Good morning all. Hope you had a good holiday and your New Years plans are shaping up nicely. Here’s some quick news for you.
Contention around the firing last year of then-Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell flared up again over the weekend after emails from the records of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed correspondence between him and fellow Democrat Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley. In those emails, Cranley advises Emanuel about how to ride out police-related controversy, saying that it was his close relationship with the Sentinels, Cincinnati’s black police union, that allowed the city to get through anger over Blackwell’s firing. “In Cincinnati I inherited a bad chief who happened to be black,” he wrote to Emanuel, explaining that he waited until the Sentinels were willing to speak out against Blackwell and go along with his firing.
That seems to contradict Cranley’s claims at the time that City Manager Harry Black directed Blackwell’s firing. After criticism from Blackwell’s family, Cranley said that the firing was a decision made by the city for just cause, and that he was speaking the administration as a whole when he referred to actions taken to remove Blackwell.
The emails have generated some pushback. Sentinels president at the time Phil Black released a statement following the revelation of the emails stating that he believes the city and the union should work together and acknowledging that some black officers did speak at City Hall against Blackwell, but denying that the Sentinels supported Blackwell’s ouster. Meanwhile, the former chief’s family slammed Cranley’s emails. “Cranley writes that he wanted his inherited African American police chief gone,” a statement from the family released Sunday reads, “so he pitted the city’s black groups to accomplish his goal.”
• It’s finally starting to become reality: Construction will begin June 1 on Wasson Way, the 7.6-mile bike path that will stretch from Newtown to Xavier University, organizers have announced. The project, which will take about $10 million to complete at this point, has been in the works for years as grassroots supporters and the city hustled to find money to make the trail. In September, the city bought a 4-mile stretch of unused railway along the route for $12 million from Norfolk-Southern Railroad Co. In October, the federal government kicked in a $750,000 Transportation Alternatives grant for the project. Construction of the trail is expected to go well into 2018.
• The Ohio legislature recently passed a law allowing guns on college campuses and other areas where they’ve been banned in the past. But don’t walk into the University of Cincinnati or Xavier packing. The law allows universities to exempt themselves and continue to ban firearms on campus, a move UC, XU, Miami University and other area colleges say they’ll be making. Cincinnati State Technical and Community College officials say they’re reviewing the law before they decide what actions to take. Schools continuing their bans say they’re unlikely to reconsider, citing student safety as the main driver for efforts to keep guns off campus.
• The campus carry legislation — which also extended concealed carry permit rights to airports, day care centers and other places where guns were once banned — was a big last-minute victory for conservatives in Ohio’s Republican-dominated lame-duck legislature. But there may be more fighting over some other staunchly conservative bills passed by the General Assembly. Today is the final day for Ohio Gov. John Kasich to act on a number of lame-duck bills, including one that would ban abortions after a heartbeat is detectable in a fetus, one that would make Ohio’s renewable energy standards optional for three years and another that would give a multi-million-dollar tax break to oil and gas companies. Kasich could veto any of those. If he does, lawmakers in the Ohio House are ready to try and override that veto with extra sessions scheduled for later this week. They’d need some 60 votes to push legislation past Kasich, a challenging threshold when most lawmakers have already gone home at the year’s end. The fetal heartbeat, energy standards and oil and gas tax break bills have all been highly contentious pieces of legislation, and it’s unclear whether Kasich, a Republican who has at times showed tendencies to defy the hard-right faction in the State House, will sink them or not.
• Finally, it’s been a big year for the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled on open records laws related to police shooting videos and other transparency rules. If you’re interested in checking out what the highest court in the state got up to this year, here’s a handy recap. It’s worth checking out — the state courts are often overlooked but just as often pivotal places where big decisions with big implications get hashed out.
I’m out. Til tomorrow, news buds. Hit me up with tips or New Year’s Eve suggestions.
This article appears in Dec 21-28, 2016.