City Council's work

Upon being elected last fall, the new members of Cincinnati city council declared they were committed to working together and ending what many considered petty bickering at City Hall. Council members, along with Mayor Mark Mallory, said they were going to “end the chaos.”

So how’s that going?

Here’s an indication: the in-fighting is so bad that when Mallory tried to re-appoint John Cranley to the board of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments Wednesday, two council members circulated Cranley’s attendance record to that board over the past four years.

This fight came a day after David Crowley asked Mallory to withdraw his name from consideration from the Transportation Improvement District, because Jeff Berding was trying to block the appointment. In his letter, Crowley said he just wanted to end the fight so council would concentrate on more important issues.

There have been at least three other nasty political fights in the past couple of weeks. The thing they all have in common: they involve members who supported different budgets in December, in what turned out to be one of the most divisive budget debates in memory – Berding, Leslie Ghiz, Chris Bortz, Chris Monzel, and Laketa Cole on one side; Cranley, Crowley, Jim Tarbell and Cecil Thomas on the other.

“I thought the action I took, withdrawing my name (from TID), it might set a tone of cooperation,” Crowley said Wednesday. “Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

Cranley’s record is pretty bad at OKI. He has missed 29 of 37 meetings since October 2002.

“To me, I was troubled by his attendance record,” Monzel said. “When we’re called on to represent the city of Cincinnati, we need to show up.”

Cranley was quick to point out that he almost always sends an aide from his office when he can’t attend a meeting, circulating his own attendance sheet with “R” (for “represented”) on the dates he missed.

Cranley said he’s worked hard on the board, concentrating on getting a study for a new Interstate 71 interchange at Martin Luther King for the Uptown Consortium, a grouping of the five largest employers in the Uptown area – Avondale, Clifton, Clifton Heights, Corryville, Fairview, Mt. Auburn and University Heights. The employers are Children’s Hospital, the Cincinnati Zoo, The Health Alliance, TriHealth and UC.

Mark Policinski, OKI’s executive director, thinks Cranley has done a bang-up job. He wrote a note of thanks to Cranley earlier this month.

“Put directly, there would not have been an Uptown study without you,” Policinski said. “You initiated the idea of the study, you secured the financing from the city which leveraged all other investment in the study and you did the heavy lifting on making sure that the interchange recommendation was going to get a fair hearing.”

A couple other issues council has been dealing with in the past two weeks:

On Monday, in Jeff Berding’s Rules Committee, he made a move to have an important quarterly report called the Quality of Life Index, introduced to council though the Rules Committee, instead of through Thomas’ Law and Public Safety Committee. The index deals with a lot of issues, most prominent policing matters, and has been introduced through the Law committee since before this board was elected.

Berding abandoned that effort Wednesday after a long, private discussion with Thomas before the meeting.

And last week, when Thomas had a national law enforcement expert in his committee, Berding read – over Thomas’ shoulder – the motion of support Thomas drafted of the expert’s ideas and quickly circulated his own version of the motion.

“There’s a lot of craziness going on,” Thomas said Wednesday. “This isn’t why I'm here."