Sunday, October 17, 1999
Hold the pork - council goes on a pre-election diet
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Last week's Cincinnati City Council meeting provided a valuable lesson for all those who yearn to climb aboard the City Council gravy train and rake in some of those dollars some council members seem so eager to pass around:
Get there before the re-election campaign starts.
Before Labor Day, when this year's council campaign got off the ground, a majority of the present City Council was in a generous mood, doling out taxpayers' dollars to practically anybody who walked in the front door.
Now, with a dozen non-
incumbent candidates breathing down their necks, trying to make council itself the issue in the council election, council members have gotten religion. They've sworn off pork, at least for the next 16 days.
Last Wednesday, Republican Councilman Charlie Winburn, whose office has become the place for one-stop shopping at city hall, waltzed into council with an ordinance to spend another $325,000 to build an indoor running track at $3.9 million neighborhood recreation center that is to be built in College Hill.
A lot of people in College Hill apparently want it, and a lot of people in College Hill have been known to go to the polls on election day, so Mr. Winburn was more than happy to oblige.
A few months ago, this would have sailed through council faster than a resolution proclaiming Motherhood Day.
But times have changed. Some of the incumbents, it seems, have had their skulls dented in recent weeks by nonincumbent candidates hammering them over their spendthrift ways, so they decided, to Mr. Winburn's chagrin, that it was time to stop the Santa Claus act.
So, one council member after another made speeches on the floor of council about how it would be imprudent at this time to spend money on an indoor running track and deferred a decision until later.
Such diligent stewardship of public dollars was not to be seen a few months ago when seven of the nine council members found $14.6 million lying around to spend on a list of 48 pet projects.
Only two council members voted against that package — Democrat Todd Portune, who wants to be mayor, and Republican Phil Heimlich, who consistently votes against spending proposals and who also would like to be mayor.
The rest gladly coughed up $14.6 million for, among other things, an “executive health club” for the exclusive use of chubby kids, money for a “memorial to slain children” that we are still waiting to see, $10,000 to the Human Relations Commission so it can conduct a study of what it ought to be doing with its $432,370 budget, and $150,000 to a fellow by the name of Marvin Gentry so he could buy a beauty school. The beauty school idea flopped a few months later after Mr. Gentry failed to give the city the required paperwork on his project.
Then, a few months later, the council incumbents gave another $50,000 to the West End's Genesis Redevelopment Inc. so it could reorganize itself, even though the fact that past city audits of Genesis found unexplained payments, employee “loans” and the use of tax dollars for calls to a psychic hot line.
Genesis and the other beneficiaries of city council's largesse got in under the wire, before the campaign ads started and before voters started paying attention to the council campaign and scratching their heads over how the current nine were spending their tax dollars.
City council, it seems, didn't need a psychic hot line to figure out it was time to shut off the spigot.
Howard Wilkinson's column runs Sundays. Call him at 768-8388 or e-mail at hwilkinson@enquirer.com.
