Cincinnati's chief labor negotiator resigned Friday.

Monday, she established a campaign committee to run for City Council.

Leslie Ghiz, a 33-year-old Republican lawyer from Hyde Park, hopes to be the first former city administrator to win a City Council seat since former development director Nell Surber.

(Actually, she hopes to do better than that. Ms. Surber was never actually elected to City Council, but was appointed in 1992 to a seat vacated by Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell. In a 1993 election bid, Ms. Surber finished a dismal 16th.)

As the city's chief labor negotiator, Ms. Ghiz negotiated and administered union contracts with the four unions of city employees. That is, until the Fraternal Order of Police contract came up last year. City Manager Valerie Lemmie found an outside law firm to represent the city, and that contract was voted down by City Council over a dispute about the selection of assistant police chiefs.

Ms. Ghiz (pronounced with a hard "g") said she wouldn't express an opinion on that controversy while the contract is still in fact-finding, but made clear that she would add a healthy dose of opinions to the campaign before it's all over.

"I could give you a list of problems with the administration that's as long as I am," she said. "The administration does everything it can to put off council. City Council can be harsh, there's no doubt about that. But this council is too far removed from what's going on in the administration."

Now in private practice at Freking & Betz, Ms. Ghiz is not a cookie-cutter Republican attorney. As a labor lawyer, she has a healthy respect for unions. Her grandfather, Clarence Meadows, was the Democratic governor of West Virginia from 1945 to 1949.

And she once dated Democratic Councilman John Cranley, though she said they're now "just good friends."

Class warfare: Is there trouble brewing among the plaintiffs in the Collaborative Agreement?

In a secret motion filed two weeks ago, plaintiffs' attorney Al Gerhardstein asked to be taken off the racial profiling lawsuit that led to the historic Collaborative Agreement on police-community relations.

Though it remains sealed by U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott, sources familiar with the motion said Mr. Gerhardstein cited "irreconcilable differences" with his co-counsel, Ken Lawson of the Cincinnati Black United Front and Scott Greenwood of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

Mr. Gerhardstein has always been the most level-headed of the collaborative lawyers, preferring to work on volatile racial issues behind-the-scenes rather than on talk radio.

True to form, he did not return several phone calls inquiring about this motion.

But past and future partners say they've patched up their differences and the motion will be withdrawn.

"All that has been reconciled. We're all one team, and we're moving forward," Mr. Lawson said.

So what were those now-reconciled, irreconcilable differences?

"That will stay between us," Mr. Lawson said.

Word of the week: Bimonthly - once every two months.

Rules Committee Chairman David Pepper proposed last week that committees meet in the neighborhoods bimonthly. That's six meetings a year.

Mr. Pepper, a Yale grad, now says he meant to say semimonthly, or twice a month. That's 24 neighborhood meetings a year.

Strange but true: The Rules Committee spent an entire two-hour meeting Monday debating ways for City Council to spend less time in meetings.

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