Good morning, Cincinnati! Here are your morning headlines as you gear up for the Opening Day festivities.
• Well, it's finally here. The giant citywide party that is the kickoff to the start of baseball season. It's my first time experiencing Cincinnati's famous Opening Day celebration, but judging from the amount of Reds fans I've already seen lined up on Race Street this morning, it's going to be a big baseball party. If you're not lucky enough to get to watch the Reds play the Philadelphia Phillies at the Great American Ball Park this afternoon, there are still many festivities well worth ditching school and work for. Some ideas of what to do can be found here, here and here.
• The Cincinnati Planning Commission voted Sunday to allow an Atlanta-based developer to move one step closer to building a $90 million apartment complex near the riverfront. The Novare Group plans to build a 25-story apartment building featuring 352 rental units and 3,000-square-feet of retail space. The company says it would like to begin construction this summer to have the complex finished by winter 2017. But before any groundbreaking happens, the plan still has a few more hoops to jump through: The Novare Group will need to submit final development plans to the Planning Commission as well as the City Council for approval before it gets the green light.
• Cincinnati's Metropolitan Sewer District, similar to the Cincinnati Park Board, is facing allegations of bad contracts, questionable relationships and overspending by the Enquirer. An Enquirer investigation has asserted that MSD is paying contractors way too much for their work, and MSD officials have had little oversight over major projects like the $3 billion court-ordered sewer reconstruction project. City Manager Harry Black so far has responded to the Enquirer's requests for MSD public records by tightening their spending policies, drawing up a new ethics policy, launching an audit into the department and has started personally approving all of MSD's contracts.
• Donald Trump has called for ultimate underdog, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, to drop out of the presidential race. Trump is currently campaigning hard in Wisconsin, trying to rouse voters for the state's primary on Tuesday, and said Sunday that Kasich should just throw in the towel because it's impossible for him to secure the GOP nomination with his current delegate count. Kasich is far, far short of the necessary 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He has secured just 143 delegates, compared to Trump's count of 736 and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's count of 463. Trump said Kasich is doing little more than taking away delegate votes that could be going to him. Kasich's campaign responded by saying that none of the remaining GOP candidates have enough delegates to secure the nomination either. One of Kasich's spokespeople told the Associated Press that Trump should consider taking his own good advice and drop out of the race before the GOP convention in Cleveland this July.
• Last weekend, during an interview on ABC, Kasich defended the many restrictions on abortion he's signed into law as Ohio governor. His comments come in the wake of the massive pushback Trump received for telling MSNBC that women seeking abortions should be punished if abortion is outlawed. Kasich said that lawmakers must be careful about passing abortion restrictions that don't cause a constitutional conflict and called for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in an attempt to appeal to social conservatives. Well, pro-choice critics say Kasich actually doesn't care about "constitutional conflicts" as the 16 restrictions on abortion providers Kasich has signed into law as governor have caused half of the state's clinics to close.
