Increasing the salaries for the part-time City Councilors and especially the mayor was proposed. The City’s unaccountably confused and confusing City Charter Review process functioned through a commission of unqualified appointees prompted by private interests desiring to reduce their need to request all but automatic variances to city zones and regulations-not by the victimized, taxpaying public. The same pattern follows with respect to the faint line that divides ethical violations from illegal actions. Evidently he thinks he is fooling someone. But it is the mayor himself who named it. The mayor’s office website brazenly proclaims, “Columbus has been named ‘Opportunity City’” during his term. “Columbus is America’s Opportunity City” takes the prize.
City Council trademarks slogans for spending without accountability or responsibility. The mayor’s accompanying slogan is Columbus will “spend whatever it takes” to make city safe from crime.” But there are no proposals or funds allocated to “spend whatever it takes.” Empty rhetoric corresponds to the absence of developed programs, budgets, timetables, or means of evaluation: That is the mayor’s, indeed, the Columbus Way. As with his approach to affordable housing, he is arithmetically challenged. With respect to guns and crimes more generally, the mayor tosses around numbers with no respect to their reliability or significance. The mayor and police chief mention federal gun surveillance programs but never provide evidence of their impact. The latter often takes the form of evening basketball games for teens. City Councilors confuse law enforcement with crime deterrence and prevention.
Instead, a small number of already overworked and understaffed police are paid overtime to patrol police parks where gun violence is not occurring. In the face of mounting gun violence and homicide, and of numerous cases of police violations (under seldom-mentioned federal Department of Justice investigation), there is no serious program of responsible gun-buybacks. Making no effort to provide the human and financial resources urgently demanded by a depleted and demoralized force, he did not attempt to renegotiate the City’s contract with its unusually powerful chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. Instead, he materially weakened the Columbus Police Department by offering buyouts of $200,000 to 100 officers indiscriminately of their status as “good cops” or “bad cops.” A firm believer in leadership by sloganeering, Ginther is unusual both in the unoriginality of his slogans-from “Columbus is America’s Opportunity City,” with no concern for defining “opportunity” or for whom or professing support for equity but not joining Mayors Organized for Racial Equity, to repeatedly declaring gun violence “a public health crisis” but doing nothing serious to meet the crisis. Let’s begin with the incumbent mayor who unselfconsciously follows his predecessors in disdain for his publics and his responsibilities. In fact, Columbus’ diverse publics have never been the focus of its City government and its overlapping elected and unelected governing class, a number of whom live outside of the city’s boundaries from Worthington to New Albany and beyond.įollowers of mayor and City Council are not surprised by lack of concern about ethics or the law. As I have explained in earlier essays, Columbus City government is unusual in lacking in expertise and relevant experience, organization for operations to serve its publics. In this essay, I argue that these critical omissions, on the one hand, and commissions, on the other hand, are part and parcel of the same lack of a modern urban foundation and sense of itself and its publics. As Ohio increasingly takes center stage nationally for corruption permeating its state government, 21st century Columbus takes center stage as its corruption capital. These are historical anomalies, unlike other cities of its age and size in Ohio and across the nation.Ī central element in Columbus’ absent core is the combined extent of mismanagement and lack of management, and both real and likely corruption. I return to its absence of typical city reforms toward representative city government in the second half of the nineteenth century and its missing Progressive Era of the early 20th century: that’s capital P, unlike our present-day search for a 21st century progressivism. As I continue my search for Columbus’ history and identity, I regularly rediscover the City’s and the city’s willful lack of the foundational elements for a modern city.
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