The Hamilton County Green Party has endorsed Chris Smitherman for Cincinnati City Council , just like we did back in 2011.
Councilman Smitherman has been outvoted most of the time in the past 2 years so we are also suggesting a vote for other candidates who can improve our chances of getting the correct actions taken and decreasing the chances of the wrong actions taken. We would like to create a Cincinnati City Council where no one party has the majority and the various parties and independents will have to work together to improve the City. The candidates we suggest you consider voting for are:
For Cincinnati City Council
Independents: Chris Smitherman & Angela Beamon
Charter: Vanessa White & Kevin Flynn
Republicans: Amy Murray & Melissa Wegman
Democrats: David Mann & PG Sittenfeld
for mayor : John Cranley
You can vote for up to 9 candidates for City Council, but the fewer people you vote for, the more powerful each vote becomes.
In choosing this list of candidates, the Green Party is most concerned about the financial future of Cincinnati if the City goes bankrupt we could lose our parks and other physical assets as well as lose all city funded programs that matter to us. The Green Party is asking people to look past the party labels, to the candidates themselves to get the best elected officials possible.
– Our biggest looming debt/concern is the over $850 million shortfall in the funding of the Cincinnati pension fund (but we suggest a NO vote on Issue 4 in November 2013.)
– We remain concerned about the financial games being played and the money being wasted to build the short OTR section of the streetcar and know that this little section will likely be the only section ever built (since there is no possibility of federal or state funding and the city does not have the money for it either), so it is just a waste of money and will give real mass transit a bad name plus will financially hurt the bus system.
– We think that the city’s parking system can best be managed by the City employees without sending a huge cut of the profits from parking to the Port Authority &/or other outside investors.
– The Democrats who have been running Cincinnati for the past generation have tried to bring us the ‘trash tax,’ red light cameras to produce revenue, to transfer our police department services to the County and in general have been supporting the sale of public assets &/or privatizing public services.
The Green Party has been working with the NAACP, COAST and other groups to prevent these negative actions from taking place over the past several years. The candidates we suggest have shown the best record for opposing these actions and will give our best chance to take positive actions to secure the financial future of Cincinnati.
Regarding the Cincinnati School Board race, the Hamilton County Green Party picked the following candidates based on their direct contact with the classroom. We believe that since teachers work directly with the students, they are the most knowledgeable source of input regarding what will make our school system better. With that in mind, we are recommending a vote for the following candidates for Cincinnati School Board:
Betsy Shank
Martha Good
Sally O’Callaghan
Victoria Staughn
Regarding the other issues on the Cincinnati ballot , We recommend a NO vote on Issue 4 – the pension fund
Regarding the Hamilton County ballot , we recommend a YES vote on both:
Issue 1 Library tax renewal
Issue 2 Zoo tax renewal
Update ———
On Saturday, October 19, 2013, the Port Authority met to decide how much of a loan to take out against Cincinnati’s parking assets and is hiring two companies to work the to be basically privatized parking system that has been operated by the City of Cincinnati with City employees at a profit. Some downtown Cincinnati streets are now being closed to work on relocating utilities for the Street Car that there has never been a fair vote to see if assuming this debt for construction and operation is supported by the citizens of Cincinnati.
These two agenda items have been the clear agenda of the current Democrat majority on Cincinnati City Council.
The Port Authority has stated that they will be ones to keep any money earned by the Parking System above what is needed for operation and debt service, as opposed to the money being used for Cincinnati operating costs &/or pension debt servicing. Using the “dictator mayor” system that current mayor candidate Roxanne Qualls was the spokesperson for when it was on the ballot, Mayor Mallory has denied a vote to the members of Cincinnati City Council to over turn the parking vote they made back in the spring when they were told that not supporting this proposal would cost the city its police and fire department employees and other fabricated problems. Both the turning over of the parking system and the light rail vote that was then turned back into a vote for the street car have been the products of lies and the Democrat majority on Cincinnati City Council.
The question now is why the urgency when there is an election that is just a few weeks away that will be a referendum on both of these major proposals and the direction the city is headed. There is only one reason for the current “powers to be” to be acting this way, they must be thinking that they are about to lose the election to the saner voices in Cincinnati and they are trying to tie their hands so that they can permanently send Cincinnati off in a direction that will benefit the small, self-serving special interests of a few who don’t even necessarily live in the City of Cincinnati but want to profit from the rest of us. These are the same special interests who have put their pork, pet projects above the funding of the Cincinnati Pension fund which have opened the door for the Wall Street group to take away the City’s pension program (vote no on Issue 4 to say NO to this bad idea.) These are the same special interest groups who want to turn our city’s assets over to Wall Street in the form of the parking lease deal.
Hamilton County has had to make some bad decisions (like selling off Drake hospital) because the rich special interest (yes Roxanne Qualls was a spokesperson for that one too) convinced Hamilton County to purchase two sport stadiums in an very unfavorable deal for the tax payers. Party politics a usual is not good enough when Cincinnati is in such trouble and it is for that reason that the Hamilton County Green Party coordinating committee decided to support the candidates for Cincinnati City Council and the Mayor of Cincinnati that we thought would act in the best interests of Cincinnati as a whole. We chose our candidates based on their past actions and what we believe will be their future actions based on their opposition to the Streetcar and Parking deals and other fiscal matters. The city council and mayoral race are technically non partisan but some of the other political parties in Cincinnati have endorsed in this race, including the Democrat party which endorsed 10 persons in a race where voters are only allowed to cast 9 votes. The Charter party has endorsed people from both the Democrat and Republican parties, but their reason for being has been gone since they supported “breaking the Charter” when they supported the “dictator mayor” form of government in the late 1990’s. We have seen that the inability of the major parties to work together in Washington, DC as leading to a government shutdown; but we’d like to think that the Green Party would not have been willing to play these games and could have brought the ‘parties’ together to craft a better deal that what we got from the major party’s game playing. We say that the Green Party has future focus, that means we have to move beyond labels and judge people for their actions, deeds and intentions and move beyond the special interest politics that is so detrimental to our future.
In the past the Hamilton County Greens supported one independent candidate for Cincinnati City Council, Chris Smitherman and he has been consistently outvoted on City Council. It would be insanity for the Hamilton County Green Party to not want to try something new so we tried to put together a coalition of like minded candidates from all of the candidates running for Cincinnati City Council and what we found was that the Democrats and Republicans refused to come together with each other, but all of the candidates we chose to support were willing to work with us and that is how we came to the recommended list of candidates that we support. We know that some of our supporters confuse the national Democrats or national Republicans with the local ones, but we know better. It has been the local Democrats who have supported the privatization of public services and selling off of our assets and the so called “anti-government” forces who have fought against this, so we know that viewing people by labels, not actions is not a good idea.
You can vote for 9 candidates for City Council, but since all of the candidates are competing against each other, each of your votes is more powerful if you vote for less than nine and you should only vote for the candidates you want to see elected, which may not be any organization’s full slate. We are suggesting that your best choice is to pick from the following slate (party labels have been added FYI for those who like to read labels when choosing)
Cincinnati City Council:
Independents: Chris Smitherman & Angela Beamon
Charter: Vanessa White & Kevin Flynn
Republicans: Amy Murray & Melissa Wegman
Democrats: David Mann & PG Sittenfeld for mayor of Cincinnati:
John Cranley
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