Focusing on gains in the fight against the opioid addiction crisis, a new initiative to foster collaboration between Hamilton County’s 49 municipalities and efforts to increase diversity on county boards, county commission President Denise Driehaus today delivered her first State of the County Address.
Driehaus’ speech comes as Democrats hold a rare three-member sweep of the powerful body that sets the county’s budget, and as the party has gained more and more swagger in once-red Hamilton County. But the address also comes as big challenges face the commission and the county as a whole: most notably, the county’s budget shortfalls. Last year, the county came up $29 million short, necessitating cuts to county departments.
One way Driehaus wants the county to become more efficient? A new initiative to explore ways to increase collaboration between various municipalities to avoid duplicating services. That effort will kick off with a Shared Services Summit this coming fall.
Driehaus acknowledged that addressing the county’s fiscal situation would be a challenge, though she also pointed to reductions in funding from the state’s local government fund. The county lost $342 million since 2010 due to those cuts and other state policy changes.
“The county was able to balance the 2019 budget with cuts to services and one-time revenues,” she said. “Over the next two years, the board will need to develop a strategy for bringing the county budget into structural balance. This will be no easy task.”
Driehaus also touched on a number of human services the county provides, noting that Ohio is dead last among states in providing funding for children’s services. But a countywide child services levy passed last year will help the county hire more caseworkers, fund a special unit that helps locate safe homes for at-risk children and offer a stipend for relatives who become caregivers for children.
A new program is also coming that could reduce incarceration in the county’s overcrowded jails by allowing law enforcement officers to connect people to addiction treatment or mental health resources as an alternative to jail time, Driehaus said.
That initiative and others, including alternative sentencing efforts and a behavioral health and addiction treatment facility, will help reduce costs over time and end the cycle of recidivism for inmates, Driehaus says.
“Rehabilitation — not incarceration — needs to be our north star,” she said.
Driehaus spent a significant portion of her speech discussing the ongoing opioid addiction crisis that has ravaged the county, killing 441 people via overdoses in 2017. That number dropped last year — 347 people died from overdoses in Hamilton County in 2018 — but Driehaus stressed that the crisis isn’t over.
The reduction is due in large part to efforts from the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition, Driehaus said, which distributed 50,000 doses of Narcan last year and oversaw an array of emergency response and addiction prevention efforts.
Another big part of Driehaus’s speech focused on economic development, highlighting the county’s effort to remediate with state grants a former industrial site in Camp Washington. Half of that site became Rhinegeist’s new distribution center.
Driehaus also joined calls by Mayor John Cranley and other City of Cincinnati officials for the renovation of downtown’s Millennium Hotel.
“I think we can all agree we simply cannot tolerate the lack of a functioning convention center hotel,” she said. “Quite simply, the Millennium is a mess.”
Driehaus rounded out her speech by highlighting efforts to increase diversity in the county’s board appointments and encouraging more young women to pursue leadership positions in public service. According to Driehaus, 77 percent of recent appointments to county boards have been women or people of color.
Driehaus took office in January 2017 after defeating then-commissioner Dennis Deters, a Republican, tipping the balance of the three-member body toward Democratic control. She joined fellow Democrat Todd Portune on the commission and this year Democrat Stephanie Summerow Dumas gained a seat after defeating Republican commissioner Chris Monzel.
This article appears in Apr 3-10, 2019.