Good morning all. Here’s some news for you today.
Newly-elected Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Aftab Pureval continues to make big changes at that office, stirring up controversy among some conservative backers of his predecessor Tracy Winkler. Last week, he appointed veterans from the corporate world to three senior leadership positions and sent five of Winkler’s hires packing. Pureval tapped Rene Cheatham, formerly of General Electric, as chief financial officer; Ash Agrawal, formerly of Fifth Third Bank, to be the office’s chief of information technology; and 10-year talent acquisition veteran Shonda Sullivan to head the clerk’s human resources department. Pureval says the hires will help him modernize and professionalize the Clerk of Courts office and improve service to taxpayers. Republicans, including former Hamilton County commission candidate Andrew Pappas, cried foul at the dismissal of the clerk’s former chief financial officer, human resources consultant, chief of auto titles and other employees. Pappas claimed they were fired because they weren’t “liberal Democrats.” Pureval’s office says all hiring and firing decisions have been carefully vetted and have nothing to do with politics.
• The Cincinnati Police Department is slowly equipping all its officers with body cameras, a move that has come as national focus continues on police accountability and reform. But according to this report by WCPO, most officers aren’t sold on the technology. Fraternal Order of Police President Dan Hils says that even when officers haven’t done anything wrong, they believe the body cameras will be used to second-guess their judgment, making many officers resistant to the idea of using the cameras. Oversight of police judgment in the line of duty seems to be one of the points of the body cameras, but yeah. Hils says a majority of officers believe the cameras could be used to judge officers unfairly. In 2015, body camera technology recorded the shooting death of unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose by University of Cincinnati Police officer Ray Tensing. The footage led to Tensing’s firing from the force and his indictment on murder and manslaughter charges. A jury could not agree on a verdict in Tensing’s case, which is rescheduled for this spring.
• Following last month’s executive order by President Donald Trump putting the brakes on refugee resettlement, the number of refugees coming to Cincinnati will soon slow to a trickle. Trump’s executive order also clamped down on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, a provision that has put it in hot water with federal courts. But Trump is well within his powers to cut down drastically on the number of refugees the United States takes in, and he’s indicated he’ll cut in half the 110,000 a year the Obama administration authorized. That has big local implications for refugee resettlement programs here in Cincinnati.
• The University of Cincinnati gets a new top executive today. President Neville Pinto begins his tenure today as the university’s 30th president, replacing popular Santa Ono in the powerful perch. Pinto spent more than a quarter century at UC as an engineer professor and dean of the university’s graduate school. He says he wants to take UC to the top of the heap when it comes to the country’s research universities. You can read more about Pinto here.
• It’s Presidents Day, which is generally a day off school for local students. But some will be spending their holiday learning about civil rights and black history at an alternative to Presidents Day event in Over-the-Rhine. Cincinnati Black Lives Matter is holding the “My Voice Matters Freedom School” today at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. There, students from kindergarten to 8th grade will see documentary screenings and participate in a youth march, have art lessons centered around empowering self-portraits and protests, play math-themed basketball games and use poetry as a means of expression. The free program runs all day and includes breakfast, lunch and a snack.
“Many local schools have the day off and we are excited to provide an empowering, enriching and educational space for our youth to collectively discuss how to make change in our community and realize their collective power,” organizers wrote on posts promoting the event.
• After a spate of recent local shootings in Mount Auburn, Over-the-Rhine and Avondale, a local faith group has organized a gun buyback program designed to get firearms off Cincinnati streets. Project Nehemiah will exchange $100 gift cards from Wal-Mart and Kroger for handguns and $50 gift cards for rifles and shotguns in an effort to stem the tide of weapons making their way into Cincinnati neighborhoods. The buyback takes place today at 3 p.m. at Truth and Destiny Covenant Ministries Fellowship Church in Mount Airy.
• Want to get in touch with your local congressman? Good luck. While the lawmakers Greater Cincinnati voters sent to the big game in Washington are really into hosting telephone or virtual town halls (think a Skype session between you, your congressperson and thousands of your closest friends), none have any local, in-the-flesh town halls on their schedules, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer. Those town halls have become a big issue nationally of late, as irate voters have taken to swarming them asking their congressional representatives what they’re doing about the Affordable Care Act and how they’re going to hold controversial President Donald Trump to account as questions around his conflicts of interest with his businesses, Russia and other sticky ethical situations mount. At least one local lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, will hear from his constituents in person tomorrow as a group heads to his office in Carew Tower downtown to drop off a petition with hundreds of signatures from voters in his Cincinnati-area district asking for an in-person town hall appearance sometime in the near future.
• Finally, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, in many ways a staunch conservative, is once again bucking his party on the Affordable Care Act. Kasich recently said that a plan in Congress to roll back Obamacare “makes no sense” and that cutting the program’s Medicaid expansion would be disastrous for many of Ohio’s 700,000 residents who gained health insurance through the expansion. Kasich has said that one-third of those residents have mental health or substance abuse issues that require treatment through the low-income federal healthcare program.
This article appears in Feb 15-22, 2017.