Cincinnati City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 wrangled over the city’s upcoming $1 billion budget, passing the operating portion of that financial plan but leaving a fight over capital spending for another day.
With two weeks left until the city’s current budget expires, that’s stoked fears about what will happen if a standoff continues. Basic services like police and fire wouldn’t be under immediate threat in the budget battle, but the city could face legal action, some service outages and even state oversight if it doesn’t pass a full budget on time.
A complex dance for power between council Democrats and Mayor John Cranley has left the capital part of the budget, which funds everything from road improvement to economic development to bike lanes, at an impasse. The majority coalition of council members say Cranley is trying to block their will, but Cranley says the group is trying to force a shutdown.
“A majority of City Council seems poised to vote down the City’s Capital Budget and threaten a government shutdown because members couldn’t get their pet projects funded,” Cranley said in a harshly worded statement June 15. “Because some councilmembers were upset that their pet projects weren’t included, the city will not be able to repave our roads or replace our aging police cruisers, fire trucks and ambulances.”
The five Democratic council members — Yvette Simpson, Chris Seelbach, P.G. Sittenfeld, Wendell Young and David Mann — have prioritized six expenditures in the budget that Cranley opposes. Those priorities were by and large left out of City Manager Harry Black’s initial budget, so Democrats drew up their own omnibus budget proposal, which Cranley looked likely to veto wholesale, since he can’t line-item veto budget items.
Cranley says the budget Democrats on council have presented is structurally unbalanced because it uses one-time sources of money to pay for some of council members’ spending priorities.
Cranley takes issue with six spending priorities Democrats on council have promoted, calling them wasteful. Those priorities include $400,000 for Clifton Market, a co-op looking to fill the vacant former Keller’s IGA in Clifton, $24,000 for high-tech bus shelters in Bond Hill and $150,000 for repairing and building new bike lanes. In addition, Cranley looks likely to veto an extra $500,000 for the city’s human services fund in the operating budget. That money is aimed at bringing human services funding up to a level council unanimously voted for last November. Council Democrats say their eventual goal is to bring human services funding up to 1.5 percent of the operating budget, a commitment council made years ago but hasn’t lived up to since 2004.
The extra expenditures would be paid for in part by pausing some of the city manager’s proposed extensive $100 million in road repairs. Together, the disputed expenses total less than $2 million, or roughly 0.2 percent of the total city budget.
“I cannot support these items and hope that City Council won’t either, but I am referring these items as stand-alone ordinances to the Budget Committee so that council will have the opportunity to have an up-or-down vote on all of the City Council requests,” Cranley said in a statement after the individual ordinances were released. “The people of Cincinnati created a Charter in which six votes are required to overcome a mayoral veto. We should not try to subvert the Charter we took an oath to uphold.”
Council Democrats met with Budget and Finance Chairman Charlie Winburn late last week to hammer out a compromise, and it looked as though things would be OK. In the meantime, however, Cranley moved to have council’s budget priorities broken down into 19 individual ordinances, giving him the ability to veto them on what amounts to a line-item basis.
“We worked with his budget chair. We sat down with Charlie Winburn and worked out a budget that his budget chair supported,” Young says. “And then we get, ‘You’re trying to bankrupt the city.’ If we’re working with Charlie and something Charlie says he supports, and suddenly Cranley’s having a hissy fit, we don’t even know what it’s all about. That’s where we are.”
Winburn said Cranley didn’t take up the compromise budget because he wasn’t “in the loop” about it.
Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld called presenting the operational budget as an omnibus document and council’s capital budget as a series of ordinances “weird” and “overtly political.” Sittenfeld said he felt like a majority of council’s wishes were being disregarded by the move.
“Treating different items so differently raises suspicion, I think, for any member of the public,” Sittenfeld said. “I don’t see why funding for the health department or human services or Clifton Market would be separate. Some things are protected behind the veil of an omnibus, and some things aren’t. I’d say put it all together, and if the city administration or the mayor doesn’t want to do that, it’s kind of on them whether or not they want to shut down the city government.”
The budget and finance committee must pass a capital budget so it can go before a full council vote, and the maneuvering has caused the current impasse as four Democrats in the committee’s June 15 meeting balked at voting for the administration’s capital budget. That raised alarms from council conservatives, including Charlie Winburn and Christopher Smitherman, who both cautioned against going down the road toward “a government shutdown.”
That language echoes statements Cranley made in a news conference that day when he accused council Democrats of attempting to shut down city government over their priorities and compared them to Republicans in Congress. Council members Yvette Simpson and Wendell Young shot back.
“I defy anybody to look at the budget we’ve proposed and see how that shuts the city down,” Young said. “That’s just not what we’re trying to do. I’m really offended that he’d even say that about us.”
“The concern that we as members of council have is that a budget was prepared by the city manager, and then the mayor had the opportunity to weigh in on it, and then it got to us,” Simpson said. “It’s our turn as policy makers to say, ‘Here’s where we would make adjustments.’ “
Council was scheduled to vote on the budget June 17, but it’s unclear whether it will pass at that meeting. The city has until June 30 to pass a budget. If it does not, Cincinnati’s city government could be subject to legal action from the city solicitor and even outside state oversight, as it is required by state law to have a full budget passed. The city’s current budget expires July 1. ©
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2015.