“Here to my right is Acting City Manager Rashad ... Rashad?”

        “Young,” the 26-year-old city administrator said.

        “I'm sorry,” the mayor said. “I forgot your last name.”

        Rashad Young, the assistant city manager who is running the day-to-day affairs of the city while City Manager Valerie Lemmie is attending a conference in Switzerland this week, took the mayor's gaffe in stride.

        “We really just started working together this week,” Mr. Young said afterward. “He just knows me as Rashad.”

        Indeed, Mr. Young is remarkably unflappable for a man who just turned 26, was recently married and has been thrust into the No. 3 administrative job in a city where even his hiring was tinged with a note of controversy.

        When Ms. Lemmie tapped him in April from Dayton City Hall — where he had served with her as an assistant city manager since he was a college intern — Mr. Young's arrival raised eyebrows at 801 Plum St.

        “Two weeks before I got here, so much was made about how young I was and how much I made,” said Mr. Young, who makes $103,000 a year. “But it's funny. Once I got here, no one had anything to say about it.

        “I realized that people were going to ask questions about my salary. I just wish there would have been more questions about, "Is he competent? Is he capable?' I'd be happy to answer those questions.”

        With Ms. Lemmie out of town and Mr. Young at the helm of the city for the first time, Mr. Young has had to answer some other questions this week.

        Those questions concerned the city's handling of the investigation into Lt. Col. Ron Twitty, who is suspected of giving a false report about damage to his city car.

        Did the city administration underestimate the response from the African-American community about the suspension of the highest-ranking black police officer?

        “In local government, you have to deal with the race issue from time to time. But Cincinnati is a whole different ball of wax,” said Mr. Young, who is black.

        “We did underestimate the response. Does that mean we should have or could have handled things differently? No.”

        Another question: Should the administration have done a better job of keeping elected officials in the loop?

        Mr. Luken said he was “embarrassed” that he wasn't told of the investigation until three hours before the news conference, when he was on his way to Columbus to play golf. Had he known, he would have stayed in town and called community leaders to head off a controversy, Mr. Luken said.

        “I'm sensitive to where the mayor's coming from,” Mr. Young said. “On the merits, I think we made the right decision. We should have handled it differently from a publicity standpoint. But even there, I think our rationale was a good one. The rumors had started. The Enquirer was making phone calls. We had to get it out there.”

        Name game: So is the mayor's memory lapse on Mr. Young's last name any reflection on the job he's doing at City Hall?

        A spokesman for Mr. Luken said Rashad Whatshisname shouldn't worry.

        “It's no big deal. Charlie couldn't remember my last name for two months,” joked Brendon Cull.

        Update: Mark Gissiner, the acting head of the Office of Municipal Investigation, was the city official responsible for translating the city's Web site into six languages.

        He apologized this week for quirks in the translation software that resulted in City Council members' names being mistranslated. Pat DeWine, for example, became “spank DeWine” in German.

        “Have you looked up "pat' in the dictionary? There's like 17 definitions,” he said. “And yeah, one of them is "spank.”'

        Mr. Gissiner said there were bound to be some problems translating 30,000 Web pages.

        City Hall reporter Gregory Korte can be reached at 768-8391 or e-mail gkorte@enquirer.com.
       

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