BY LUCY MAY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
City and county officials acknowledged Friday that they may be putting the cart before the horse on riverfront development.
The problem: Cincinnati city officials started out with a vision for a bustling entertainment development on the city's central riverfront, built on a series of garages to serve the city's parking-starved core.
While Hamilton County could be six months away from deciding how to build the garages, the city has no development plan and no way to pay for new city streets that are supposed to feed into the garages.
"It doesn't make sense to me to build a garage for a development without knowing what the development is," said Hamilton County Administrator David Krings during a meeting about riverfront parking options.
Even so, County Commission President Tom Neyer Jr. said that might be exactly what the county must do to meet its parking obligations to the Bengals, the Reds and the Crown and avoid paving the entire riverfront into a giant parking lot.
"We're going to have to make some assumptions and move forward," he said.
"There's a number of difficult issues to be resolved," he added after the meeting. "But I'm confident they will be."
The first of those issues is what kind of development to add to the central riverfront mix.
Cincinnati City Manager John Shirey and city Economic Development Director Andi Udris had pushed for a family entertainment district that would have packed the riverfront with restaurants, shops and a 14-screen movie theater.
City Council killed that plan in April, with Mayor Roxanne Qualls dismissing it as the "malling of the riverfront."
Within a month, Mr. Shirey was working on a planning strategy that included the city managers of Newport and Covington.
About the same time, City Councilman Charlie Winburn, Ms. Qualls and City Councilman Dwight Tillery announced they were working on a planning process, too, and it was different from Mr. Shirey's. Newport and Covington officials said they wouldn't sign on to anything until they were sure all the officials in Cincinnati were moving the same direction.
Riverfront development has been stalled ever since.
Without development, Mr. Udris said Friday, the city doesn't have the taxes that officials were counting on to pay the city's share of roadwork.
"The issue is: How do we pay for the street costs? " he said. "How do you get to the garages if you don't have the streets?"
Mr. Neyer said that's certainly a "hole" in the city's financing plan. But he and County Commissioner Bob Bedinghaus expressed confidence that the city and county can work it out.
City Councilman Phil Heimlich pledged to work with council to get riverfront planning back on track.
"We need to move forward with agreeing on a planning process for developing that section of the riverfront," he said. "It should be done in conjunction with Northern Kentucky."
Mr. Winburn said he, too, wants to move riverfront planning forward. In fact, he might push for a vote on a riverfront planning process as early as next week, he said.
But Councilman Jim Tarbell said he doesn't think city council -- or county commissioners -- should develop further plans for the riverfront until after Nov. 3, when Hamilton County voters cast a ballot on the Reds stadium issue.
All the county's riverfront parking options under study assume a new Reds ballpark will be built on the riverfront, at the site next to the Crown known as Baseball on Main or the "Wedge."
Mr. Tarbell, a champion of the rival Broadway Commons site at Broadway and Reading Road, argues city council couldn't possibly consider a riverfront development plan until after the stadium vote.
"We can't really have a solid riverfront plan when the biggest rascal in the mix is falling short," he said.
