Hello all. Here’s some quick news today.
City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County elected officials yesterday announced the city’s plans for $33 million in local money toward an eventual replacement for the Western Hills Viaduct. Mayor John Cranley says that money will come from bonds the city issues when its debt capacity will support them, likely around the year 2020. That’s when a major debt-financed road maintenance program called CAP the city is currently working on winds down. Hamilton County has already identified the source of its $33 million share — a $5 auto licensing fee. The project is expected to cost about $335 million, the rest of which officials hope the state and federal governments will pick up. It could be another decade before that project is finished.
• The former Florence, Kentucky resident allegedly responsible for the death of anti-racism activist Heather Heyer during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville over the summer has been charged with first-degree murder in that incident. James Alex Fields is accused of running his 2010 Dodge Charger into a crowd of protesters, killing Heyer and injuring 35 other people. He was charged with second degree murder back in August, but prosecutors have since announced in pretrial hearings that they’d like to pursue the first-degree count. Fields has expressed interest in and sympathy for Nazi and white supremacist ideologies.
• A controversial presidential nominee to the Environmental Protection Agency with local roots is withdrawing his candidacy for a high-ranking post in the organization. The former University of Cincinnati toxicology researcher and founder of his own toxicology consultancy, Michael Dourson, asked President Donald Trump to remove his nomination after bipartisan criticism from some senators tasked with voting on his confirmation. At the heart of that controversy: research Dourson performed paid for by chemical companies that suggested certain industrial chemicals were safe to use in higher doses than previous research indicated. Critics say Dourson, who has won numerous awards as a toxicologist, was producing research to buttress industry’s case for using higher levels of dangerous substances. Dourson denies this, but said stepping down “avoids unnecessarily politicizing the (EPA’s) important environmental protection goals.”
• The University of Cincinnati is naming a dorm on its flagship uptown campus for a local civil rights legend. Former vice mayor Marian Spencer, the first black woman to serve on Cincinnati City Council, wasn’t allowed to live in dorms when she attended UC 70 years ago. But the school’s newest high rise dorm will now bear her name. Prior to her boundary-breaking tenure on city council, Spencer was one of the activists who helped desegregate Coney Island in 1955.
• The Ohio Department of Commerce says it didn’t do anything wrong when it hired a man with a previous drug conviction to help pick the 24 businesses receiving medical marijuana licenses, and wouldn’t have done anything differently. The state didn’t run a background check on Trevor C. Bozeman before it paid him to be one of three consultants scoring applications for medicinal marijuana licenses. If it had, the state would have discovered Bozeman’s 2005 conviction for possession of a controlled substance in Pennsylvania. Bozeman received three years probation for that conviction. Critics, from elected officials to businesses who applied for and didn’t receive licenses, have railed against the situation. But the state says it followed all of its protocols and that Bozeman has “significant subject matter expertise.” Indeed.
This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2017.