Hello all. Hope you enjoyed your weekend. Here’s a quick news rundown to get the week started.
Cincinnati Public Schools will consider taking a payment of $10 million from FC Cincinnati to build a replacement for West End’s Stargel Stadium itself. That’s a change from the original plan, which had FCC building the stadium as part of a landswap deal for property behind Taft High School occupied by the current Stargel Stadium. FCC will use the land to build its soccer stadium, one of the requirements for landing its Major League Soccer franchise. The Cincinnati Planning Commission Friday approved a version of the landswap agreement that allowed for the change, and the CPS Board of Education is expected to approve it today.
• Speaking of FC Cincinnati, here’s an interesting story about how the team’s one-time spokesperson, Anne Sesler, is also a spokeswoman for Hamilton County. That’s because Sesler works for Government Strategies Group, which handles communications and lobbying tasks for both groups. Some say that’s a conflict of interest — Hamilton County Commissioners did vote to build a $15 million parking garage for the FCC’s stadium, after all — but Government Strategies says it’s just the nature of the business, and that they have no role setting policy. Sesler also serves on the Cincinnati Planning Commission. There are other potential conflicts, however. Government Strategies founder Chip Gerhardt lobbied Cincinnati City Council around a controversial expansion of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital last year. Sesler wasn’t involved in that lobbying, but did vote as a member of the planning commission to approve that expansion. The group has also lobbied for U.S. Bank Arena and the Cincinnati Museum Center, which have sought money from the county.
• Historic preservation activists are asking the prospective redeveloper of a downtown icon to change some of its plans. Anderson Birkla Investment Partners LLC wants to renovate the 600,000-square-foot Terrace Plaza Hotel downtown, which has been empty for years and is deteriorating. The 70-year-old building is one of Cincinnati’s most notable examples of Modernist architecture and was the first International Style hotel built in the U.S. after the Second World War. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places last year. Part of its uniqueness: seven stories of stacked bricks made from local clay that preservationists would like to see kept. But developers say that would be extremely difficult, and that there is no real use for that much space without windows in the building. The Cincinnati Preservation Association is asking Birkla to reconsider or to sell to another developer who will preserve some of the massive façade.
• Let’s jump over to another historic hotel for a minute, this one still very much in business and looking to crack open a decades-old safe. No one has been inside the Hamilton-made Mosler safe in the Hilton Netherland Plaza in at least three decades. The hotel announced last week that it had brought in a safe-cracking “auto-dialer” machine to decipher the combination and open it, but that machine turned out to be unable to do so. Now we’re back to human ingenuity. Safe cracker Chuck Wood, who says he’s been working with Mosler safes for almost seven decades, is now making an attempt. He says he thinks he can get into the safe in a few hours. That’s confidence. We’ll update if he’s able to do it.
• As we reported in our story here, a camp under a Fort Washington Way overpass downtown will move tomorrow morning, according to nonprofit leaders working there. The camp, home to about 40 people, has been the focus of controversy over the last two weeks after Acting City Manager Patrick Duhaney released a memo ordering the camp to be cleared, citing complaints from nearby residents and businesses. Duhaney called the camp a public health and safety risk, though some have contested that claim.
This article appears in Jul 18-25, 2018.