Bill's PRIORITIES
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Working for the city. Supporting the residents, neighborhoods and businesses that together make Cincinnati the great city it is and the future city we can all be proud of.
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Every candidate talks about ‘neighborhoods’ during the election process. The reality is that few are as engaged in the day to day issues in the neighborhoods as they promise, and in many cases, the local Neighborhood leadership team is not organized in a way that helps this partnership even start.
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This is being worked by the city, but it needs to be at the center of City Council efforts. The city and neighborhood councils need to represent everyone. The City residents, and the businesses and their customers and employees, all rely on the city to work for them.
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Decisions that are made for both the current City of Cincinnati and the future City of Cincinnati are needed. Leadership that is not engaged in ‘point-scoring’ politics but is engaged in city-centric policy making and execution will help us build the next 200+ years of Cincinnati by building on what Cincinnati is and always has been - a great place to live, and a great place to work, home for great people, led by great people.
2
Improve the effectiveness of the relationships between City Council, and City Management, City Neighborhoods and City Businesses.
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The day to day running of the City of Cincinnati requires the effective, efficient, and equitable working of not only the Mayor and City Council, but also the City Management & Departments, and the local leadership in each of the 52 city neighborhoods. These teams need to be the best they can be, and the interactions between them needs to be perfect.
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Too often, the hard work of one of these groups is nullified by a ‘dropped ball’ or a mis-communication by or between the others. With the communication tools available to us, and the clear majority of us residents, and the great businesses, and experienced city management, who work hard every day to do the right thing ... we should expect better.
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Recently, the reaction to any failure in our city has been personal attacks on one person or the next. We need to look at the processes. They are broken. History shows that 99 times out of 100 the root of a problem is in the system itself. The knee-jerk blame-game damages good people, and leaves the real problem in place. This needs to stop.
3
Always searching for and supporting the best solution to the city’s problem, no matter who comes up with the solution.
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Since the end of his time as Community Council President, Bill has spent time looking to understand and improve how to fully engage ALL of the city in developing solutions and making the decisions that affect all of us who live and work in Cincinnati. One outcome of this quest was in Bill’s election to the Board of The Charter Committee of Greater Cincinnati with whose principles Bill is 100% aligned....
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Principles of the Charter Committee of Greater Cincinnati
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Independence
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Accountability
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Transparency
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Fiscal Responsibility
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Regional Co-operation
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Equity
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Continuous Improvement
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4
Always searching for and supporting the best solution to the city’s problem, no matter who comes up with the solution.
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Budget challenges are regular, and COVID-19 will bring its own budget shortfall, maybe lasting several years. There are Federal funds to help with this but we need a plan.
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Before the usual blanket % cuts across the City, it’s time we reviewed every project funded by the City. We have a duty to the City Taxpayer to ask, “are we getting value for money?”. The City Budget process needs to include reviews of ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) so that Council can target cuts to the programs that are not performing.
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In future, every project funded by the City should be reporting back to the City in quarterly public hearings on its costs vs benefits compared with the project ‘value’ in the original agreement with the City. If a project is falling short in its ‘value’ to the City, a graduated scale of remedial actions should be implemented engage. From ‘come back in a month and show us how you’ve fixed it’ to ‘shut it down and repay the money we have given you up to now’.
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This ‘value of a tax dollar’ approach should be taken with Tax incentives to businesses for their investments, or incentivizing a development. These incentives should be measured and appropriate, like any business would approach its investment in a project. There should be a Return on Investment (ROI) that is acceptable. This return can be non-financial, but its must be a good value proposition.
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The question we should be asking is…. Q: Does the money do the City more good being spent on Project X vs being placed in a holding fund waiting for a better ‘value’ Project Y ?
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The City need to work as hard to manage the wise and successful spending of tax $$ as residents and businesses in the city do to earn these $$.
5
Ethics and values. Earn the people's trust by addressing concerns and needs with fairness, equity, and transparency.
With every problem, the simple guiding principle is that we should always be looking for the best solution for the residents and businesses of Cincinnati. This is the ‘North Star’ that Bill will follow.
This means that Bill will behave ethically and transparently in everything he does, always following the City Charter guidelines. Bill will also commit to shine a light on all and any situations where there’s any questions or doubts about the ethical behaviour of those in public office. This includes the City Council and Mayors offices, the City manager and departments and everybody whose daily work is on behalf of the residents and the businesses of our City. We need to regain the trust of the electorate. This starts in November 2021.
People need to trust that when they approach the City or part of its administration, their concerns and needs are being addressed appropriately with fairness, equity, and in a way consistent with the values we all share.
Any sign of bias in the ‘access to’ or ‘help from’ the City and its departments will always be dealt with in the same way that corruption should and will be dealt with. Instant review and remedial actions, that are made as public as the law allows, are what we should all expect.
This will all be helped by pushing a policy that the City does all it can to get everyone to the table for key issue discussions. This has to be a priority if the residents of the City are expected to trust that decisions are being made with the best interests of the City at the centre of decision making. is the most critical measure.
Bill believes that Neighborhood Community Councils are key to getting customer-centric behavior into City Hall. By ensuring EVERY neighborhood has a well-functioning, effective community council, and that the City Council members are visiting the neighborhoods to talk to the residents and businesses … just as much as when they are running their campaigns for election. A schedule of Council ‘surgery hours’ in local Libraries is a program that Bill would like to spearhead once in office, in addition to kicking off the team to assist the Community Councils in where help is needed.
Once we have a city where people know they have a voice, and a Council that actively listens and then is willing to adapt policy to reflect what they have heard, then we can begin to rebuild the trust we have lost in our local government.
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Bill FROST
CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE 2021