Hello all. Here’s some news this morning.
Cincinnati’s Board of Park Commissioners yesterday named a new director for the city’s park system. Wade Walcott, from Columbus, will take the reigns from outgoing director Willie Carden July 17. Walcott is currently the director of Greensboro, N.C.’s parks and recreation department. He’ll make $11,000 more a year than Carden’s $144,000 thanks to a boost approved recently by Cincinnati City Council. Carden, who recently has been dogged by ethics issues related to a non-profit foundation that raises money for the parks system, has worked for the city’s parks for 30 years. He’s been director for more than half of that tenure.
• A system designed to detect racial bias in policing here in Cincinnati in the aftermath of the 2001 death of Timothy Thomas ended in 2012. But it’s making a return in January after months of work by the city, according to this story. The Office of Performance and Data Analytics will be adding a staff member to help track bias in police stops, pending City Council approval for that position in the upcoming budget. The office will analyze several sets of data in determining bias, including an officer’s assignment, location of the stop in question, the gender, age and race of both the officer and the person she or he stopped and the duration and outcome of the stop. Officials say the new system could provide very quick identification of patterns of bias among Cincinnati Police Department.
As we first reported last April, big racial disparities still exist in the number of stops and arrests made by Cincinnati police. Police arrest data for 2015 up to October of that year shows that 2,090 of CPD’s 2,936 felony arrests were of black citizens. Of the department’s 13,447 misdemeanor arrestees, 9,430 were black. In 2015, 64 percent of those stopped by CPD for pedestrian violations and 63 percent stopped for traffic violations were black, according to department data. The city’s overall population is 46 percent black. Many of those stops came in predominantly black neighborhoods.
• Is the city selectively charging some music festivals a 3 percent tax on admissions revenue? That’s what a federal lawsuit claims. Former Bunbury music festival owner Bill Donabedian filed the suit back in late 2015, saying the festival paid more than $42,000 in admissions taxes to the city in 2013 while other events charging admission paid none. The city says that any event charging admission must pay the tax, but the city’s laws are written in a somewhat ambiguous way when it comes to whether events without reserved seating should pay. The city raked in about $6.5 million from the tax last year — though the lawsuit could put its legality in jeopardy in the future.
• City officials, developers and community groups yesterday unveiled the results of $6.7 million in rehab efforts on 40 units of affordable housing in Pendleton. Mayor John Cranley, developer Wallick Communities CEO Tom Feusse, residents of the buildings, Over-the-Rhine Community Housing Executive Director Mary Burke Rivers and others presented the rehabs at OTR’s Peaslee Center before giving attendees a tour of rehabbed units. The apartments are spread across eight buildings in the neighborhood sitting next to Over-the-Rhine, and were in danger of becoming more expensive because federal tax credits issued in 1998 that set affordability requirements were about to expire. The rehab was funded in part with another round of those credits, called Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, meaning that the units will stay affordable for at least another 15 years.
• Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced yesterday that his office is suing five drug companies he says are partly responsible for the opioid addiction crisis in the state. DeWine, who is contending for the Ohio GOP’s gubernatorial nomination, is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Johnson and Johnson and Allergan and subsidiaries of those companies for what he says were misleading practices that downplayed addiction dangers and encouraged doctors to prescribe and patients to take drugs like OxyContin and Percocet. The suit says the drug companies targeted elderly patients, veterans and other vulnerable populations with their marketing pushes for those drugs and violated the state’s consumer protection laws. A wave of opioid overdoses has swept across the country, with Ohio often leading the nation in increases in drug-related deaths.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 7, 2017.
