Two former Cincinnati mayors made surprise last minute endorsements ahead of Tuesday s Cincinnati mayoral primary.
Former mayor Mark Mallory told The Enquirer he believes Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Aftab Pureval is the candidate that can bring needed change to City Hall.
Former mayor Charlie Luken told The Enquirer that Councilman David Mann s experience is what the city needs now.
Mallory and Luken know most of the candidates and have been quietly watching which of the two candidates will emerge to battle it out in the general election, but both said the city is at such a critical juncture they felt it was time weigh in.
Nick Swartsell / WVXU
Temporary eviction protections are now in place in Cincinnati, but council voted against a proposal Wednesday to make the change permanent. Council Member Greg Landsman introduced both ordinances after the Hamilton County Municipal Court decided to no longer enforce a national eviction moratorium.
The measure with temporary pay to stay protections will be in effect only as long as Ohio s pandemic state of emergency is active. It allows tenants facing a lack-of-payment eviction to halt proceedings if they can pay all back rent and fees. This is obviously one of the most significant things we can do to protect our children, to protect our families, to protect our neighborhoods, and ultimately ensure that landlords are made whole, Landsman said.
Vice Mayor Christopher Smitherman is chair of City Council s new Affordable Housing Subcommittee. I think it s important that if we re using numbers, we at least know that we re using 2010 numbers in 2021, Smitherman said in late March. And we don t know; those numbers could be bigger, those numbers could be smaller.
Michael Jones, a professor of economics at the University of Cincinnati, thinks the gap is quite a bit smaller. He researches labor and public economics, and says he got interested in housing after reading a WVXU article about council members wanting more recent data.
He decided to take a look for himself, and presented his findings to the subcommittee in mid-April. His analysis is based on a report published in March from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
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Mann for Mayor / Facebook
I have known Cincinnati mayoral candidate David Mann for nearly 40 years – as a City Council member, as mayor, as a one-term congressman, and as an old-fashioned Democratic liberal.
But the one thing I never thought I would see is conservative Republicans – a minority in this heavily Democratic city – going out of their way to vote for Mann for mayor in the six-candidate field that is on the May 4 primary ballot.
I am convinced it is happening. There is evidence out there that it is happening in the early in-person voting at the Hamilton County Board of Elections and in the early mail-in absentee voters who are carried on the voting rolls as Republicans.