Portune Kept out of Banks Loop

The March 21 joint meeting of Cincinnati City Council and Hamilton County Commissioners about the status of the riverfront development project known as The Banks seemed to herald the beginning of true collaboration (see “Arguing All the Way to the Banks,” issue of March 29-April 5). Commissioner Todd Portune was pleased with the opportunity to see substantive change in the quality and tone of the interaction between the governmental bodies.

“I thought that it was good that we were finally in a public session,” Portune says. “But that was weeks ago. There does not appear to be any real desire by the county people to follow through on that.”

The county commissioners and administration met after the joint session and began to discuss a more collaborative approach to the process, Portune says. “There’s been no follow up to it, no direction, no leadership,” he says. “It looks like Phil (Heimlich) and Pat (DeWine) and county administration have gone back to their same old approach of doing things on their own, behind closed doors, in secret, without full participation.”

Portune now sees the March 21 meeting as another lost opportunity.

“The most confusing thing to me has been the posture that has been taken by the mayor in the context of these deliberations,” he says.

“Mark (Mallory) has worked very closely with Commissioner Heimlich, and that has been both a good and a bad thing to the process. The mayor’s willingness to be a good partner and collaborator with the county has been extraordinary. I give him very high marks on that. He has been willing to engage in this secretive approach solely with Commissioner Heimlich, which has empowered Heimlich and has enabled the behind-doors process to continue.”

Citing the change in the deadline for choosing the developer from the original date of April 5 to April 7 and then April 21, Portune says he learned about the changes via the newspaper — commissioners never met as a group to pick those dates. He says he’s heard a rumor about the reason for the latest change and is in the process of trying to find out if it’s true.

“There’s an unseemly rumor that is circulating right now,” Portune says. “The reason for Phil and Pat’s action and the approach that they have taken is to allow the Eagle Realty/ Western Southern group the opportunity to strike a deal with the Rockefeller group or the AIG group or both and come back with that. They then would be chosen as the preferred developer over the Riverbank Consortium group, which, from what I hear from most objective observers, gave the most impressive presentation of anybody.”

Because the Riverbank Consortium is deemed to be labor-friendly and supportive of prevailing wage and minority inclusion, Portune says, “philosophically, there is a desire by people to look for ways to prevent them from getting the job.”

What is the next step for The Banks? Portune says he has “to read the tea leaves” because he’s not “briefed” or “kept in the loop” on many of the county meetings and conversations that are held in-house or with business and community leaders.

“I don’t know where they’re heading with all this,” he says. “All I know is what I read in the paper.”

Enquirer Weaves a Tangled Web
Another place for interesting reading is Cincinnati’s growing blogosphere, where a debate has been raging over a seemingly innocuous blog on The Enquirer‘s Cincinnati.com umbrella site, “Grandma in Iraq.” Written since September by Suzanne Fournier of Alexandria, a “grandmother of 15” deployed in Iraq with the Army Corps of Engineers, the blog carried upbeat news about school reconstruction projects and such with little reader commentary or notice — until last week.

That’s when the TPMmuckraker.com — a national news blog focused on public corruption and political scandal — reported that Cincinnati’s everywoman granny was actually an Army Corps public affairs officer, a fact that wasn’t made clear in her posts or her Web site bio. Journalism magazine Editor & Publisher picked up the story, interviewing Enquirer Editor Tom Callinan about the apparent conflict of interest of a government PR person spinning positive war news on a media Web site.

“She never hid the fact that she worked for them,” Callinan told E&P. “But we did not put a disclaimer at the top, we had overlooked that.”

Local blog Cincinnatibeacon.com also took up the cause, pointing out that The Enquirer itself did a story about Fournier on Aug. 15, 2005, that includes this description of her job in Iraq: “She’ll work with media from around the world, showing them the 2,700 construction projects the corps is working on or has completed in the country, such as schools, hospitals, sewers, roads, bridges and dams.” That’s a job she proceeded to do with the help of her blog.

Via his own blog that debuted right after the Grandma controversy erupted, Callinan said that Fournier’s job title was being prominently added to her blog bio and then the next day announced the blog was ending because her tour in Iraq was wrapping up.

Even though Callinan says elsewhere in his blog that he doesn’t want to engage in finger-pointing over who was to blame for the Grandma gaffe, both he and Enquirer Managing Editor Hollis Towns told Editor & Publisher that Cincinnati.com runs their own operation. “The newsroom does not direct content on the Web,” Towns said.

At the bottom of Cincinnati.com’s main page is this line: “Copyright 1995-2006 The Cincinnati Enquirer.”

This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2006.