Happy Monday, Cincy! Hope everyone had a great weekend. Here are your morning headlines.
• The Cincinnati Red Bike program celebrates its one-year anniversary tomorrow, and it’s had a great start. In the past 12 months, the bike share program has blown the lid off of initial first year projections. It has logged more than 87,000 rides, 69-percent more than initial predictions, and membership is at 1,330, 42-percent more than predicted. Stations were expanded out to Northside and northern Kentucky earlier than planned due to its popularity, and it now has 50 stations, 20 more than when the program launched. Best yet, the Red Bike hasn’t lost a single bike! Red Bike officials say this kind of growth into the second and third year isn’t expected, and some stations — like the ones in Northside and Uptown — aren’t being used as much as they’d like. But that’s not stopping the program from celebrating. In addition to throwing itself a birthday bash at Taft’s Ale House in OTR, bike rentals will be only a dollar on its anniversary tomorrow.
• Officials from the city and the arts community this afternoon will reveal the group that will be renovating Music Hall. The 2 p.m. press conference will include details about the crew that will help with the $125 million project. The historic building is in dire need of repairs and updates, as duct tape holds the carpet in place in some areas, old hemp rope is still used behind the scenes, buckets are set up to catch leaks and narrow passageways and doors make staging difficult to get through the 137-year-old structure, officials say.
• The Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police is expected to issue a vote of confidence for Interim Police Chief Eliot Isaac today. Isaac was promoted to assistant police chief in July and received this quick bump up in ranks after City Manager Harry Black fired former Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell last Wednesday. Isaac is a 26-year veteran of the CPD and had been serving as captain since 2004 before being promoted to assistant chief this summer.
• City Manager Harry Black’s memo released last Wednesday, the day Blackwell was fired, cited low morale, frequent absences and described Blackwell as too self-promotional, among the reasons why the police chief was fired for cause, but the Enquirer is questioning whether his community-focused policing approach played a part in his dismissal. Blackwell’s approach to working with kids in the community through programs like the Right to Read program and a recently launched pilot program that would extend hours in community centers has been cited as a model for police stations by some outside of Cincinnati but possibly shook the city’s confidence in him during a recent spike in shootings.
• The great recession has robbed many Ohio young people of valuable formative career experience, resulting in a rise in poverty even as unemployment goes down, according to a report detailed by the Columbus Dispatch. Employers are more hesitant to hire workers with less experience or transient work histories, which is what a lot of young people who emerged during the recession have on their resumes. Instead jobs like the ones at call centers and manufacturing, which have historically gone to young less skilled workers, are going to older workers. By some estimates, 30,000 16- to 24-year-olds are without a job and not in school.
That’s all for now. Email me story ideas at nkrebs@citybeat.com.
This article appears in Sep 9-15, 2015.
