City Council has taken no vote. No public hearing is scheduled. The charter remains unchanged.
But the opinion published Monday makes a specific demand: restore the safety director position that Cincinnati eliminated more than two decades ago. The position was phased out just before the Collaborative Agreement was signed.
At the time, the city declared the city manager would oversee police and fire directly. That shift, the opinion argues, handed the mayor more direct influence over the chiefs. The result, it says, is political management of public safety that has not worked.
Police, fire and emergency communications together consume roughly 75 percent of the city’s nearly $2 billion annual budget. That is three-quarters of every tax dollar Cincinnati spends.
Until the safety department was phased out, a dedicated professional supervised all three. Now there is no such supervisor. The opinion calls that a structural failure.
The recent firings of Police Chief Teresa Theetge and Fire Chief Michael Washington are cited as compelling evidence. The chaos and expense of those firings, the opinion argues, flow directly from the absence of a professional safety director insulating the chiefs from political pressure. The city manager and the mayor now sit closer to the chain of command.
The opinion says that proximity has not served the city well. No council member has publicly endorsed the idea.
No one has introduced a charter amendment. The opinion makes clear the failures predate the current administration. Mayors and city managers, not the police department, have owned those responsibilities since the Collaborative Agreement was signed.
The contact-card data that sparked the current debate should have been analyzed years ago, according to the opinion. That analysis never happened.
The opinion calls for a re-engineering of the city charter. The first step it proposes is straightforward: City Council should vote to restore a functioning safety department and a safety director. That would require undoing the structural change made more than twenty years ago.
It would require the mayor to give up some direct influence over the chiefs. It would require the city manager to report through a professional safety director on police and fire matters. Council has not responded.
The mayor’s office has not issued a statement. The city manager has not commented.
The debate over the contact-card data has become a proxy for a larger argument, the opinion states. That argument is whether Cincinnati’s public safety oversight has become too political to function. The firings of Theetge and Washington happened.
The costs are real. The budget numbers are public.
The opinion piece simply connects those dots and says the structure is broken. Whether anyone in city government will act on that argument remains an open question. No one has moved yet.
