The project had it's greatest amount of support at the beginning. When the streetcar project was in its initial phases at the beginning of Mallory's term, only Monzel was openly against it, and only Cranley was actively hostile. The slow erosion of support and loss of Ghiz and Berding was much more because of personality conflicts on council. Live by 4 years, die by 4 years. If the previous council had had 4 year terms, there was an actual majority to kill the project, and a couple of recent votes (Duke, Car Barn) with which to do it. Bottom line for me is that I don't think the change will enhance either 1) the success of council or 2) citizen participation.

I oppose Issue 4. I like Laure as a city councilor much more than Sittenfeld, but I find her reasons to be disingenuous. The idea that working and campaigning are opposed strikes me as being ridiculous. Laure's best work on city council has been her campaigning for the Streetcar. The dichotomy Laure presents between "work" & "campaigning" isn't going to change with 4 year terms because the City Administration does the "work" and council then votes to approve it or disapprove it and sells it to the voters through their campaigns. That's not going to change, because it's the administration that has the expertise. The question we should be asking about any political structure has two parts: (1) Does the structure produce the best results and (2) Does it strengthen or hinder democracy (e.g. citizen equality)? Because Issue 4 doesn't change anything except the length of council terms it doesn't even touch on the first question (which is, does a nine member executive board of a city of 300,000 produce more positive results for the City when compared with other systems?) and it strikes me as negatively impacting democracy. If you think the present system, where Charlie Winburn keeps coming back and an obviously unqualified kid like Sittenfeld are able to get elected, having 4 year terms isn't going to get any new or less well connected blood in there. Finally, a word about Erie Avenue in Hyde Park and all those storms we had over the summer. The City has been fixing up streets and squares left and right, and each time they leave them in great shape and utterly over-engineered. I've feel that blinking red stop lights are far more efficient than the myriad rules and oddly timed signals you get in Mt. Lookout or Oakley Square (not to mention the infuriating downtown mid-block red lights you on Sunday mornings). When Erie Avenue between the Square & Madison was given a pointless turn lane, the people there bitched so much and so effectively that the City switched it back. I think that we need more citizen input and responsibility, and I don't see Issue 4 moving that forward at all. That's why I think a lot smaller wards could actually improve the City if they are structured to give citizens opportunities to get involved, even if just by being better able to contact their representative.

The power of eminent domain is long established. Like, hundreds and hundreds of years long. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by enough states to go into effect in 1791. That altered eminent domain (at least with regard to the federal government) so that the government had to justly compensate the property owner. That means that prior to the 5th amendment, the government could just take it for public use without compensation. Well into the late 19th century and early 20th century the 5th amendment became enforceable against the states through the the 14th amendment. Even later still, the 5th amendment was held to apply to regulatory takings, essentially, regulations that prevented the full and fair use of property (to a certain extent). So, just to put things in perspective, the position that private property rights trump public use rights is quite a recent development. The rights of corporate communities to regulate land use has been around for over five hundred years, and even then, the first corporate charters were merely recognizing ancient privileges that had existed well before the charters had been issued.

But you are being subsidized by the City because you purchased a tax abated home. The City didn't vet you as a purchaser, they had no way of knowing that you would reliably make all your payments or be able to hold the job that your loan to purchase your house was predicated on. I don't see any functional difference between the subsidy these folks will receive than the one you are presently getting, except that because these people have a specific skill set the City wants they have decided to take what looks like a greater risk, and 6 out of 9 elected officials looked at and signed off on Mahoganny. Regardless, you are both being subsidized by the City.

This is a good point. There's no reason that being angry at the small expenditure to help Mahoganny is made less valid because the state/feds are willing to spend billions of dollars to replace the Brent Spence bridge for no particular reason (jmecklenborg has laid out this argument pretty thoroughly, so I'm not going to rehash it). Those expenses are entirely independent of one another. So your point is absolutely valid. However, it also misses the point most people are trying to make. it is completely understandable that someone questions Ram23's anger over this expenditure when he hasn't displayed nearly the same anger over far greater expenditures made by the City and the government. If he doesn't come up with a clear and logical explanation for the discrepancy people will decide not to take this complaint seriously. The argument isn't about whether he's right, it's about what exactly are the foundations for his argument. Why so angry about this and not the other ones? That's a completely legit question to ask. Presently he's failed to articulate any understandable position.