Commitment to Core Services

Everyone deserves access to great parks, frequent and responsive public services, and top-class public safety. Trash pickup, road repairs, public safety, and other core services are the backbone of any thriving city – these services are how most people interact with their local government and are vitally important to the safety and lived experience of Cincinnati residents.

Unfortunately, years of disinvestment led to Cincinnati struggling to deliver basic, core services that citizens rely on. And too often, the zip code you grew up in dictated whether or not you had access to these. We must work to change this.

What We’ve Done: 

From the moment I stepped into my Council office, I went to work making investing in core services a Council priority. This involved investment in people –  not just infrastructure. The first motion I sponsored addressed workforce shortages and excessive overtime among our firefighters by properly funding our future fire recruit classes.

In the time since, I’ve made certain that we are making strategic investments in city departments; additional funding went towards our Buildings & Inspections Department to streamline permitting and licensing speeds, and to improve code enforcement in our neighborhoods. In our annual and carryover budget processes, this Council unanimously approved a record-setting amount of money to address deferred maintenance (incl. funding for parks, streets, and other public facilities).

Work to be Done:

While we took an aggressive stance on deferred maintenance, there are still hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects that need to be completed in the following decades. The longer we wait to address them the more expensive they get. A shrinking city cannot pay for itself. Therefore, we must continue to verify that these budgetary changes are systemic, and as we grow in population, we leverage these gains toward restaffing our vital city departments and paying back the bill for rebuilding our city’s most essential resources.