By Brenna R. Kelly
The Cincinnati Enquirer

FLORENCE - It will be a city within a city.

Florence plans to build a Safety City, a miniature city designed to teach kids in five Northern Kentucky counties safety lessons in a hands-on environment.

"Any opportunity we can take to educate our children, to show them firsthand the right and the wrong way, the safe way to do things, we want to do that," Mayor Diane Whalen said Wednesday while explaining the project to a group of business people the city hopes will help fund the Safety City.

Plans have second- and third-grade classes from Boone, Kenton, Campbell, Gallatin and Grant counties making daylong field trips to the city. There are 53,000 children between ages 3 and 10 in those counties.

Florence police Officer Dave Piper brought the idea to the city after visiting the Safety City in Paris.

Florence plans on about two acres for the "city," with miniature roads, electric cars, buildings, traffic lights and railroad crossings. One building would house a classroom, a kitchen (where kids would learn about kitchen dangers) and a bedroom that would fill with smoke to teach kids how to get out of a fire.

The Florence police department would staff the city during the school year, but it would be open year-round for parents to take children through.

"Can you think of a better place to bring your kid when you are teaching them to ride a bike?" Piper said. "It's a nice, secure area, all fenced in. ... You can teach them to ride a bike the right way, on the right side of the road."

Whalen said the Safety City would fit nicely into the city's campus, which includes a new aquatic center and skate park.

"We've changed our focus," Whalen said, "and our focus is family, our focus is recreation, and our focus is making this a great place to live."

The $1 million city would be built with a $400,000 federal grant that Florence expects to get from an appropriations bill now in Congress, and with $200,000 in city money.

But the city needs to raise about $400,000 more. To do that, the city will sell the naming rights to the educational building and other pieces of the city.

Businesses can also "own" a section of the city for $15,000. For $10,000 businesses can have one of the buildings in the city modeled after their building, like a bank or hardware store. They can also have their names on the cars, appliances, gas stations or other things in the city.

"This is all new, we have never done this before," Whalen said. "My biggest concern is that is gets over-commercialized, but I think we can do it and do it tastefully."

E-mail bkelly@enquirer.com