Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken's opening words Tuesday to members of the new Economic Development Task Force were optimistic, but his tone was skeptical.

        “I've still heard for 20 years that it's difficult or impossible to work with the city,” Mr. Luken said, urging the 17-member panel to consider regulatory reforms to rejuvenate the city's flagging development efforts.

Luken

        Still, Mr. Luken admitted that he resisted early attempts to convene the 17-member panel. “I don't want to all of you to spin your wheels,” he told them. “I don't want to hold out false hope that this will be an easy process.”

        Since then-Mayor Arn Bortz overhauled the Economic Development Department 20 years ago, there have been at least a dozen efforts to reform the process, Mr. Luken said.

        So why should this effort be different? Mr. Luken said there's more brainpower on this task force, led by Fifth Third president George A. Schaefer Jr.

        The panel's mission: to help determine which incentives are most effective in attracting and retaining jobs, and to make recommendations on how to cut City Hall's sometimes unwieldy bureaucracy.

        But Mr. Schaefer's co-chair, City Manager Valerie Lemmie, cautioned that the panel's role will be limited. It will not seek regional development, she said. It will not “prepare a strategic plan to lay out grandiose plans for the future.” It will not focus on neighborhood-scale development.

        As Mr. Schaefer put it: “We're not going to bring the Hallmark store to Madisonville.”

        Though Tuesday's task force meeting was introductory, panel members wasted no time in asking pointed questions of Ms. Lemmie.

        “I just want to know when we knew IBM was leaving,” asked Keith Glaser of Excalibur Development. “Do we have an early-warning system?”

        IBM is reportedly leaving its downtown office for Blue Ash in December, taking 250 jobs, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier.

        Ms. Lemmie admitted that the city often doesn't know there's a problem until it gets federally mandated plant-closing notices.

        “But there's another issue. Knowing is one thing. Keeping them is another,” she said. “Sometimes you can be working with someone for years and still lose them, because what they want is not something you can produce.”

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