Cincinnati Citizens Government Academy: Week 2

This article is a follow-up from last week's entry on the Cincinnati Citizens Government Academy.

Last night I attended the second week of the Cincinnati Citizens Government Academy. This week's course was primarily composed of drier topics, but I was very interested in the aspects and areas they covered, including: building permits; developer assistance; city planning; vision and direction; transparency in process; multi-jurisdictional cooperation and marketing the city to developers and corporations.

While I won't recount all of the discussion which ensued during the evening I would like to note quite a few important (to me) details:

  1. The Department of City Planning was disbanded in the mid-nineties after having been one of the best planning departments in the country just a few years prior. It was reformed during Autumn of 2007 with Carl Graves at the helm who had worked for Baltimore, Atlanta, DC and Cincinnati (in no particular order) and who is already very familiar with the city).
  2. The former head of the code violations & inspections department retired in Autumn of 2007. Milton Dahoney Jr, Cincinnati's City Manager (discussed last week) took the opportunity to place this additional division under Mr. Graves' wing to increase efficiency for two departments that work frequently with each other. This also consolidated city departmental staff into a primary location.
  3. The city has many many blighted properties which need to be torn down. These properties are often either abandoned, stale or condemned - BUT the city doesn't have the money to tear them all down or refurbish the important or historic ones and relies on grants from state and federal government to do so. According to our correspondent for the code violations group, they run out of money for properly reclamation and demolition long before they run out of properties to reclaim or demolish.
  4. The city of Cincinnati has 52 distinct neighborhoods/boroughs, many of which have their own flair and feel. The Planning and Permits departments work with the local councils to assist in up and coming projects, feed [gap] financing into important or watershed projects and handle requests for joint development assistance ventures.
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Tags: politics cincinnati government academy council permit planning urban borough 52

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