CINCINNATI — Roughly three-quarters of the city’s nearly $2 billion annual budget flows through the police, fire and emergency communications departments. That is the money at stake in the fight over who really runs public safety here. A new opinion piece argues that for over two decades, city managers and mayors have failed their basic management duties.
The piece points to the fight over police contact-card data as the latest symptom. That data should have been analyzed years ago.
It wasn’t. The core problem, the argument goes, is structural. Before the Collaborative Agreement was signed, Cincinnati eliminated the safety director position.
The city manager was supposed to oversee police and fire more directly. In practice, that gave the mayor more direct influence over the chiefs.
The shift was deliberate. It was political. And it has not worked well.
The recent firings of Police Chief Teresa Theetge and Fire Chief Michael Washington stand as evidence. The opinion calls that chaos and expense. It is hard to argue with the word chaos.
Two public safety chiefs fired in quick succession is not a sign of a functioning system. The opinion piece makes a point of saying these failures predate the current administration.
This is not a new problem. It is baked into the city charter. The safety department and the director position were phased out.
Those functions used to be supervised by a dedicated professional. Now they are not.
The result is a political layer that has created chaos. The debate over the contact-card data became a proxy for a larger argument by nightfall. That larger argument is whether Cincinnati’s public safety oversight has become too political to function.
The opinion calls for a re-engineering of the city charter. The first step it proposes is for City Council to restore a functioning safety department and a safety director. That is a specific, concrete fix.
It is also a heavy lift. Re-engineering a city charter is not a quick process.
It requires political will. But the money involved is staggering. Police, fire and emergency communications together traditionally make up around 75% of the city’s budget.
That is roughly $1.5 billion a year. That is a lot of money to leave under a structure the opinion piece describes as fundamentally broken.
The piece does not offer easy answers. It lays out a diagnosis. The diagnosis is that the city has failed its own basic management duties for more than two decades.
The contact-card data is just the latest evidence. The firings of the two chiefs are just the latest chaos. The question the piece leaves hanging is whether City Council will act.
The opinion calls for restoring the safety department and the director. That would mean undoing a change made right before the Collaborative Agreement was signed.
That change was supposed to improve oversight. Instead, the argument goes, it gave the mayor more direct influence over the chiefs. And that has not worked.
Seventy-five percent of the city’s budget. Two chiefs fired.
Data unanalyzed for years. The stakes are concrete. The failures are structural.
The fix, according to the opinion, is a return to professional oversight. Whether that happens is an open question.
