Happy Friday, Cincy. Here’s your news today.
Amtrak officials, Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber representatives, folks from rail transit advocates All Aboard Ohio and plain old transit nerds are getting together today downtown to talk about the Cardinal Line, which runs from Washington, D.C. to Chicago and stops at Cincinnati’s Union Terminal. Currently, the line runs only a few days a week, but efforts are underway to speed it up and get it running every day again like it did until 1981. That could provide Cincinnati residents with an easy, reliable trip to Chicago and other cool destinations for work, vacations, day trips and so forth. The Cardinal conference goes all day today and includes talks from Amtrak folks about coming changes to the line, success stories about other, similar routes and perspective from Chamber officials about the importance of boosting rail travel in Greater Cincinnati. You can follow along with the conference here.
• More rail news: The Cincinnati Bell Connector has ferried its 100,000 rider already, according to a news release from the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, which operates the streetcar. By yesterday, the transit system, which runs on a 3.6 mile loop around Over-the-Rhine and downtown, had seen 102,932 rider since its opening two weeks ago. Not bad. The streetcar saw about half of those riders on its opening weekend, when 50,000 people hopped on board the space train for free rides around the city. Since that time, the Connector has met or beaten its ridership projections.
• Hamilton County hospitals have averaged nearly 15 overdoses a day since July, when animal tranquilizer carfentanil was first detected in heroin used by addicts in the region. That’s more than 1,000 overdoses in that time frame. The number, just released by authorities yesterday, underscores the continuing crisis posed by heroin laced with additives like carfentanil and fentanyl, which law enforcement officials say are streaming into the region.
• A Miami University professor has won a MacArthur genius grant for his work preserving the language and culture of the Myaamia tribe with the school’s Myaamia Center. Associate professor Daryl Baldwin will receive $635,000 over the next 10 years for his work. Baldwin, a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, came to the Myaamia Center in 2001 to aid in its research around preserving native languages and cultural practices.
• Want to know how many people Ohio has purged from its voter registration rolls? Good luck with that. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted insists the removal of inactive voters who didn’t respond to an address verification mailing has been standard across all 88 Ohio counties. But he can’t tell you the number of people that has happened to. That’s because removing voters from the rolls falls to county-level officials, who keep varying degrees of records about their activities. That patchwork makes it hard to know an exact count of the number of people who have been stripped of their voter registration for inactivity. Voting rights advocates and state Democrats have decried the practice, challenging it in federal court.
• Finally, yesterday I told you about Kathy Miller, a Trump campaign chair in Mahoning County who had some choice things to say about black folks, President Barack Obama, and racism. A video of Miller’s comments went viral, causing her to resign from her post yesterday. The Trump campaign issued a statement calling Miller’s comments “inappropriate.” Her replacement, prominent Ohio Republican Tracy Winbush, who is black, promptly went about deleting past tweets she’s posted calling Trump “a godless man” among other things. Winbush, once a #NeverTrumper, seems to have bought the full-ride ticket on the Trump train now.
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2016.