From Mallory's Weekly Press Briefing.....

Here's some of what Mayor Mark Mallory had to say Wednesday at his weekly meeting with reporters:


1. He's having meetings with officials to organize the Student Recovery Teams he mentioned in his State of the City speech. He hopes to announce them in April. These are the teams he said would help schools, specific students and their parents.

2. He's also in the process of putting together the census Complete Count Committee, which will work on getting residents to understand the importance of an accurate census and how they can help make the next one so. But the group will take a different approach - they'll be working on ways to account for all the more than 378,000 people the private study by Social Compact said live here, rather than just counting as many people as possible. (That number's a lot higher than the 332,000 estimated by the Census last year as living in Cincinnati)


He's planning to put on the committee people connected with difficult-to-count groups, like homeless people, college students and lower-income folks.


"This is our opportunity to get this number right," he said.


3. I meant the current rain when I asked about whether his office had taken any complaints about the weather, but he answered about the snowfall two two weeks ago and turned it into an opportunity to praise cleanup efforts. He praised City Manager Milton Dohoney's summer planning session last year as the reason the city was more prepared and cleaned up quickly after the large amount of snow. He also attributed it to Dohoney's plan to use any city truck and any city employee who's a licensed truck driver to help with snow removal, rather than just the usual snow-removal people. "That's what got it done," he said.


As for the fact that Dohoney now says he needs more than $2 million extra dollars to cover this year's snow removal so far, the mayor said: "An operation like that costs."


4. As for the county's idea that the city pay $250,000 toward the county's costs for housing inmates jailed on city charges, he said if his memory serves, running jails is a county function. "It's an interesting concept," he said of the city chipping in. "But no."