"None of your business"

If you've gotten those calls encouraging you to attend public hearing on funding a Hamilton County jail, the voice on the other end of that automated telephone call is Prosecutor Joe Deters.

But if you want to know who paid for the calls, don’t ask Sharonville attorney David Langdon, who admits he “facilitated” the calls.

“None of your business. None of your business. None of your business,” Langdon said today when asked about how many calls were made, how much the calls cost and who paid for them.

Langdon is perhaps best known as the attorney for Citizens for Community Values, the anti-pornography activist group and the COAST, or Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxation.

At first, Langdon said the Deters calls “may have been free” but later admitted a private company was hired to make the phone calls. But he wouldn’t say who hired the company, the name of the company, the cost or who paid.

Langdon’s clients, he said, were Deters and “The Campaign for a Safer Hamilton County,” the group formed to push for a quarter-cent increase in Hamilton County’s sales tax that would fund a new 1,800-bed, $225 million jail.

Deters, though, said that was untrue.

“I have not signed on to any committee yet,” Deters said.

Deters was asked to be the voice of the telephone calls by Mike McNamara, a former employee in Deters’ office but now the campaign manager for Phil Heimlich, the Republican incumbent Hamilton County commissioner up for re-election this year – and the man who proposed the sales tax increase to pay for the jail.

The recorded message wound up with Langdon.

Langdon said he is not affiliated with Heimlich’s re-election campaign.

Tonight’s hearing is at 3011 Harrison Ave.