CINCINNATI — Aging pools. Cracked tennis courts. Erosion at park overlooks. Crumbling retaining walls.
Old fire stations (one was built for a horse and buggy.) Recreation centers that don’t meet current safety and building codes. An unairconditioned fleet garage where workers say temperatures top 100 degrees in the summer.
Those are just some of the critical projects awaiting repairs as the City of Cincinnati faces a projected $500 million backlog in deferred maintenance.
“I believe that our city employees are working in terrible conditions,” said Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Cramerding. "Our critical failing infrastructure is one of the largest problems we as a city face. It’s a problem that is decades in the making,”
City Manager Sheryl Long is expected to release her proposed 2024 fiscal year budget in late May, then council members will debate which projects to fund and by how much.
“The city of Cincinnati is addressing this head-on. We really are not interested in kicking the can down the road any further,” said Assistant City Manager Virginia Tallent. “On the other hand, we have a very limited pool of dollars.”
Cramerding wants the council to take a bus tour of the city’s worst buildings ahead of the budget vote in June.
One of the oldest and worst is the city’s fleet garage off Central Parkway. Roughly 70 work inside an un-airconditioned garage, repairing vehicles from salt trucks to police cruisers.
For years, garage workers have complained about unsafe working conditions, particularly falling concrete in the basement and floors that can’t support the weight of modern heavy trucks.
A 2015 city facilities assessment report warned of possible failures in old buildings, specifically a “potential collapse” of the fleet garage floor “within four years.”
“Make our building safe, actually make it safe,” said mechanic Tony Towe, who worked in the garage for five years before transferring to the parks department in 2019.
Towe still comes to the garage several times a week to pick up equipment.
“They should care a little more about the safety of their employees. I personally would love to see them replace the building. Those guys deserve that,” Towe said.
WCPO has reported on working conditions at the garage several times since 2016. After a story last May, the city began a $3 million project to stabilize the garage’s concrete floor and repair the roof, while adding solar panels. Those costs have since doubled to nearly $6 million.
“When that work started to take place, we realized that the damage was more extensive than we thought, it’s going to take more money and more work,” Cramerding said. “It’s going to be a reoccurring theme … which happens when this maintenance goes neglected for years and years and decades.”
WCPO toured the garage again last week, and saw the extent of work being done to stabilize and reinforce concrete floors, which workers had long worried might collapse.
Once slab repairs are finished, floors will be strong enough to hold a fully loaded salt truck. Until now, trucks had to unload before entering the garage, or mechanics had to fix loaded trucks outdoors because the floor couldn’t withstand the weight.
“A new building would be everyone’s desire but … the city has really significant unmet capital needs,” Vallent said.
The latest estimate to replace the fleet garage is $43 million, according to a March report of the city’s most critical infrastructure needs.
“Cincinnati is a mature city, so that means we have mature infrastructure,” said Department of Public Services Director Jerry Wilkerson. “This (garage) was built in 1939. We have 21 other buildings that are older … including City Hall. When you’re dealing with older infrastructure, it is going to be costly.”
Yet garage repairs have not always gone smoothly. Towe said conditions have actually worsened over the past year.
“You tore up half the building. You’ve got 15 to 20 guys trying to share half the building now. I mean how long is it going to take until they get that fixed,” Towe asked.
Workers sent videos to WCPO of heavy water pouring into the garage, onto electrical panels, during rainstorms from open sections of the roof which are under repair.
“This is something that we take very seriously, and we’re committed to fix. And with this roof repair this will be addressed,” Tallent said.
Wilkerson said once roof repairs are done, likely by this fall, the leaking will stop and the roof will have a 20-year warranty.
He is hoping City Council will allocate an additional $6 million to the garage in next year’s budget. His top concerns are replacing original windows, and updating electrical and air conditioning.
Both Wilkerson and Tallent said the garage is structurally safe for workers
“The administration and the city manager’s office takes employee safety very seriously and it’s a top priority,” Tallent said. “Our commitment is to provide a safe working environment. And these repairs not only will mean a safe work environment, but they’ll also mean a functional work environment.”
City managers have been warning about the potentially dangerous state of many buildings for years.
Many of the city’s 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. Until now, Cramerding hopes.
“With this current budget, which will pass in June, I hope to have another rather large bucket of money that will continue to go to incrementally address these (infrastructure) problems while we work toward a long-term solution,” Cramerding said. “I hope to have a road map forward for the city of Cincinnati by the end of next year to be able to permanently find a solution to our infrastructure needs.”
The 2023 city budget included $14 million for critical deferred maintenance and repairs to facilities, with $5 million going to the Department of Public Services.
Separately, more than $7 million was allocated for infrastructure projects from the fiscal year 2022 carryover budget.
The city manager's 2024 proposed budget will be unveiled likely next week.
