CINCINNATI — Leaking roofs, broken air conditioning systems and floors that are in danger of collapse.
These are the working conditions inside many older city of Cincinnati buildings including fire stations, recreation centers and municipal garages.
“The situation is very serious. We’ve got buildings that are unsafe for our city employees and often, our citizens,” said Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Cramerding. “We’ve got a lot of fire department facilities that are unsafe and can’t maintain the weight of a fire engine.”
City officials began presenting next year's budget needs for the public services department at City Council last week. Those presentations will continue in the weeks ahead as each department head makes a pitch for funding. The staggering cost of deferred maintenance on old city buildings may be a big topic.
The city currently budgets roughly $2.8 million per year to fix 88 buildings – including City Hall, Centennial II Plaza, fire and police stations, the municipal garage, and other facilities where 3,500 city employees work.
Salt from the salt trucks for the city of Cincinnati leaks through cracks in the floor and hangs from the basement ceiling underneath at the Cincinnati Public Services' garage on Friday, Jan. 29, 2016 (Phil Didion for WCPO).
That’s $26 million less than what the city needs to spend in 2022. By 2025, that deficit will grow to $62 million to cover maintenance costs on buildings overseen by the city’s Department of Public Services.
But that’s just the beginning.
Parks and recreation department officials will bring forward their capital needs in the coming weeks, which are expected to widen that budget hole to $235 million over the next five years, according to city budget documents.
Several recreation centers, pools, trails, tennis and basketball courts, baseball fields, and playgrounds are out of life cycle and need renovations.
“Significant time has passed since major renovations at several recreation centers, with facilities such as Sayler Park and North Avondale having gone without renovation since the 1970's. Aquatic facilities have seen a similar time gap … With current budget projections, it is unlikely that any recreation centers or aquatic facilities would be significantly renovated in the next six years,” according to the city budget.
Add in the cost to fix the city’s outdated roads and bridges, crumbling staircases and sidewalks, and the budget gap to fix old infrastructure will balloon to $500 million, Cramerding said.
“We’ve dug a hole up to our eyeballs and it’s getting bigger. We’re going to be at a point soon where we are unable to dig out,” Cramerding said. “The first step is to admit we have a problem, which we have not been willing to do.”
In past years the quiet deterioration of city buildings was rarely discussed at budget hearings. Historically, most citizens asked for funding for human service agencies, and elected leaders focused on high-profile spending, such as hiring new police recruits.
“It’s not the issue that everybody is going to look at and get super excited about - bricks and mortar. But it’s an issue that everybody tends to agree is important,” said Sean Comer, Xavier University’s director of government relations.
According to the city’s 2022 capital budget, these are some of the most urgent building needs:
• Major structural repairs to the Fleet Municipal Garage and Cormany Garage, including foundation stabilization, slab shoring, and roof replacement.
• HVAC mechanical replacement at most of the City's fire Stations, police Stations, and Centennial II, as well as roof replacement and HVAC repair at the Emergency Communications Center's (ECC) main Radcliff location.
• Additional safety and security repairs required at historically significant structures such as the Eden Park Water Tower, City Hall, College Hill Town Hall, and Eden Park Station No. 7.
“We can’t wait. Because at some point something is going to break. Something is going to fall down and that’s not really the place you want to be,” Comer said. “Do you want to be in a position where people could die?”
Fire Station 49 on Prentice Avenue in Madisonville was built in 1910, when firefighters traveled by horse and buggy.
Except for modest updates over the years, such as turning the horse stalls into a kitchen, the building hasn’t changed much. It’s clean and meets city codes,officials said during a 2019 tour with WCPO,but the tiny space isn’t comfortable for the firefighters who work 24-hour shifts here.
“They have to get this vehicle in a certain spot because if they don’t, they can’t get out of the kitchen door … because it’s so tight,” Cincinnati Fire District Chief Steve Salmons said in 2019, pointing to an engine parked inches from the kitchen door.
The first-floor bathroom, which Salmons described as “a box,” is so tiny the door won’t open if the toilet seat is down. Space is so tight that uniforms are stored in rolling lockers.
City managers have been warning about the potentially dangerous state of many buildings for years.
“Many of these facilities were built before 1950 and due to years of deferred maintenance and inadequate capital investment several are in need of comprehensive renovations or building replacements,” then City Manager Harry Black wrote in a Nov. 28, 2016, memo to City Council.
Years later, then City Manager Patrick Duhaney echoed the same point in 2019 budget documents, “As emergency work and repair become more commonplace and the deferred maintenance list grows, this presents a problem that is both insurmountable with current funding sources as well as a potential safety hazard to the residents and employees of the city of Cincinnati should a catastrophic failure occur.”
Despite these warnings, past City Council members never created a long-term plan to pay for infrastructure repairs.
“We have hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure that we have no plan to fix, we have no plan to replace,” Comer said. “Critical needs like buildings that are falling apart. Roads that are falling apart. Parks and recreation center facilities that are falling apart.”
A 2015 city facilities assessment report warned of possible failures in old buildings, specifically a “potential collapse” of the floor of the Department of Public Service’s municipal garage could happen “within four years.”
But in a 2019 tour, deputy public services director Joel Koopman told WCPO that the garage floor has been inspected and is safe.
“It’s structurally safe as long as you stay within the load requirements,” Koopman said in 2019. “To put it simply -- this structure wasn’t built to handle the weights of the vehicles we have today.”
This means fully loaded dump trucks and salt trucks must be emptied before they can enter the garage for repairs.
When the garage was built, vehicles were much smaller and lighter, so only a portion of the floor can accommodate modern fire engines.
City workers don’t worry about the floor collapsing, Koopman said, unless they hear a loud noise or see someone driving the wrong vehicle on the floor above them.
“At the current rate of funding we are investing less than an average homeowner. We are in essence the bad neighbor nearing the level of the slum lord,” according to a 2016 city facilities report urging leaders to spend more on infrastructure.
That report singled out the municipal garage as the most in need of replacement. Second on the list was Fire Station 8 in Pleasant Ridge, which resembles a large Tudor built in 1931.
The decontamination sink at that station is a few feet from the kitchen, diesel fumes flow from the garage to the kitchen through a swinging door, and concrete falls from the ceiling of the basement workout room.
“All that weight just pushes down,” Koopman said. “The trucks aren’t going to fall through – but you don’t have this in a new station. You don’t build basements under massive trucks.”
Because the price tag to fix these old buildings is so steep, the solution may take time.
Cramerding wants the city to conduct a new study – similar to John Smale’s Infrastructure Commission report in 1988, on which buildings need to be repaired or replaced, and which facilities are redundant and should be closed.
“In 1988 we did a study of Cincinnati’s infrastructure, and the voters approved a .1% earnings tax to preserve our existing infrastructure. It worked very well for a number of years. However, there were cuts to state government … that created a really serious budget issue for the city. Instead of addressing those issues … we’ve kicked the can down the road, we’ve covered it up for the past ten years.”
The city’s earnings tax may eventually need to be raised to pay for infrastructure, and some buildings shut down, Cramerding said. But for now, he wants City Council to prioritize incoming federal funds for infrastructure, and not on new spending.
“Council has not been willing to make tough decisions over the past ten years and acknowledge that there is a problem,” Cramerding said. “So I am optimistic that this council will address the problem and understand the change that’s necessary. But we haven’t done it yet.”