Chris Seelbach for City Council

I had a chance to spend over an hour today, mostly one on one, talking with Chris Seelbach.  Chris is running for Cincinnati City Council.  I'm convinced that he has the right ideas about what City Council should be doing.

I asked him about the budget crisis.  I was glad to hear him say that we can't have a budget that contains little more than police and fire.  We have to pay for other services, for urban planning, for quality of life.  And we currently can't do this.  No great city invests solely in police and fire.

So far so good.  These have been my thoughts exactly.  So I asked him how he would balance the budget.  We have about 1100 police.  A few years ago, City Council voted to add 100 police officers.  The Police Chief said they were not necessary and would not make the city safer.  So Chris didn't say how he'd make the transition, but reducing the staffing by 100 or so over time by attrition or other means would provide huge savings.  According to Chris, it would be enough to get us in the black so that we wouldn't be constantly closing community swimming pools and Recreation Centers, canceling recycling programs, and failing to invest in improving the quality of life.

Again, I agree.  I've read about the Police Chief's comments.  He really DID say that he did not want the extra 100 police officers.  For City Council to provide staffing that the Chief of Police did not want seems to me to be a criminal waste of taxpayer dollars.  They did it to get re-elected, and what did I get?  Yard waste that I have to drive to the dump.

I asked Chris about development in Over-the-Rhine and other lower income communities.  I asked him what he thought about the tradeoffs between progress and displacement of the poor.  Chris lives in Over-the-Rhine.  He said that the development there has not been perfect, but it beats the alternative of out-of-control crime in dilapidated housing, the alternative of historic Germanic architecture crumbling into ruins.  He said that the development has been done with careful planning to provide a mix of housing prices so that the community has room for both the working poor and for the professionals who are moving into the area.

Again, I agree.  I've lived in Cincinnati for decades and have welcomed the development in Over-the-Rhine.  I believe that we need to have neighborhoods with mixed income levels so that the wealthier citizens are more likely to empathize with and support their less fortunate neighbors.

Finally, I asked how Chris felt about proposals to have Hamilton County take over policing in Cincinnati to save money.  Chris felt this would just be a tactic to lower police salaries because Hamilton County is non-union.  He was also concerned, as am I, that the Hamilton County Police Department would not be subject to the "Collaborative Agreement".  This is the agreement that was hammered out after the Cincinnati riots over 10 years ago to improve police-community relationships.  It's been widely successful, and I would not want to go back to the tension that permeated the city during the riots.