Catching Up With The Mayor

Mayor Mark Mallory's weekly press briefings, mostly gone since council has been on break, returned today.

Here's what Mallory has been/is up to:

1. He and Blue Ash officials finalized the deal to sell the Blue Ash Airport to Blue Ash. The deal will earn Cincinnati $37.5 million over the next 30 years, the mayor said, and the city is pursuing federal money to use to keep up the airport. The $37.5 million will go to city neighborhoods.

2. He's going tonight to the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce's discussion of its new Agenda 360, which Mallory says is a plan for a regional "shared, civic agenda." Next week, he said, representatives of Indianapolis' chamber will be here to compare ideas with Cincinnati representatives.

3. He has met so far with 44 neighborhood leaders to talk about Shop 52, his plan to get more retail into neighborhoods. His office is putting together a template for neighborhood representatives to use to tally each neighborhood's available commercial properties. From there, Mallory says his office will help each neighborhood try to get what they want in those spaces. "We want this to be neighborhood-driven. We want to know what they want, and then we're going to go after it."

4. Thursday, he'll be helping take Gov. Ted Strickland on a tour of "what's hot" in Cincinnati. On the list: the Aronoff Center for the Arts; Over-the-Rhine; Uptown, where the Uptown Consortium is working on redevelopment; and Government Square. They're also both going to the groundbreaking for the new School for Creative and Performing Arts in Over-the-Rhine.

5. He wants everyone at City Hall next Monday to wear orange and black in honor of the Bengals' appearance that night on Monday Night Football. It would be nice if everyone in the city, in fact, wore the colors, he said.

6. He had a great time last week in Ukraine, where he was among 11 mayors invited to be part of a trip that coincided with the 64th anniversary of the country's liberation from the Nazis. He was the only U.S. mayor. Kharkiv is a Cincinnati sister city.

7. His beliefs about the accuracy of the U.S. Census are well-known - he thinks the methodology is flawed. So it's no surprise, really, that he thinks the numbers that showed Cincinnati to be the third poorest city in the country also are flawed.

But, he said, "We are very serious about doing everything we can to improve our standing, no matter what it is." He cited the STRIVE program as an example of what to do. It aims to make sure kids are ready for college and equipped to do well there. Just creating more job opportunities won't help, he said, if people aren't ready to step into them.