By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Moertl

Peg Moertl, Cincinnati's development director since 2000, tendered her resignation to the city manager Friday after a series of management fiascoes in her department.

She will leave the city Dec. 4, two weeks after the scheduled completion of an internal city audit of the Department of Community Development and Planning.

In a three-page resignation letter to City Manager Valerie Lemmie, Moertl pointed mostly to her successes: 1,200 new housing units in the city, the renovation of Findlay Market and a complete rewrite of the zoning code, among others.

But Moertl also candidly spoke of her "disappointments."

"I wish we all had not suspended disbelief in the face of a young basketball player's plan for a theater relic on Vine Street. Like the mayor, I would like to see more progress made on that entire main artery through Cincinnati's heart."

The Empire Theater scandal, in which former Taft High School basketball standout Lashawn R. Pettus-Brown is still eluding the FBI after allegedly running off with $184,172 in city money, is the most famous of the department's recent debacles.

Moertl said she had a "good staff" that inherited a lot of problems from decades past.

"I didn't have any illusions about this being a lifetime job," she said. "I came with the intention of wanting to get some good things done. And you and I both know that I've lasted longer than my predecessor."

Moertl was a vice president at Bank One in 2000, when former City Manager John F. Shirey appointed her to lead what was then the Department of Neighborhood Services after a previous series of management scandals.

Since then, Lemmie has moved the economic development and planning departments to Moertl's bailiwick, giving her responsibility for everything from social services to zoning. In April, the mayor's Economic Development Task Force criticized what it called the "mission creep" of the department.

Moertl's resignation came just two days after a joint committee of City Council grilled her for more than an hour about mismanagement of the city's Rental Rehabilitation Program.

The program has come under fire recently after a series of development debacles, including Huntington Meadows in Bond Hill and the Glengate Apartments in Pleasant Ridge.

Harshest in his criticism was Councilman Pat DeWine, who said the city was playing a game of "whack-a-mole" community development.

"I'm embarrassed when I talk to people and they say 'How does this keep happening?' " DeWine said.

"What I see is a department that certainly doesn't share my philosophy, doesn't share Council's philosophy or most of our taxpayers' philosophy of self-accountability for tax dollars," DeWine said. "What I see is a continual pattern of lax oversight and poor management."

And while he didn't mention names, DeWine said, "Maybe we need to start having people re-interview for their jobs. I'm ready to start from scratch."

Moertl said Friday night that her resignation had been in the works long before, but she didn't deny that the political pressures at City Hall were a challenge.

"At the bank, it was rare that the board of directors would take the staff to task in the newspaper," she said.

Moertl, 46, said she was staying through December to help the city with the transition and the audit, which was ordered by the city's Internal Audit Committee last month. She said she was looking forward to moving to a job in a local nonprofit development entity, which she would not name.

Councilman David Crowley, a member of the audit committee, said it was never his intention to assign blame and was surprised by the suddenness of the resignation - if not the move itself.

"I think Peg is a good manager and a good administrator. She's one of our better ones," he said. "And she has, with the possible exception of police, the most difficult culture to deal with."

Crowley said the department probably has too many missions and "boutique" programs to manage any of them effectively.

"Bringing in another person, without looking at the load on that department, is not going to do a lot of good," he said.

Lemmie said any decision on a replacement - or even the structure of the department - would wait until after the Nov. 21 completion of a management audit.

But she promised any new department would have a "strong neighborhood component."

"I applaud her for the great job she did and the leadership she has shown under some very difficult circumstances," Lemmie said.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com