Good morning all. Did you go to the Neighborhood Summit over the weekend? If you didn’t, you missed the city nerd Super Bowl. It was great.
It was also probably pretty awkward for some attendees who work at City Hall. I was at the opening dinner Friday night when news broke that Mayor John Cranley has reportedly asked City Manager Harry Black to resign. We have everything you need to know about all that in our story here, but the long and short is: Black refused to step down and now it may come down to a vote by Cincinnati City Council — the results of which are unclear. Civil rights groups have come to Black’s defense. Cranley’s been tight-lipped about the whole deal and has been out of town for a U.S. Conference of Mayors event. Black and several other high-level city leaders were at the Summit this weekend, as planned, and, as you might imagine, no one there was talking about the drama playing out on Plum Street.
• Will white nationalist Richard Spencer be forced to pay more than $10,000 in security fees so he can hold an event at the University of Cincinnati? We won’t know for more than a year. Southern Ohio’s federal district court will hold a jury trial March 18, 2019 regarding a lawsuit from a Spencer supporter over UC’s fee. Georgia State University student Cameron Padgett brought that suit after he requested Spencer’s appearance at UC. Padgett and his attorney say the fee represents an unfair barrier to speaking for Spencer and violates his First Amendment rights.
• The City of Cincinnati may have struck a deal that will allow it to preserve the historic Evanston site of King Records. The Cincinnati Planning Commission March 16 will consider a land swap that would give Dynamic Industries, which currently owns the King site, another plot of land to expand on in exchange for the historic property. In addition to King’s legacy as the launch pad for James Brown, Bootsy Collins and other music legends, it’s also significant as one of the country’s first integrated work places where blacks and whites worked side-by-side in the 1950s.
• The Southern Ohio Regional Transit Authority Board of Trustees will now hold some of its meetings in the evenings to better accommodate public attendance and comment, according to a statement from the transit authority today. The next board meeting, for example, will take place at 6 p.m. at the downtown office of SORTA’s Metro bus service (602 Main Street, 12th floor). Future board meetings will rotate between 8:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. The board’s meetings take place the third Tuesday of every month.
• Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, will be in Cincinnati tomorrow to check out Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s art and music therapy programs. The second lady is on the board of Tracy’s Kids, a national nonprofit using art therapy to help treat children with cancer. This is the second high-profile visit for Children’s: First lady Melania Trump visited the hospital earlier this year to learn more about how the hospital provides treatment for opioid addiction.
• March Madness is upon us and local teams are in the hunt for tournament glory, but let’s fast forward to this time in 2022. Will Cincinnati host the men’s tournament that year, or not? It all depends on whether the aging U.S. Bank Arena gets an upgrade — and we may have to decide that soon. The NCAA gave Cincinnati the right to host games in the first two rounds of competition that year, but stipulated that the city needs a better arena if it wants to be the host. U.S. Bank’s owner, Nederlander Entertainment, says the only way to meet college basketball’s standards is to tear down the current, four decades-old venue and build something new. They want to pay for that by extending for another six years the quarter cent sales tax currently used to pay for the renovations of Union Terminal. The Hamilton County Commission hasn’t weighed in on whether they’ll put such a move on a ballot for voters, but commission president Todd Portune says he’d like to see a decision one way or another soon — the new facility would take roughly two years to build. As if we don’t have enough stadium drama to think about.
