Cincinnati City Councilman Charles Winburn supported the "strong mayor" initiative that reached the ballot in 1995. He opposed a different version in 1996. Last month, he proposed that council turn back the clock to when council members chose the city's mayor themselves.
Now Winburn is championing the Build Cincinnati plan to directly elect Cincinnati's mayor, a plan that council has been debating for placement on the May 4 ballot.
The twists and turns of Winburn's support parallel the long journey of charter reform in Cincinnati over the past four years. No less than six plans have been offered since 1995 to change the way the city's mayor is selected (see chart on page 16). Many of those plans also suggested changing the way city council is elected, changing how long council members serve and changing who the city manager reports to.
They all have one thing in common: ending the current system of city government. And, ultimately, they've all gone to the same place: nowhere.
After almost a year of public meetings and consensus building, Build Cincinnati is on the verge of offering its plan to city voters. The group has support from the leaders of the Republican, Democratic and Charter parties as well as leaders of key organizations like the League of Women Voters, AFL-CIO, NAACP and past charter reform efforts.
Six council members -- three Republicans, two Democrats and one Charterite -- have said they will vote to place the plan on the ballot, the super majority needed in such ballot initiative cases. But at the first public reading of the ordinance on March 2, Councilman Jim Tarbell indicated his support might be wavering.
Two more readings were scheduled for March 3 and 4, with a council vote expected after the final reading.
Unlike some recent unsuccessful plans, the Build Cincinnati effort leaves council makeup and election methods untouched. The plan focuses on how Cincinnati's mayor is elected and what his or her enhanced duties are, leaving the contentious debate over council elections -- districts vs. field race, 9X vs. proportional representation -- to another day.
On the surface, the plan before council seems to have the best chance of any recent effort to pass muster with the public. But questions remain: Will Democrats step up to support it? Will African-American leaders overcome the feeling some have that the plan makes it harder for blacks to be mayor? Will the public agree that city government needs radical restructuring? And will a directly elected mayor solve anything?
Exhausting efforts at change
When Cincinnati City Hall was reformed in the 1920s, power was divided among council members, with the mayor's position becoming largely procedural and ceremonial. A city manager was brought in to run the city's day-to-day operations in what was hoped to be a non-political, businesslike fashion.
There have been just two significant changes to the system over the years. In 1957, council's proportional representation election method was changed to the current 9X method. And, in 1987, the method for choosing a mayor was changed from having council pick him or her from among its members to giving the position to each election's top vote-getter.
In the 1990s, however, pressure has built for overhauling the system. Important development projects -- Fountain Square West, new Reds and Bengals stadiums, a new convention center -- stalled for years. It took two years for council to live up to the city's 1996 agreement -- outlined as part of Hamilton County's stadium sales tax hike -- to provide $5 million a year to Cincinnati Public Schools. Coalitions formed on council that effectively created gridlock. And spending on council campaigns skyrocketed.
An article in the September 1997 issue of Governing magazine claimed Cincinnati was one of four U.S. cities with "nobody in charge" where "it seems to take forever to get anything done." Ineffective governments in Dallas, Miami, Kansas City and here were holding them back from competing with neighboring cities, the article said, because those governments couldn't make quick decisions in an emerging global marketplace.
"Effective local government is not about 'rescuing' a city but about helping it live up to its potential," Bob Gurwitt, the article's author, told CityBeat at the time. "Cincinnati needs to think about moving into the future."
The first attempt at such movement occurred in 1995, when two plans competed for public attention. One, backed by the Republican Party and the Cincinnati Business Committee (CBC), called for ditching the existing council-city manager structure in favor of a directly elected executive mayor to whom a city administrator would report. The other, called Citizens for Constructive Change, advocated a directly elected mayor with just a few new powers and kept the city manager reporting to council.
The CBC plan became Issue 1, the only item on a special city election ballot in August 1995. When voters saw the plan as an attempt by local corporate leaders to impose their will on city government (even more than they already did), Issue 1 was soundly defeated.
Meanwhile, Citizens for Constructive Change had collected enough petition signatures to place its plan on the November ballot. But after seeing the Issue 1 results and recognizing a need to seek a broader base of support, the group declined to file the signatures with the clerk of council.
Members of that group went on to form the Cincinnati Forum for Charter Reform, which met with leaders of 20 or so organizations (the three local parties, Baptist Ministers Conference, NAACP, CBC, Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce) to try to reach consensus on a reform plan. After meeting from September 1995 to May 1996, the forum lost two key groups: the Republican Party, which objected to the forum's plan to return council elections to proportional representation, and the League of Women Voters, which objected to its plan for partisan primaries in the mayoral race.
After a year's work at consensus building, the forum's plan basically fell apart.
Some members of that effort then picked up the ball and created Cincinnatians for Charter Reform, which proposed a much milder plan with a non-partisan primary for mayor followed by a run-off between the top two finishers. It left council elections as they were.
Cincinnatians for Charter Reform mounted their own petition drive to get on the city ballot and succeeded in collecting enough signatures by the March 1998 deadline. Republican Party insiders Thomas Brinkman, Christopher Finney and David Langdon mounted an effort to declare the signatures invalid -- and it worked, halting the group's attempt to give local voters another shot at government reform.
Build Cincinnati formed shortly afterward. Its first order of business was to get three of the city's key political powerhouses -- the Democratic Party, Republican Party and NAACP -- on the same page. After another year of twists and turns, the plan now before city council emerged.
Councilman Todd Portune, who did not support any of these previous reform efforts, decided last weekend to back the Build Cincinnati plan -- becoming the crucial sixth "yes" vote. He says his change of heart comes as much from exhaustion over years of debate as it does from any desire to change the current system.
"Not a year has gone by recently without a charter reform proposal being put in front of council," Portune says. "Basically, I want closure on this issue. This proposal has unfolded after what seems to have been a strong effort to reach out to all constituencies. I think it's time the people of Cincinnati tell us whether they like our current form of government or not. One way or another. Then we all need to live with the decision."
Building a coalition or a monster?
Last summer, Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Tim Burke, Hamilton County Republican Party Chairman Mike Allen and the NAACP's Cincinnati Branch President Milton Hinton announced they were forming the steering committee of Build Cincinnati. They tapped some senior politicians -- Gene Ruehlmann, Gov. John Gilligan, Bill Bowen -- to help lead the effort.
Anything the Democrats and Republicans agree on immediately raises suspicions, so the coalition had to work extra hard to give the impression that their planning process was inclusive. Three public hearings and private meetings with more than 75 organizations followed throughout 1998.
The result, Build Cincinnati leaders say, was a complete turnaround in their plan details.
The group's first draft of a charter reform plan included an executive mayor with direct supervision of a city administrator, who replaced the city manager; direct election of the mayor after partisan primaries; and an eight-member city council elected from districts.
Local lawyer Johnathan Holifield, who represents the NAACP on Build Cincinnati, says that original plan grew from meetings he had with several African-American council members.
"I talked with Dwight Tillery, Minette Cooper and a little with Charles Winburn, who wanted an executive mayor position and no city manager coupled with districts for council," Holifield says. "The feeling was that if you increase power for the mayor, you should increase accessibility for candidates to city council. With districts, you run in a much smaller area and thus need less money to compete."
But after he held a number of meetings with African-American groups, he says, it became apparent that council districts and an executive mayor were racially divisive issues that would threaten to derail the entire Build Cincinnati effort. And, as the NAACP's representative to the group, Holifield says he couldn't support what he calls "the politics of race."
"Some people were afraid that districts would be drawn in such a way as to minimize the number of African Americans who could be elected to council," he says. "So we dropped our council ideas and decided to focus on the mayor's job. Then many in the community were concerned that, like in 1995, our executive mayor proposal was an effort by the CBC and the Republicans to run the city. So we modified that idea, too."
The modifications still did not please everyone. Although Burke is on the steering committee, local Democrats have been slow to embrace the Build Cincinnati proposal. At a Jan. 30 meeting, party leaders tabled a formal vote on the plan until it was finalized.
What emerged in February was a plan that borrowed ideas from earlier plans -- direct election of the mayor from the top two finishers in a non-partisan primary; a four-year term for the mayor; maintain term limits -- but gave the mayor the power to hire and fire the city manager, with council approval, and to veto council legislation. The city manager would report to both the mayor and council under the plan.
Council was left alone in the plan: Terms are still two years, and members are still elected in the 9X field race.
David Crafts, an integral member of earlier reform efforts with Citizens for Constructive Change and Cincinnatians for Charter Reform, calls the Build Cincinnati plan a compromise that has some flaws. But he supports it and thinks it has the best chance of overcoming objections from the city's various special interests.
"I support most of the plan details," he says, "and I can live with the other points. I'm glad they separated out the council district idea, which is very controversial. Now we'll just have to get out and work to educate voters on the plan."
Crafts and Holifield are among a handful of Cincinnatians who, in one group or another, have been pushing for city government reform since 1995. The Build Cincinnati proposal marks their best -- and maybe last -- opportunity to convince the public of the need for radical reform.
"The charter reform people are exhausted from all this," Portune says. "This (plan) is their last chance." ©
