Cincinnati City Council's Budget and Finance Committee today approved several tweaks to Mayor John Cranley's proposed Fiscal Year 2020 budget, adding more money for some human services organizations and neighborhood groups, creating a new funding category for legal aid organizations, restoring funding for the director of the city's Office of Environment and Sustainability and the city's bike program, among other additions.
Council members Tamaya Dennard, Greg Landsman, David Mann, Chris Seelbach, P.G. Sittenfeld and Wendell Young support the motion adding $1.5 million for those groups on the budget's operating side.
The money for the additions and funding restorations would come from roughly $881,000 left over from this year's budget, plus adjustments to holiday pay for incoming police recruits (totaling about $220,000) and other sources.
Full Cincinnati City Council could vote on the proposals Wednesday, largely closing out the city's budget process ahead of the end of the fiscal year June 30. The six council members supporting the changes form a veto-proof majority.
Groups and offices receiving funds under council's proposal:
• The Center for Closing the Health Gap: $744,000
• Office of Environment and Sustainability: $175,000
• Economic Inclusion Wage Monitoring: $140,000
• Office of Aging and Accessibility: $111,000
• Bethany House: $100,000
• Hillman Accelerator: $100,000
• Chemical Addiction Treatment (CAT) House: $41,250 above the $46,250 in Cranley's proposal
• Cincinnati Human Relations Commission: $20,000
• Urban Agriculture Program: $20,000
• City Clerk's Office funding restoration: $19,000
• Invest in Neighborhoods: $12,500 above the $37,500 in Cranley's proposal
• Neighborhood games: $10,000
Council also wants a new category for legal help added to the city's United Way-administered Human Services funding process. That category would include Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati and the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, both of which currently get funding from the city. Council would add the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center to that category and provide $50,000 in funding for the nonprofit.
Council would also add $663,500 in spending on the budget's capital side funded by extra money from closed out projects and tax increment financing district proceeds.
That money would go to restore cuts in funding to:
• City of Cincinnati bike program: $251,000
• Neighborhood Business District Improvement Program: $112,500
• Neighborhood Transportation Strategies: $111,000
• Electric vehicles for city departments: $96,000
• Over-the-Rhine Museum: $75,000
• ArtWorks mural funding: $18,000
Among the biggest winners in council's proposal is the Center for Closing the Health Gap. As it was last year, the group's funding was cut under the city manager's and the mayor's budgets. Council also restored its funding last year.
The popular nonprofit, which saw a large number of supporters turn out to advocate for restoration to funding during the city's budget hearings recently, works to bridge health disparities experienced by Cincinnati's black residents. The Health Gap says it has touched more than 360,000 people through its Do Right! Campaigns and has hosted annual health expos providing more than 100,000 attendees with more than 30,000 free health screenings.
Cranley has said that the Health Gap should go through the same process overseen by the United Way of Greater Cincinnati that other nonprofits apply to in order to get city funding, though, under his tenure, the center's funding via the city went up multiple years in a row outside that process.
That is until the nonprofit found itself the focus of media scrutiny around its spending practices and was caught up in a political fight between founder and former Cincinnati mayor Dwight Tillery and his onetime ally Cranley. After Cranley and Tillery had a falling out in late 2016 over an appointment to the Cincinnati Health Department, Tillery backed Cranley's mayoral opponent Yvette Simpson.
The fight between the two got more contentious when the budget drawn up by the city manager's office the next year looked to cut funding for the Health Gap. That came after media reports that raised questions about the organization's spending on a program that provided fresh fruit to convenience stores and a few thousand dollars invoiced to the city by the Health Gap for events by a political organizing group called the Black Agenda. The Health Gap later returned that money after the city said it represented improper spending on political events. A city audit later found less-than-ideal billing practices at the Health Gap, but laid part of the blame for those lapses at the city's feet. Tillery left his leadership role at the Health Gap last year.
Council is also working to hammer out a solution to a roughly $1.4 million budget gap for the city's streetcar and could vote on possible solutions to that separate budget issue next week.