If you’ve followed local political news over the past year, you’ve probably read a lot about Cincinnati City Council.
It’s been a tumultuous first year for the city’s main governing body, which has seen nearly non-stop controversy from one angle or another and has sometimes been derided as “clowncil” by social media observers.
At the very beginning of its term, council stepped into a tense tug-of-war over a mayoral appointment to the Cincinnati Park Board. Then there was the dramatic showdown between then-Cincinnati City Manager Harry Black and Mayor John Cranley last spring. And don’t forget an intense debate over FC Cincinnati’s stadium in the West End. We’ve seen splashy news stories about council members missing meetings. And, of course, there was the battle around five council members who texted each other in violation of Ohio open meetings laws.
But as those waves of acrimony have washed over council’s nine members, a key question has remained largely unasked: What exactly do taxpayers get from each of their supposedly part-time employees, each of whom makes $65,000 a year?
Or, to put it even more simply: What does council actually do?
CityBeat pored over legislation records and made records requests for members’ calendars. We talked to council members, chiefs of staff, political experts and others to get an answer.
As it turns out, there is a lot going on behind the scenes, and it’s hard to fairly judge the work a council member is doing by public meeting attendance or social media static alone.
“For the average council member, the real work of the job happens when the council’s not in session,” says University of Cincinnati Political Science Professor David Niven. “The real task is being a voice for Cincinnati. That doesn’t just happen in meetings.”
Council members and staff CityBeat talked to each independently estimated about 70 to 80 percent of the job takes place outside of council chambers. And no one said it was a part-time gig.
“How’s this for camaraderie?” first-term council member Jeff Pastor, one of two Republicans on council, asks. “I guarantee you not one member of council is only spending 20 hours a week on city business. When we were going through the Harry Black debacle, or working on the budget, you’re spending hours and hours in your office. Everyone loves to beat up on city council. Now, there’s some clown shit that goes on here, don’t get me wrong. But the reality is, when we pull our sleeves up and get things done, the media won’t report on it and then people don’t get to appreciate it.”
Of course, council members are more than happy to say that — it makes them look active and engaged to voters. But by considering some key pieces of evidence — legislation filed, meetings taken, goals achieved — it’s possible to get a better idea of who is doing the work.
There are some caveats to any measure of an elected official’s performance. Council member Wendell Young had a serious health scare in 2017 involving his heart. And Vice Mayor Christopher Smitherman lost his wife of 28 years after a long, brutal fight with breast cancer. Those kinds of personal events cut into the time they have to attend public hearings, file legislation and meet with constituents, the same way they would with any job that has sick leave.
Job Description
First, let’s lay out the various moving parts of a council member’s job. They must attend the 36 public Cincinnati City Council meetings, usually held on Wednesdays, plus any number of committee meetings that happen bi-weekly.
Most council members chair a committee, and all except Murray and Smitherman are part of the Budget and Finance Committee, which is chaired by council member David Mann. It’s perhaps the most important of the committees, and this year, it meets once a week.
One of council’s most important jobs is amending and approving the city’s $1.4 billion-plus budget every year. That involves a lot of work — especially when the city is facing the $19 million deficit it must address this year.
As part of the budget process, members attended three special public meetings about the city’s budget last June. Those evening meetings were hours long.
The Cincinnati Enquirer earlier this year reported members’ attendance at council’s 36 regular meetings. Council veteran Mann, a Democrat, was the only member to have perfect attendance.
Democrats Greg Landsman and P.G. Sittenfeld both missed one meeting each. Republicans Pastor and Amy Murray, along with Democrat Young, all missed three meetings; independent Christopher Smitherman and Democrat Chris Seelbach both missed four; and Democrat Tamaya Dennard missed six.
Council members each stressed that attendance at council’s regular public meetings is vital and not to be missed whenever possible. However, attendance isn’t the be-all and end-all, council members, their staff and political experts say.
“It’s almost embarrassing I’ve missed no meetings,” says Mann, who has served more than 20 cumulative years on council, in addition to three years as mayor and two years in Congress. “That hasn’t been true in the past. I don’t go out of my way to not miss meetings. Sometimes I have to for a client (Mann is also an attorney). Maybe I have to be in court. (Former Cincinnati City Council member) Kevin Flynn didn’t miss any meetings for four years, and, you know, I thought, that’s great Kevin, but it’s not my aspiration.”
Much of the legislation council members vote on during those meetings originated in one or multiple member’s offices in the form of resolutions, motions and ordinances.
To draft that legislation, council members and their staff often take a regimen of meetings — with constituents, stakeholders on an issue, experts inside and outside city government and, yes, the city’s powerbrokers — to understand an issue, get buy-in and push their legislation to the finish line.
There are also plenty of other events to attend as part of the job — interest groups, community councils in any of Cincinnati’s 52 neighborhoods, information sessions, out-of-town conferences — that also show up on a council member’s calendar.
And then there are the less-measurable duties: the calls and visits from constituents for individual issues, the hours spent stopping to report potholes via the city’s app (an activity Murray says is a routine, if not favorite, pastime on her morning commute) and conversations about policy during chance public encounters.
Murray, now in her second full term on council after she was appointed to a brief term in 2011, says for her, that’s the heart of the job.
“A lot of what my office does is meeting with constituents,” she says, noting many residents come to her with things like zoning, development or basic infrastructure concerns. “That’s where I feel we can offer so much to people. That’s a huge amount of what we do with businesses and individuals.”
Down the hall and across the aisle, first-term council member Dennard agrees.
“People reach out at the gas station, or the grocery store,” Dennard says during an interview in Walnut Hills that she and her chief of staff Tara Keesling squeezed in between constituent meetings. “I’ve had plenty of impromptu meetings in front of Kroger. I don’t care if you’re at a bar. I’ve had people ask me about the budget at Queen City Radio. What am I going to say? ‘I can’t talk to you right now’? I want to be approachable. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
Legislation
Last year, council members sponsored 120 ordinances, 162 motions and 49 resolutions. The mayor and city manager can also introduce legislation, and do so often.
The numbers from council are higher than they were a decade ago. In 2008, council members sponsored 50 ordinances, 154 motions and 45 resolutions.
Now, numbers aren’t everything and not every piece of legislation introduced ends up becoming law. And there are varying philosophies about whether more is better at all when it comes to legislating.
“I don’t know that having more motions and ordinances is necessarily a good thing all the time,” Murray says, noting that sometimes, those moves by council put strain on the city administration.
Not all council members draft legislation equally — and not all legislation is the same, either in terms of the work required or in terms of its efficacy.
Ordinances actually change the laws of the City of Cincinnati. Motions are directions from council to the city’s various departments about the way in which the city is run — directions that the city administration may or may not take up quickly. Resolutions, meanwhile, express the values or wishes of council. Those mostly happen as a way to honor Cincinnatians, proclaim a special day or express an opinion about national policy.
“When you consider all three, you’re talking about things that range from directly affecting people’s lives to how the city does its job on a daily basis to symbolically gesturing toward things that matter to us,” Niven says.
Some argue that motions are often “frivolous,” and that ordinances are the only true way to accomplish goals. Others say that it’s vital that council publicly voice and vote on the way it wants the city run.
Either way, most council members said ordinances are generally the heaviest lifts in terms of legislation.
“An ordinance has great finality about it,” Mann says. “It’s the law. I think it’s supposed to get more respect from the city administration, though sometimes we make mistakes and someone has to help us figure it out. Legislation should occur only after a lot more engagement, a lot more research, input.”
Mann was the king of ordinances last year, having sponsored 38 in 2018. A few of those were multiple attempts at the same policy goal. Others were simply legislation meant to transfer money between various parts of the city’s budget. But many were separate efforts on different issues.
As an example, he brings up the multiple versions of an ordinance that would impose a tax and safety regulations on short-term rentals found on sites like Airbnb. Mann would like that tax to go to fund affordable housing, a badly-needed resource in Cincinnati.
“We’ve been working on Airbnb since the beginning of time it seems,” Mann says during an interview in his office.
“A year and a half,” Mann’s chief of staff, Ioanna Paraskevopoulos, chimes in. “We’ve put a hundred or more hours into Airbnb for sure. Ordinances are more serious because we consult very closely with the (city’s) law department, who makes sure we aren’t running afoul of any laws and helps try to protect us against the possibility of getting sued and losing once we pass a new law. We also have to work with administration officials who will be implementing these complicated programs. That’s really important because we can introduce this pie-in-the-sky ideal, but when the building and inspections department has to create a registry for every single Airbnb host and then be able to make sure they have a way of enforcing the law that we create, they will end up investing a significant amount of money in software and personnel time.”
Mann recalls a meeting with a constituent at an OTR bar who started out by yelling at the council member over his efforts to regulate Airbnbs. That’s not the norm, and not enough to sway a policy proposal, but Mann says he strives to listen to everyone and is open to trying again when an ordinance isn’t right the first time.
“It’s a new phenomena, there are a number of legislative responses around the country, there’s a fledgling industry that is very resistant to interference, so we’re trying really hard to identify the right public policy,” he says of the Airbnb efforts. “The first time through, I tried to establish caps (on the number of Airbnbs a property owner can operate). I didn’t have the votes for that, so we went back to the drawing board.”
After a number of permutations and revisions, Mann’s ordinance levying a 7 percent tax on short-term rental units to fund affordable housing finally, and rather unceremoniously, passed council on April 24.
Most council members agree motions are also important, as they publicly express the will of the city’s democratically-elected officials and direct the city’s administration to issue reports and take concrete actions. Sittenfeld originated the most motions of any city council member — 34 — but was also second when it came to ordinances with 20.
“Some members of the administration have told me they prefer requests to come in motion form for a few reasons,” Dennard’s chief of staff Keesling says. “There’s a process for approved motions — they get logged in a certain systematic way versus an email or call, which can get buried. With a vote, they know how many council members are interested in the topic and whether or not there is a strong will of council to move in a certain direction. Some motions alert the administration that there may be a bigger change coming and gives them time to prepare and/or advise council on direction.”
Motions don’t always have the desired impact, however — a series of motions by council progressives calling for a narrowing of Liberty Street between northern and southern Over-the-Rhine is a good example. After more than five years of public input and multiple votes by council directing the city to move forward with the proposal, it is still in limbo due to logistical questions and competing proposals from the mayor.
And motions can also be overdone, some in City Hall say, noting that some could be accomplished by simply asking questions of city departments.
“If you look at the calendar today, some of the motions seem like a simple phone call to a department,” Pastor’s chief of staff Beth Rabenold says. “But some people want to put it in a motion so that it requires a report… I guess if it’s something that is your baby or your passion, then you feel like they need to put a motion out there so that people see they’re publicly requesting it.”
Meetings (and more meetings)
As Mann and chief of staff Paraskevopoulos note, spending months on a piece of legislation begets another layer of work — meeting with all the people interested or affected by that legislation.
Murray also knows this well. A glance at her 2018 calendar shows meeting after meeting labeled “safe stations,” referring to legislation she introduced recently that will allow those seeking drug addiction help to walk into City of Cincinnati clinics and get free-of-charge Uber rides to area drug treatment clinics participating in the program, now called “Safe Places.”
The day of the mayor’s State of the City Address in October, for example, Murray took eight meetings about the initiative before attending the mayoral address.
“We’ve been working for 10 months, looking at examples from other cities,” she says. “It’s been a big project.”
Most council members have similar long-term projects — for Seelbach, they’re streetcar performance and parking issues, among others. For Vice Mayor Smitherman, it has been fixing problems with the city’s Emergency Call Center. For Landsman, work on preventing evictions in Cincinnati has become a keystone issue. Sittenfeld has focused often on issues affecting senior citizens.
For Dennard, one of those big issues has been an ordinance banning questions about a job applicant’s salary history, which required a year of meeting with the region’s various chambers of commerce, women’s advocacy groups, the city’s law department and others.
That ordinance could help ease the wage gap women and people of color face, Dennard says. But it has some opposition from the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce and some other business groups, who argue that it will make hiring unnecessarily difficult for employers. Dennard’s calendar is full of meetings with those groups — whether or not they supported her ordinance.
“Whether you agree with something or not, we want to have input on it,” Dennard says. “We’re going to engage people who we know are going to be fans of it, and those who may not be.”
Of course, not all meetings are tied to ordinances. Pastor says his busiest hours in the past year came out of the battle over FC Cincinnati’s West End stadium. Pastor was one of the council members who helped broker a deal — the so-called Community Benefits Agreement — between the team and a few representatives of the neighborhood.
“I think that was a proud moment,” he says. “You’re sitting down for hours trying to figure out what people want for the neighborhood — not people outside the West End. What are some financial things you want to see for this community that can be reasonably done from a private company? What do you want from the city and this $34.9 million in infrastructure? That took weeks. And that was just my chip at the nut.”
MEETINGS PER WEEK IN 2018 LISTED ON COUNCIL MEMBERS’ CALENDARS
Excludes regular council and committee meetings, personal appointments and party political events.
Tamaya Dennard: 13
Greg Landsman: 15
David Mann: 13
Amy Murray: 8
Jeff Pastor: 7
Chris Seelbach: 3
P.G. Sittenfeld: 16
Christopher Smitherman: 2
Wendell Young: 3
All This, Plus Politics
As the recent release of five council members’ texts and emails reveals, there is also all the political work that goes on within City Hall — the negotiations between council and their staff along with the mayor, city manager and city administration to gain support for a piece of legislation or initiative.
Those texts and emails, released after a lawsuit by conservative activist Mark Miller, show that the tone within City Hall can go from collegial to sharp-elbowed to downright nasty.
Sometimes, members overstep their bounds — as shown by the text message chain between Young, Sittenfeld, Seelbach, Landsman and Dennard that broke Open Meetings laws. But most of what the texts and emails show is the mundane political work of trying to get another council member or the mayor to buy a particular idea.
Those efforts don’t always work out.
There are plenty of interesting tidbits about various City Hall business sprinkled in the texts, including commentary on FC Cincinnati’s coming West End stadium.
Sittenfeld ended up engineering a key public infrastructure deal worth $35 million that made that stadium a reality. But others in the group of five council members were much more skeptical of the stadium going into the West End.
In April of last year, as city leaders and the team were hustling to make a deal for the stadium, Sittenfeld texted Landsman to gauge his enthusiasm for the facility going into the West End.
“If 1 is a hard no and 10 is a hard yes — any sense where you are on the stadium stuff?” Sittenfeld texted.
“Probably a 1 on the West End,” Landsman replied. “Happy to talk Oakley and all in for Nippert. He (FCC President Jeff Berding) had so many chances to get WE on board, and they’re not there. But would feel better if he came to Council or submit something. After I thought about it a bit, and with folks looking at our calendar, I don’t like the idea of meeting with him. Especially if Jeff wants to cut some sort of deal. I trust you. Not him.”
A few months later, it was Landsman’s turn to get a chilly reply about an initiative he was working on, this time from Mayor Cranley about a pause Landsman was advocating for the city administration’s efforts to clear tent cities that had popped up downtown. Landsman said that the pause would give the city more time to draw up long-term solutions for addressing those experiencing homelessness. The mayor didn’t share his enthusiasm.
In late July, Landsman sent an email to Cranley asking if he would support his efforts.
“First, don’t allow illegal and unhealthy and unsafe tents in public right ways,” Cranley shot back. “Second, don’t impede law enforcement from doing their job and third, don’t treat illegal camps like a ‘neighborhood’ that should receive city services.
“Sometimes people don’t know what’s good for them,” Cranley continued in the email, “but either way, they don’t have a right to infringe on the public good.”
A Part-Time Job With Full-Time Duties?
All of this — the legislating, the meetings, the constituent work, the wrangling — takes place in what is regarded as a part-time job. That’s not realistic, many say.
“It’s not an 8-to-5,” Dennard says. “I work Saturdays, Sundays, evenings. The cool thing about doing it is that no two days are alike. Technically it’s a part-time job, but if you spend 20 hours a week doing this job, that’s a problem.”
Niven, the University of Cincinnati political science professor, agrees.
“This is the great irony of the situation,” he says. “We want this to be called a part-time job because we want these to be regular people just like us. But regular people just like us don’t have time to listen to people like us all day. If we called it a full-time job, it would get this out-of-touch aura to it — but it can’t be done any way but full time.”
And those full-time duties are complex, Niven says, and go beyond a simple metric like attendance or the number of motions a member files.
“This gets at the heart of representation,” he adds. “What they do isn’t just use their best judgment in line items on the budget. They respond to the needs of the city, and you can’t do that sitting in council chambers all the time.”
How active an elected official is when it comes to filing and passing legislation or taking meetings can be measured in a useful way, but how well those add up to the larger point — responding to the needs of Cincinnati — is ultimately up to voters to decide.
This story has been amended to reflect up-to-date membership on the Budget and Finance Committee.
This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 3, 2019.