Thomas Key Maddox is a senior at the University of Cincinnati studying finance.
Cincinnati’s residents are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make.
Under Mayor Aftab Pureval and a one-party City Council, City Hall has developed a habit of passing the bill off—away from the people who approved the spending and straight to the taxpayers who didn’t.
When a decision fails, it doesn’t land on the people who made it. When a program collapses, nobody steps forward to own it. When millions disappear into settlements, consultant contracts, and quiet write-offs, the cost doesn’t stay inside City Hall. It gets passed along—slowly, quietly and reliably—to the middle class.
Over the past few years, Cincinnati taxpayers have watched costs rise without any clear connection to better outcomes. Property taxes increase. Assessments jump. City-related fees stack up. People didn’t move. They didn’t renovate. There was no corresponding increase in wages or household income. The bill just went up. Officials call it “growth.” Families experience it as fewer groceries, less stability, and more stress—the hidden cost of sloppy governance.
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about accountability.
Start with the city paying more than $8 million to settle claims tied to the mass arrest of nonviolent protesters in 2020. Whatever your politics, that money didn’t come from nowhere. It came from taxpayers already stretched thin. What followed wasn’t a reckoning or serious accounting. It was silence, then business as usual.
The same pattern shows up in discretionary spending—the kind residents only learn about after digging through reports. In December, WCPO reported that city consultant Iris Roley received a $664,300 contract signed two days after the election, with nearly $100,000 paid for work completed months earlier. She also hired her son for $4,400 a month in a city-funded position.
Say that out loud. No one hears that and thinks it’s normal.
In the real world, retroactive invoices get rejected. Nepotistic hires raise alarms. In City Hall, it gets defended. Officials say it was legal. That defense alone shows how low the standard has fallen. Legality is the minimum, not a governing philosophy. Judgment matters. Competence is what people feel. Accountability is what’s missing.
City Hall insists this is normal. That’s the problem. What’s routine inside the building doesn’t resemble normal life anywhere else.
The money was supposed to stabilize Downtown and reduce violence. Instead, residents watched disorder escalate until curfews and SWAT deployments became unavoidable anyway. At that point, the questions aren’t political. They’re unavoidable. What were the goals? How was success measured? When would someone have said, “This isn’t working?”
If there were no benchmarks and no consequences, that isn’t compassion. It’s a surrender of responsibility.
While City Hall explains and reorganizes, residents deal with the basics: crime rising, disorder spreading, and the sense that no one is actually in charge when it matters.
The city is drowning in task forces, vision statements and polished language about progress. What it lacks is discomfort—real accountability for people in charge. When leaders explain outcomes instead of owning them, costs rise, trust erodes, and problems don’t get solved. They get managed, reframed, and pushed into the next budget cycle.
Cities don’t fall behind because no one cares. They fall behind because no one clearly owns results. When everyone is responsible, no one is. A functional city has someone who wakes up knowing that if things go wrong, it’s on them—not a consultant or a committee.
So here’s a proposal City Hall would despise—which is how you know it’s the right one.
For the next two years, Cincinnati should freeze all new consultant contracts. Every one. No exceptions. If a project can’t be explained, managed, and defended by people already on payroll, it doesn’t deserve to exist. Instead, the city should publish a live, public dashboard listing every active contract, settlement, and development deal—one page, searchable, updated monthly.
Each project should list four things: the original budget, the current cost, the percentage over or under budget, and the official who approved it. No summaries. No press releases. Just numbers.
Projects under budget are green. Over budget are yellow. Anything more than 10 percent over is red—clearly labeled, impossible to miss.
Residents shouldn’t need records requests or buried PDFs to see where their money went. If City Hall is proud of its decisions, it should post the receipts.
If a project goes more than 10 percent over budget, the people who approved it don’t get promoted, reassigned, or “transitioned.” They’re out. Fired. Replaced. The way it works everywhere else.
If that sounds harsh, good. The middle class doesn’t get a grace period when bills go up. They get penalties.
City Hall says governing is complicated. So is running a business. So is raising a family. Somehow everyone else manages constraints without press conferences that rebrand failure as progress.
This city doesn’t have a money problem. It has a responsibility problem. Too many people have permission to overspend quietly, fail upward, and explain it all away later.
People aren’t asking for perfection. They’re asking for adults—adults who own results, publish the numbers, and accept consequences when things go wrong.
Cincinnati works very well for the people who run it. It just doesn’t work very well for everyone else.
That’s why the middle class keeps paying for City Hall’s bad mistakes.