Why Tarbell won't run

When Jim Tarbell gets an idea in his head, he just can't let it go.

He's still mad at Pat DeWine for backing out of a Tarbell-initiated plan to fire former City Manager John F. Shirey in 2001. He doesn't understand why Great American Ball Park isn't at Broadway Commons. And he gave up downtown's oldest and most consistently successful bar, Arnold's, to take over an Over-the-Rhine restaurant that's been, frankly, a disappointment.

So we can expect to hear this refrain from Tarbell for at least another four years:

I shoulda run for mayor.

Tarbell had been talking up his campaign at City Hall for so long that most people stopped taking him seriously months ago. But his roast at the Over-the-Rhine Chamber of Commerce last week injected him with a booster shot of enthusiasm, and he launched a one-week petition drive that ended Thursday without a trip to the Board of Elections.

In an interview on Fountain Square a half-hour before the filing deadline, Tarbell sat within misting distance of the landmark he calls "the Lady" and explained his decision.

"It's been literally minute to minute. I've never felt that there was a time when getting out and having a bully pulpit and talking about a vision was more important than it is now," he said.

"Part of it was Brenda," he said of his wife. "The prostate cancer issue is still out there." Tarbell was treated in 2003.

Tarbell said he's in the middle of trying to work out a deal to reopen Grammer's, the German restaurant he's owned for 21 years but which has been all but closed for half that time, either by selling it, leasing it, or finding a partner. The property has been in and out of foreclosure -- Tarbell defaulted on a city loan -- and Tarbell once owed $10,546 in back taxes on the property.

"I was willing to take the risk and leave, just to get the vision out there, to make people feel better about themselves," he said. But he said many of his supporters -- including his political party, the Charter Committee of Greater Cincinnati -- worried about losing him on City Council, where he's the most senior member.

"I grew up with council electing the mayor, and the system provoking a consensus that way," he said. The top vote-getter system, an invention of Charlie Luken in 1987, and term limits, which took effect in the mid-1990s, changed that. "The single biggest problem that we have in the system is that someone within council does not preside over council. The mayor should stay downstairs, where he or she belongs."

(Photo by Michael E. Keating/The Cincinnati Enquirer)