opinion

Cranley: I will listen more, work with council

John Cranley is the mayor of Cincinnati, elected in 2013.

In city politics, the buck stops with the mayor, and I take personal responsibility for the park levy loss. I take everything about my job as your mayor personally because my wife, Dena, and I are raising our family here and we want this to be the best city it can be.

I am proud of the campaign, the vision of investing in green space and our park system. Most of all, I say thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who helped the campaign.

However, I never wanted to raise taxes without the voters’ permission; therefore, I will heed the voters. Since taking office, we have balanced the budget by prioritizing police, fire, sanitation and road paving, and we will continue to do so within our existing resources.

The voters have spoken, and I hear them loud and clear.

Like any loss in life, I am seeking to learn from this campaign in order to better serve you.

While the parks levy resulted from listening to longstanding neighborhood requests from around the city, the results clearly show that a more robust conversation was needed related to what the citizens’ highest priorities really are for their tax dollars. I will be reaching out and listening even more.

Parks Director Willie Carden and the Park Board have delivered the spectacular Washington and Smale Riverfront parks in recent years and did so by leveraging enormous donations of private dollars. They should be heralded for their tireless efforts. However, the Park Board and department can and should improve its procedures moving forward. The city has started an independent audit of all park funds and it will be my recommendation that all park resources – even private dollars – be subject to the same rules and regulations as city tax dollars.

Just as important, I will also increase my efforts to work collaboratively with City Council, and I am hopeful that they will do the same.

When we have worked together, the results have been amazing. By hiring firefighters we have essentially ended brownouts to ensure that if you have a medical event, an ambulance will be there quickly. We have hired roughly one hundred cops to combat violence. We balanced the budget two years in a row, and have improved the city’s credit outlook. Facing an unfunded pension liability of $800 million, we made the tough decisions to negotiate a solution that required sacrifices by all. We have reprioritized road paving and will increase road paving by 60 percent in 2016. We are delivering on the basics within the means we have. And our city’s renaissance continues with thousands of jobs that we have helped bring to the city, like GE on The Banks and Mercy Health in Bond Hill.

Cincinnati is doing well and tends to do even better when we all work together.