Every time I drive over the half-patched potholes on Clifton Avenue near my home − an experience so jarring it gives me trauma-filled flashbacks to my first "over 40" physical − I wonder what our public servants do all day at City Hall.
I mean, I know they’re having meetings.
I see them on Citicable − committees and subcommittees seemingly without end, many with august-sounding names like the Committee on Equitable Growth, Performative Recycling and Thoughtful Composting. (That only part of that title is a joke is, sadly, the joke).
And I know City Hall has no shortage of staff. I see them at these meetings with their earnest PowerPoint presentations, theoretically improving the lives of Cincinnatians with each mouse-click.
need Mayor Aftab Pureval in town 24/7
And yet − our streets are a mess, our primary floodgate malfunctioned, our sewers can’t handle a good hard summer rain, and our police department remains woefully understaffed, overworked and, by most accounts, utterly demoralized. The PowerPoints aren’t moving the needle.
So what, if anything, is being accomplished at 801 Plum Street these days?
I found the answer in The New York Times.
I was perusing it last week when I stumbled upon a Kennedy-esque executive portrait bathed in hagiographic lighting, a young executive with a squarish jaw staring resolutely into an uncertain future. I startled myself by bursting out, "That’s (expletive deleted) Aftab!"
And indeed it was our beleaguered mayor, once again courting national media attention by doing something − nay, anything − other than fixing those Clifton Avenue potholes.
Climate refugees meet Connected Communities
As for the article itself − I urge you not to read it. It is a puff piece so bilious I found myself praying for a paywall. But for the sake of this piece, I must relay that the Times praised Mayor Aftab for his prescient work preparing Cincinnati as a future home for "climate refugees."
If you haven’t the foggiest idea what a "climate refugee" might be, here are the fruits of my Google search. A "climate refugee" is someone who will − in some distant sci-fi future − abandon his coastal home to avoid floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, Sharknados or whatever other wrath of God stuff might befall him. The idea is that such a person will scamper inland, one step ahead of the surging oceans, and buy a landominium in Mt. Airy.
In its most galling passage, the article breathlessly fetes Mayor Aftab’s visionary work in passing his "Connected Communities" zoning reform so private developers will build cheap housing in the event some "climate refugees" actually make their way here.
Clearly someone in the Pureval administration has been bingeing vintage science fiction flicks − and doing so after a trip to the nearest dispensary. The idea that such a speculative initiative (this being the most charitable term I could conjure under the circumstances) might serve as the centerpiece of Pureval’s mayoralty leaves me − and my pothole-rattled pelvis − speechless.
It also runs counter to what our mayor’s been telling city residents for the past five years. He’s long pushed "Connected Communities" as a solution to our home-grown housing crisis, not an exercise in doomsday prepping. And I thought the recent "1,000-year rain" which demolished basements in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout was supposed to be the result of climate change (and not the city’s derelict maintenance of the Duck Creek floodgate). So it was strange to hear Cincinnati being described as a climate-change oasis to a different audience. It was almost like he was engaging in political opportunism or something.
Now, I’m not a climate change denier. I’m sure the fumes we’re pumping into our atmosphere can’t be good, and I’m all for clean energy and the like. But as a member of Generation X, I’m still waiting for that Canadian acid rain and the swarm of South American killer bees which were supposed to hit Ohio backyards around 1978. And I must note that Al Gore’s been awfully quiet lately. I’m just saying it seems unwise to be basing our housing program on yet another environmental disaster prophecy which might not come true.
But then again, Mayor Aftab’s "climate refugee" policy doesn’t feel like policy at all. It feels like performance and self-promotion, a repackaging of prior wrongheaded initiatives for the national audience he has been so desperately courting lately.
How about governing Cincinnati first?
Love him or hate him, our mayor’s apparent North Star − New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani − appears focused on quality-of-life issues in the Five Burroughs when not fecklessly inserting himself into Middle Eastern politics. And love him or hate him, former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley was laser-focused on bringing investment and jobs to our urban core. These initiatives were designed to help real-life Cincinnatians in the here and now, not in doomsday prep for some Isaac Asimov future which might never come to pass.
But, alas, tending to such mundane concerns pales against the thrill of a national publication declaring you to be ahead of your time. And so our city continues its slide into a slow managed decline. But on the bright side, some ambitious young person at the Visitors and Conventions Bureau might one day be able to market the Clifton potholes as an urban Mammoth Cave. I could set up a spelunking equipment rental stand in my front yard, maybe sell some bottled water.
So at least there’s that.
Steve Goodin lives in Clifton and is a local attorney. He is also a former Cincinnati City Council member, assistant Hamilton County prosecutor and member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Fix Cincinnati before saving the climate refugees | Opinion
