For eight long years, Cincinnati's media and business leaders watched month after month and year after year as the City made one irresponsible fiscal decision after another, and the City sank into fiscal despair. And they did nothing.
COAST, along with a few Council members -- Smitherman, Murray, Lippert, and eventually Bortz and Berding -- rang the alarm bells. But Mayor Mark Mallory insisted on driving the train of municipal finances into a brick wall.
As sure as a housing crisis cooked up by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the chickens have come home to roost: yesterday Cincinnati's bond rating was again lowered.
Mayor Cranley has it right. Of the twin effects of higher interest rates and loss of Cincinnati's reputation of being fiscally responsible, the latter is the far greater loss.
Of course, the new Council, drunk with their new power, went on a spending spree from Day #1 with the Cincinnati Streetcar and its annual $5-$10 million in operating expenses. So Mayor Cranley has to do battle daily with a cabal bent on the same destructive policies that brought us to this place.
Read it in the Enquirer here.
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