Hello all. Did you enjoy the improbably perfect weather this weekend? I’d like to be out enjoying it right now, but it’s Monday and we have news to talk about. So let’s do that.
Last year, Cincinnati City Council made the Queen City the first in the nation to ban controversial, religiously based conversion therapy for LGBT individuals following the suicide of Mason transgender teen Leelah Alcorn. But the law has never been put into practice, according to this story, possibly due to how difficult it is to lodge a complaint about those therapies. The city has a different read on the situation, however, saying that The Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who wrote the above story requested forms for reporting sexual discrimination, not conversion therapy, as outlined in this memo from city solicitor Paula Boggs Muething.
• A historic landmark that greets drivers heading through Cincinnati on I-75 can’t be saved, the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority said in a letter to Cincinnati City Council last week. The iconic Hudepohl smokestack in Queensgate would cost almost $1 million to salvage — a price Port Authority CEO Laura Brunner says isn’t economically feasible. The Port owns the site and hopes to redevelop it. Initially, it estimated saving the smokestack would cost about $100,000. But it would cost nearly that much just to demolish a 45-foot section of the structure that can’t be made safe, plus another $240,000 to partially rebuild the stack and $614,000 to do tuck-pointing and other restorative measures on the landmark. Council asked for a report on the feasibility of saving the stack in March, when it approved money for the Port to clear the site for redevelopment.
• No way around it. This sucks. New owners of Cincinnati Magazine, Hour Media, last week jettisoned much of the publication’s upper editorial brass, axing editor-in-chief Jay Stowe, senior editor R.J. Smith, dining editor Joanne Drilling, photo editor LuAnne DeMeo and creative services head Sue Goldberg. Before coming back to Cincinnati in 2004, Stowe worked for Esquire, Spin, Outside Magazine and other high-profile publications. Smith joined the magazine in 2013 after serving as senior editor at Los Angeles magazine and writing for the Village Voice, the New York Times Magazine, GQ and others. Drilling spent a decade and a half as a much-lauded chef before joining the magazine in 2013. The layoffs come just before Cincinnati Magazine’s 50th anniversary issue, which will hit stands in October. Staff at the magazine has spent months putting the giant issue together.
• I’m a regular bus rider, and I’ve never seen this on a bus or at a stop, but it still makes me itchy. An online video taken at Government Square purporting to show bedbugs streaming out of a crack in a bench there prompted Metro bus officials to immediately dispatch pest control to the downtown transit hub. Metro officials say the central bus stop is cleaned every day and that buses are preemptively treated to avoid infestations of pests like bedbugs.
“We appreciate our customers notifying us if they believe they have seen any pests on buses or at any of our facilities and it will be immediately treated as we work to diligently ensure our service is clean and pest-free,” Metro said in a statement responding to the video.
• Huh. A Fairfield City Council member who voted to bar medicinal marijuana in the city applied for a license to grow the crop himself in nearby Monroe. Chad Oberson, who owns Oberson’s Nursery and Landscapes, is one of 185 applicants vying for one of 12 level-1 state-issued cultivation licenses for medicinal pot. That license would allow him up to 25,000 square feet in which to grow the crop. Oberson and the five other Fairfield councilmembers unanimously voted to keep such grow sites from operating in the city.
• Finally, Ohio taxpayers paid more than $1 billion between 2001 and 2016 to an online charter school that records show hasn’t been serving nearly as many students as it claims. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow owes more than $60 million to the state after those revelations — an amount the school claims could make it go out of business. But rewind. How did we get here? Tied up in the ECOT saga is the improbable riches-to-rags-to-riches story of the school’s founder, William Lager. After his office supply company went bust in the 1980s and creditors took him to court throughout the 1990s, Lager hatched his next business idea: a school without classrooms where thousands of students log in from home. He snagged a charter for his nascent company in 2001 and hit the ground running, collecting millions from the state even as ECOT hit problem after problem. You can read more about ECOT’s beginnings in this Columbus Dispatch story.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 2, 2017.