By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Some Cincinnati neighborhoods complain that they're always fighting City Hall. Others fight among themselves.

About 500 community activists will attend the second annual Neighborhood Summit this weekend, each wanting to know what they can do to get City Hall to pay attention to them. "Empowering Neighborhoods" is the theme of this year's event.

Last year's summit - the first in two decades - brought city officials and neighborhood leaders under one roof to try to improve a perceived breakdown in city-neighborhood communication. Some suggested some ground rules for neighborhood groups to bring some consistency to the process.

But the 52 neighborhoods have styles as different as the council members who represent them.

In Charterite strongholds like Clifton and North Avondale, longtime community activists remember when Richard Krabach was city manager and can find their way around the back corridors of 801 Plum St. Quiet phone calls to the appropriate city officials can often fix problems before they get to a public hearing at City Council.

In more working-class neighborhoods like Northside and Price Hill, the strategy is to pack a bus with residents and drive them down to City Hall for a show of strength. When they speak up, it's usually very loud and very public.

"Some will choose to be more political about how they do it, and others less," said Councilman David Pepper. The neighborhoods he likes are the ones that ask little from City Hall.

"Madisonville, Evanston, Walnut Hills. They don't interact within council much, but they've really figured out their own ways of getting things done," he said. Those neighborhoods have organized block watches, Citizens on Patrol, and new programs where volunteers go to the courthouse to keep track of people arrested in their neighborhoods.

And then there are neighborhoods whose clout at City Hall suffers from disorganization and in-fighting.

Winton Hills doesn't have an officially recognized community council. Mount Auburn's meetings are often more rancorous than City Council's. English Woods has been virtually wiped off the map.

Others have frequent leadership changes. Recent community council elections in Sedamsville and Westwood have been as intriguing as the Iowa caucuses.

"There are places where people don't feel an ownership, where there's regular turnover of community council leadership. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know the basics of conducting meetings. They don't know how to deal with City Hall. They're not aware of the issues in the city that might affect them," said Rick Dieringer, the president of Invest in Neighborhoods, an umbrella group that distributes city funding to 50 community councils.

Joe Morgan, president of the East Westwood Improvement Association, said the biggest problem in his neighborhood isn't crime or blight or litter or anything else City Hall has control over. It's apathy.

"People just don't realize that if they just band together they could do a lot of wonderful things," he said.

It's a common problem in working-class neighborhoods - especially where the homeownership rate is lower.

"Every community is different," said Elliot Ellis of South Fairmount, a retired city employee who serves on the board of Invest in Neighborhoods. "We have a lot of people who are transient. That's not a dirty word, but South Fairmount has a lot of rental properties - and subsidized rental props. People live here a few months and move on. And most of the people who volunteer their time to become involved are property owners."

Rarely do neighborhoods work together to fight City Hall. But one of those rare occasions happened last year, when the Cincinnati Planning Commission rewrote the entire zoning code for the first time in 42 years.

Activists from Winton Place, Mount Washington, Hyde Park and North Avondale came together to form the Cincinnati Neighborhood Zoning Task Force.

"They'll listen to you and just go on and do what they want in some cases," said Gerry Kraus, who's been a member of the North Avondale Neighborhood Association since it started in 1960. "You have to be like a barnacle. And make sure you cover all your bases."

When dealing with City Council, there's strength in numbers, she said.

"I like to think our council people are intelligent and if you give them a good, reasonable argument, they'll do the right thing," she said. "Unless there's a counterbalancing force. And they're usually invisible. There are forces always behind the scenes trying to reverse the good intentions of City Council. They make threats, except not with their votes, but with their dollars."

Indeed, many neighborhoods complain that the zoning code has a pro-developer, anti-neighborhood bias. Hyde Park's Carl Uebelacker said City Hall has a "divide and conquer" strategy in dealing with neighborhoods.

Attempts to form a permanent organization to work together across neighborhood boundaries are short-lived. A task force created last year with representatives from Downtown, Linwood, Madisonville, Oakley and Sayler Park broke apart, deciding that it was better to "stay loose and informal."

"A lot of people saw it as just another time commitment," said Dieringer. "It's a real fine balancing act, figuring out what's best for specific neighborhoods and what's best for all the city's neighborhoods. And some neighborhoods said, 'I don't need to be part of a larger group. I can go to City Hall and lobby on my own.' "

Dieringer said there might be another factor at work: "In the past year or year-and-a-half, the City Council and the city administration have really done a better job of listening to communities. And the Neighborhood Summits are a good example of that."

City government is also trying to take the politics out of neighborhood funding decisions through an initiative to be unveiled Saturday.

The Neighborhood Indicators Project - a joint program of the city, Xavier University's Community Building Institute and the Local Initiatives Support Corp. - will attempt to track homeownership, population, crime rates and other factors in the city's 52 neighborhoods.

"Right now, we're making purely political decisions about who gets what and when," said Pepper, the former Neighborhoods Committee chairman. "I want to see more decisions in the next few years based on real, hard data. So it's not just a squeaky wheel, or a neighborhood where a councilman happens to be from."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com

If you go

Registration is required to attend the Neighborhood Summit at Xavier University's Cintas Center, 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.

For more information or to complete a registration form, log on to www.investinneighborhoods.com.

Sponsors: the city of Cincinnati, Invest in Neighborhoods Inc., Grassroots Leadership Academy, Xavier University.