Hello all. Hope you’re somewhere warm and dry as the snow comes down this morning. Let’s talk about some news stuff, shall we?
And then there were four. Maybe. Cincinnati City Councilman Charlie Winburn yesterday filed petitions for a mayoral run, making him the first Republican contender to edge that direction. Winburn is term-limited on City Council and is “considering his options,” he told The Enquirer. One of those could be a mayoral run against Mayor John Cranley and his fellow Democrats Rob Richardson Jr. and Councilwoman Yvette Simpson. The petitions Winburn filed with the Hamilton County Board of Elections are just the first step that would allow him to actually declare he’s running. He has until Feb. 16 to do so ahead of the city’s May 2 primary. If he does, it could get awkward. Winburn has been a big ally of Cranley, and his candidacy could pull some of the Republican support that helped push Cranley to victory in 2013.
• Just-elected Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Aftab Pureval, a Democrat, wasn’t kidding when he said he was going to end business as usual at the office, which had been held by Republicans for more than 100 years. On his first day in office yesterday, he fired three upper-level Clerk of Courts deputies and put other staff members on notice that changes were going to keep coming. Pureval says that former clerk Tracy Winkler installed friends and allies at the office, and that the dismissals will allow him to assemble a team better capable of modernizing the way the clerk does business. That includes establishing a new, modern website that works on mobile phones, a ban on any political activity during work hours — a big issue in Winkler’s office — and other changes that will make the office more meritocratic and efficient, according to Pureval. Not everyone was happy about the moves, of course. Republicans like Hamilton County GOP Chair Alex Triantafilou took some shots at the new clerk yesterday.
“The new Clerk of Courts is off to an inauspicious start,” Triantafilou wrote on Twitter, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier. “Firing career civil servants who know the job is a rookie error. Careful, young man.”
• Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld and his community affairs director Colleen Reynolds are at the White House today talking about sexual assault prevention. Sittenfeld and Reynolds launched Cincinnati’s first citywide taskforce to address campus gender violence issues as both Miami University and the University of Cincinnati are facing federal scrutiny for the ways they’ve dealt with reports of sexual assault. Sittenfeld and Reynolds will discuss their work during the “It’s On Us” Summit during a panel on community organizing, according to a release sent out by Sittenfeld’s office.
• A couple good news items for people who like going places: First, Southwest Airlines is coming to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The carrier will be leaving Dayton International Airport and offering five flights a week from CVG to Chicago and another three a week to Baltimore-Washington. Southwest, something of an upper-tier budget airline, will start flights out of CVG in June.
• Meanwhile, the City of Oxford has just agreed to kick in $350,000 toward a $1 million Amtrak station there, bringing the likelihood of daily service between Cincinnati and Chicago a little closer. Students could hop on the train to head south to Cincinnati’s Union Terminal or north to the Windy City, among other destinations. Transit activists have long pushed to get better rail service between here and Chicago, and the added demand created by an Oxford station could buoy that effort.
• If you tried, you probably couldn’t find two Ohio politicians more unlikely to be on the same side of an issue, but it seems staunch conservative Gov. John Kasich and liberal U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown agree on at least one thing. Both are pushing back against an effort by Republicans in Congress to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. 700,000 Ohioans have insurance due to the ACA, and both Kasich and Brown are working to try and preserve some of the program’s benefits for the state, most notably the law’s Medicaid expansion.
“The fact of the matter is we have a lot more people covered, there's a lot more things happening and if, for example, it went away, then what happens to these people?" Kasich said at a press conference in Columbus yesterday. "There's room for improvement, but to repeal and not to replace, I just want to know what's going to happen to all those people who find themselves left out in the cold.”
As you might expect, Brown was even more adamant about preserving Obamacare, saying Republicans are “on their way to doing great damage” and negatively impacting hundreds of thousands of Ohioans.
The move to gut the ACA comes as an assessment recently released by the federal government found that the program improved health outcomes for covered patients while decreasing emergency room visits and increasing recipients’ ability to find work in Ohio and other states.
