Good morning all. I hope you’re enjoying this wonderful weather. Who doesn’t love some nice freezing rain as they trudge to the last day of work before the weekend? Anyway, news time is here.
Let’s get fiscal and talk about budgets for a minute. The city of Cincinnati is facing a big $25 million shortfall in its spending plan and has asked departments to envision cuts to their programs to make up for the cash drought. But even as those departments start brainstorming, their potential belt-tightening may not be enough. City officials, including City Manager Harry Black, say that city departments except for police and fire may need to make cuts of up to 10 percent in their budgets. The city’s emergency departments will be asked to make more modest 3 percent scale backs. The cuts could mean that recreation centers in Over-the-Rhine, Hartwell and Westwood would close, that the city may cease its yard waste collection program, that payments to board members on the city’s Citizens Complaint Authority would be eliminated and that neighborhood pools in Mount Adams, Camp Washington, Filson and Spring Grove Village would shut down, among other cuts. Those are just preliminary ideas that departments have offered up — cuts won’t be finalized until much later in the budget process, Black says. Even those and other cuts departments have lined out don’t get the city back to a balanced budget, however. Departments collectively have offered up just less than $20 million in savings, leaving a remaining $5 million hole. The deficit comes from a smaller-than-anticipated haul from city tax revenues, mostly the city’s earnings tax.
• Let’s stay on taxes, but move over to a different kind. New data from the Hamilton County Auditor’s office shows that the number of properties in the county getting big breaks on property taxes has ballooned in the last 12 years. About a quarter of all properties in Hamilton County get some kind of tax abatement, according to Auditor Dusty Rhodes, a figure that has increased greatly because of abatements handed out by municipalities. In 2005, those abatements were worth about $3.7 billion around the county. Today, they’re worth $6.5 billion. Rhodes has said that the increasing practice of abating new construction and rehabilitation projects, especially in places like Over-the-Rhine, contributes to an unfair tax system.
• An off-duty Cincinnati Police officer has been placed on desk duty after he was arrested for brandishing an AR15 assault rifle while under the influence, a Thursday memo from City Manager Harry Black shows. The incident happened March 13 at an apartment complex in Mount Airy, where officer David Jenkins was looking into reports of a fight. But Jenkins was off duty and had been drinking, according to police. After other, on-duty officers showed up to respond to the altercation, Jenkins was arrested. He’s been charged with using a weapon while intoxicated and disorderly conduct.
• Yesterday we told you about a Butler County lawmaker arrested after officers found him passed out in a McDonald’s drive-thru with a loaded gun. Now, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones says the other lawmakers who were with State Rep. Wes Rutherford the night he was arrested in Hamilton aren’t being helpful to attempts to investigate the incident. Rutherford went to the Butler County GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner, then to a bar with other lawmakers. In some cases, Jones says, those lawmakers deleted photos posted to social media of themselves with Rutherford.
“We have been trying to reach out to these people, that are elected, and question them,” Jones said yesterday on a radio program. “And, hey, nobody has seen nothing, nobody has heard nothing.”
Rutherford faces drunken driving and firearm charges in relation to the incident.
• The David Dooley murder trial in Northern Kentucky has taken a very strange turn. Dooley is charged with the beating death of Michelle Mockbee outside the Boone County business where she worked. Dooley, the janitor at that business, was convicted by a jury. But yesterday, his attorneys presented evidence that may mean a new trial for Dooley. Boone County Sheriff’s Detective Bruce McVay, who led Mockbee’s murder investigation, and the state prosecutor who tried the case, Linda Tally Smith, were engaged in a secret romantic relationship at the time of Dooley’s first trial. Dooley’s attorneys argue that the two withheld video evidence of another man at the business the night of Mockbee’s murder. McVay originally testified that he and Tally Smith were “just friends,” but was forced to admit the two were romantically involved under oath. That led to further questions revealing the two corresponded via email under pseudonyms — Carver Davidson and Chiquita Queen — about the case, and about evidence that was not officially presented to the prosecutor. McVay’s lawyers say he didn’t withhold any evidence and that Tally Smith’s testimony, slated for next week, will clear that up. We live in a very weird world, friends.
• We started this Friday news blog with budget stuff. Let’s finish it up that way. President Donald Trump earlier this week presented his first budget proposal — a plan filled with big cuts, including proposals to zero out 20 federal agencies like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts while boosting military spending and spending billions on a border wall. How would that budget affect Ohio specifically? Well, a $300 million-a-year initiative to clean up the Great Lakes would go away. That initiative works to eliminate invasive species like algae and protect the drinking water of areas that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, including big swaths of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states. Among other things, the initiative on the chopping block fights toxic algal blooms that have at times made water Ohio receives from the Great Lakes undrinkable. That’s not the only effect, of course. Some 100,000 home-bound Ohio seniors would cease receiving Meals on Wheels, a program eliminated under Trump’s budget. More on the budget’s implications for the Buckeye State here.
This article appears in Mar 15-22, 2017.