Randy is an award-winning urban planner who founded UrbanCincy in May 2007. He grew up on Cincinnati’s west side in Covedale, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s nationally acclaimed School of Planning in June 2009. In addition to maintaining ownership and serving as the managing editor for UrbanCincy, Randy has worked professionally as a planning consultant throughout the United States, Korea and the Middle East. After brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, he currently lives in the Daechi neighborhood of Seoul’s Gangnam district.
Are you tired of all the knobs, levers and gizmos in your car? Also, you would do open-heart surgery on yourself, so why are you driving yourself? Trains are the most efficient, economical and best investment. It’s obvious.
Those are a couple quotes from this video that cleverly covers the issue of transportation and how high-speed rail boast clear advantages over other means of transportation, and it does it all through the Mad Men scope. Enjoy.
The Cincinnati Park Board has been pursuing a more sustainable future over the past few years. Projects have included solar trash compactors, geothermal wells, rain gardens, invasive non-native plant removal, rain barrels, wind turbines and the development of solar panels among others.
As a result of their efforts, the Cincinnati Park Board is now the owner of the largest number of solar-powered structures in Ohio. Additionally, their 2010 Solar Panel Installation project has earned the organization first place honors from the Ohio Parks & Recreation Association (OPRA) and a Green Award of Excellence.
“Cincinnati Park Board’s use of solar voltaics in their parks is laudatory and quite amazing,” said Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land. “It is possibly doing more than any other park agency in the country.”
Elsewhere across the United States the Center for City Park Excellence points to two solar-powered fountains in Kansas City, solar-powered concerts in Austin and solar-powered lights in Santa Fe. In Atlanta, Harnik notes, that officials with the Atlanta Beltline have installed a 35kW system in a 7.5-acre park there that should make the park economically neutral.
State officials say that the awards were judged in a two-tiered process which included a panel of parks and recreation professional from around the state in addition to the OPRA’s board of directors. Cincinnati park officials earned the award specifically for their aggressive solar energy project funded by $451,000 in federal grants, $300,000 in state grants and additional private funds that made the installation of solar photovoltaic panels at 13 park facilities possible.
Ault Park, Krohn Conservatory and International Friendship Park are three of the locations for solar installation that are contributing to an anticipated 166,900 kWh energy production. An operations headquarters at 3215 Reading Road is the largest production location generating an estimated 50,000 kWh.
Going forward the Center for City Parks Excellence sees the use of solar energy and other renewable energy sources within city parks as a unique opportunity, but that additional studies and analysis should be conducted from these early adopters. In particular, Harnik says that it will be interesting to find out how much money Cincinnati’s effort makes or loses, and how much energy is fed into the grid.
Friendship Pavilion rooftop solar panels photo by UrbanCincy contributor Thadd Fiala.
Streetcar supporters were outraged when they heard Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) was considering pulling as much as $52 million in state support from the Cincinnati Streetcar project. Such of move would have left the project with a financing gap and would have resulted in reduced scope or delayed construction. But according to some, a move of that nature by the governor may not carry legal merit.
The premise for cutting the funds for Cincinnati’s modern streetcar system is that the State of Ohio is facing an $8 billion budget deficit, and state leaders are examining many ways to cut that figure. But according to Ken Prendergast, executive director of All Aboard Ohio, those funds awarded to the Cincinnati Streetcar would not actually impact the state budget.
“The funds to be cut are federal transportation dollars. If they are not used on the streetcar, then they would be used on a transportation project with a lower TRAC ranking,” Prendergast explained. “In other words, Kasich is giving Cincinnati a false choice.”
Prendergast is referring to the Ohio Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Transportation Review Advisory Council (TRAC) which was first established in 1998 to depoliticize the allocation of transportation funding. TRAC awards money based on a merit score, and the Cincinnati Streetcar earned 84 points which placed it as the highest-scoring transportation project in the entire state.
Local officials close to the Cincinnati Streetcar project believe Governor Kasich is attempting to strip the funds from the streetcar and reallocated them to the $2 billion Brent Spence Bridge replacement which scored a paltry 44 points on TRAC’s transportation list. The other reality is that the money could go to the Eastern Corridor plan which had three components scoring 34, 39 and 48 points – all well below the Cincinnati Streetcar’s state-leading 84 points.
“Our governor is making a false argument that pulling back this federal money will save the state money,” said Prendergast. “The streetcar funding has nothing to do with the state’s deficit. If it is not used for the streetcar, it will go to a lower-ranked Ohio road project.”
Two separate studies estimate that the modern streetcar project will stimulate approximately $1.5 billion of new investment in Downtown and Over-the-Rhine, or roughly 15 times the cost of the streetcar project. The Cincinnati Streetcar’s second phase Uptown is also expected to make large economic impacts, and has scored a 71.5 points on TRAC’s list.
“Why is our governor against redeveloping Cincinnati’s downtown and Over-the-Rhine areas with the streetcar? Steel rails offer a far superior path to jobs and growth and clean air than yet another asphalt road pitted with potholes,” concluded Jack Shaner, deputy director of the Ohio Environmental Council.
According to Prendergast, the end result may be a another legal battle for the controversial governor. He says that at attempt to move the funds from the streetcar to another, lower-ranking transportation project, that Cincinnati officials would have legal grounds to sue the state for not following its own criteria in awarding federal transportation funds.
Modern Streetcar in Cincinnati photograph by UrbanCincy contributor Thadd Fiala.
Contrary to the U.S. Census Bureau’s own annual estimates and revisions, Cincinnati and Hamilton County both lost population from 2000 to 2010. Hamilton County, Ohio’s third most populous, lost 5.1 percent of its population which is now 802,374. Meanwhile, the City of Cincinnati lost 10.4 percent of its population over the same time period.
The numbers are sobering for a mayor and city that had thought population declines were beginning to level over recent years. Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory even led the charge to get out higher response rates for the city, but his efforts fell well short of the 378,259 person goal with only 296,943 people counted in the city during the 2010 hard count.
During the 2010 Census count, it is estimated that only 70 percent of households responded in the City of Cincinnati which fell below the 74 percent national average. Inner city neighborhoods saw signficantly lower response rates across the state.
While the primary city in the Cincinnati metropolitan statistical area lost population, the region as a whole continued to add people. The largest percentage growth took place in Warren County which now is home to 212,693 people. Butler County also saw gains and remains the region’s second largest county with 368,130 people.
Elsewhere in Ohio every major city lost signficant population except for Columbus which grew 10.6 percent and now has 787,033 people within its city boundaries.
UrbanCincy will update this report over the coming days as we are fully able to analyze these numbers. There is a lot of data out there and we will break it all down, so stay tuned.
Complete 2010 Census counts are to be released later this week for Ohio, but in advance of that new 2010 population estimates were released by the bureau yesterday. The county-level data for the Cincinnati metropolitan statistical area (MSA) shows anemic population growth for the now 2.2 million person region.
Of counties with more than 50,000 people, the fastest growers were Boone County, KY (40%), Warren County, OH (34.7%) and Clermont County, OH (10%). Over the last decade the region’s largest county saw its population increased by just more than 10,000 people giving Hamilton County, OH an estimated population of 855,340 in July 2010.
No county in the 17-county region studied experienced a population loss during the time frame, and over the ten-year period the region grew by an estimated 8.2 percent adding more than 170,000 people.
These estimates come out just days before Ohio’s full 2010 Census count is to be released. Other cities has felt sobering results from those hard counts that came in notably lower than the annual estimates the U.S. Census Bureau had been releasing.
Whether these estimates turn out to be accurate or not, a trend one can note is that the counties adding the most people are those close to the core of the region. While lower percentage increases exist in the region’s largest counties, they continue to add population to their base.
Leading up to the 2010 Census counts, Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory had been a prominent spokesperson for cities suggesting undercounts within inner cities and first-ring suburbs. Those efforts led to several population revisions for Cincinnati and area municipalities, but in a matter of days we will find out whether the mayor’s goal of counting 378,259 people in the City of Cincinnati will hold up or not.