Dan Horn

dhorn@enquirer.com

If Cincinnati wants to realize its dream of building parks and offices atop Fort Washington Way, it may need to take a page out of Pittsburgh's playbook.

The Steel City, which just won a $19 million federal grant to build a similar project over one of its highways, inspired Hamilton County officials Monday to launch their own bid for help with the construction of several mammoth decks over Fort Washington Way.

Cincinnati and county officials have been talking about building decks over the one-mile stretch of I-71 for more than 15 years, seeing them as a way to add almost four acres of prime real estate while also connecting downtown to the riverfront. But so far, no one has figured out how to pay for them.

Enter Pittsburgh. That city landed a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation in January to cap a stretch of I-579 that slices through its downtown.

If Pittsburgh can do it, reasoned county officials, why not Cincinnati? County Commissioner Todd Portune said county administrators and the engineer's office are now drafting a proposal to apply for the same grant Pittsburgh got, known as the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant, or TIGER.

"We believe we qualify just as well, if not better, than Pittsburgh," Portune said.

Asking is the easy part, of course. Last year, the U.S. Department of Transportation received 585 applications seeking $9.3 billion. Of those, 40 won grants totaling about $500 million.

The last project in the city to land a TIGER grant was Cincinnati's streetcar, which got almost $16 million.

Another hurdle is coming up with enough local and state money to match a portion of the federal grant, most likely covering at least 20 percent of the project cost. Finding that kind of money won't be easy in an era of tight budgets, especially for a project that could ultimately cost $90 million.

County officials, though, say they will try a go-it-slow approach by asking for only about $25 million, enough to cover the first of the four decks needed. The goal would be to develop the land atop the first deck and use the tax revenue generated from those developments to bankroll work on the next deck, and so on, until all four are complete.

The decks were envisioned as part of The Banks project when it was conceived in the mid-1990s to bring apartments, restaurants, parks and offices to the riverfront. The city even spent about $8 million to bolster the foundation along Fort Washington Way so it could one day support development on the decks up to four stories high.

"The decking will go a long way to doing what we always intended to do," said Commissioner Denise Driehaus.

County administrators said they're in the early stages of researching a grant application now and couldn't say when they might apply.