New city solicitor, John Curp

That “guy to defend itself” is typically referred to as the city solicitor, a citified version of a county prosecutor. And just moments ago, City Manager Milton Dohoney announced who the guy is… so, without further adieu…drum roll… a portion of a press release from Meg Olberding, city spokeswoman:

“John P. Curp, Esq. as the new City Solicitor, the highest ranking lawyer for the City of Cincinnati. Curp currently is a partner with the law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Columbus in the Business and Finance Department. His practice areas have provided him with experience including business incentives, land use, property tax issues, construction and public works projects, and employment law. Curp will begin working for the city on September 2.

“John’s extensive business and financing background will be a great boon to our efforts to attract and retain companies and jobs in the city,” said Dohoney. “He is well versed in public law and his integrity and leadership will serve the city organization and the people of Cincinnati well.”

This is the guy you want to talk to next time you want to sue the city of Cincinnati, or if you, say, get sued by the city of Cincinnati. Or get a traffic ticket from a city cop or get arrested in the city. He can throw the book at you. Or, say, you’re a City Council member and want to know, say, if it’s OK legally to build a fence around Over-the-Rhine. He will tell the city’s elected and non-elected employees what they can get away with legally - and hopefully not get sued. It’s nothing personal. Just his job.

This week’s CityBeat column tackles an old, but still somewhat existent (though I’m just so tired from all the corruption), concern of mine, WAIF-FM.

I quite literally fell in love with the place in 2005, when a friend asked me if I wanted to apply for a summer program. The Brian and Joe Radio Show, full of local talk and news, aired for 10 glorious weeks. It won an award for best summer show and confirmed a dream I’d had since childhood to host my own radio show. It was a blast.

City Beat: Wessels: Keeping the Dream Burning: Wessels: Columns.

I tried my darndest with the place, but got nowhere fast.

In this week’s CityBeat column, I break news about Over-the-Rhine’s Kaldi’s Coffeehouse being asked to vacate the premises for six weeks so an elevator can be installed through their kitchen.

When finished, it would make preparing food in the tiny kitchen a real challenge, but a nice addition for delivering large quanities of food quickly and efficiently to the building’s upper floors. Some chefs dream of a dumbwaiter like this, I’m told. They just want it when and where they want it, if you catch my drift. In the meantime, owner Jeremy Thompson wants to know where all the groovies are going to get their drink on.

Read it about it here.

(Photo from October 6, 2007, Feeding Washington Park)

God bless them. Really. They mean well, but after this blog post and my first column in CityBeat, I still believe we are not seeing eye-to-eye on the cause and effect of giving away food in Over-the-Rhine’s Washington Park (and I would add to that: having a “church” service with loudspeakers so loud that windows shake in the building I live in across from the park). So, the good folks at Vineyard Community Church in Springdale (who give away food on Saturday mornings, provide some clothing and other assistance, plus send a van to pick up folks in OTR to attend Saturday evening church services) invited me to come along on a Saturday morning food run and witness first-hand (in this case, across the street from my house where I had been watching them before) the good they were doing. They believed I really didn’t understand. And they were wrong.

This week’s CityBeat column, this blog post, the past writings put me in the awkward position of being at odds with people who are truly, not only trying to do something good, on many levels they are. So, the question then becomes is just “doing good” enough? Or does the good you’re are aiming for actually have to have positive long-term consequences for those you are helping? And does the residual and indirect effects of your well-intentioned actions matter?

I’d say yes, but I think my pleas for understanding may be directed at minds that have already been made up or refuse to hear what I - and others - are saying.

In my column in this week’s CityBeat, I comment on an issue that has been buggin’ the heck out of me (and quite a few others) for some time. That’s the lack of alternate transportation options - bike, scooter or just ease of walking (especially when you live in the urban center) - available to folks living in this region.

To learn more, check out the column.

I had a big week a few weeks ago. Not only did I sell out the art show, but I found out that I was CityBeat’s Best of Cincinnati 2008 pick for journalist of the year.

I’m quite honored by the distinction - even thought I did not know the category for best journalist existed - and especially because anonymous readers voted for me.

To those who took the time to fill out the survey and chose me, first off, thank you. I really am flattered.

I was so surprised, in fact, that when I attended CityBeat’s “Best of” party that I made a beeline for Editor John Fox. Even though he and I had spoken a few times that week about the column I write for the publication, he had never mentioned it to me.

Turns out he wanted it to be a surprise and that the contest wasn’t fixed. I actually got the most votes of any journalist in the poll. So, thanks again. You made my month! (Sorry I didn’t get this posted sooner. Had my blog not been on the blink I would have written about it when it happened.)

On a recent morning I found myself again in Fairfax. It was suggested I go check out Coffee ‘n Cream, a coffee shop and soft serve ice cream parlor along Wooster Pike. I did and was pleasantly surprised by what I found: A very attentive owner in an owner-operated coffee shop with good coffee.

I plopped down and proceeded to leech the Cincinnati Bell wi-fi from the Speedway gas station across the street (CnC’s connection was down) and got talking to Joe Schneider, the guy who owns the place.

When people find out what I do for a living I often get asked about how to get stories in the paper. Many times it’s an entrepreneur looking to find the hook that will get a story in the media and then loads of customers in their door. My first quip is usually that there is an easy way to get in the news - and a hard way. The easy way, of course, would be to make news - say, by robbing banks, or worse. For the record, I don’t recommend that. The hard way would be to convince some journalist that you have a story worth telling. (Granted, this is the old style of top-down story telling that I think is dying, so don’t think I’m completely forgetting myself here.)

I told Joe that he needed a hook. That would be something that makes his place special - a stand-out among the plethora of individually-owned coffee shops in the area who serve good coffee (though he serves soft serve ice cream, too, which I thought was kind of unique).

He then expressed his frustration that his “passengers” (he sometimes slips, calling his customers by what they called them at Delta Airlines, where he worked for more than 20 years before retiring) love his “splash sticks,” something that he has used for about two years. Then he pointed to an article in USA Today (the same paper owned by the parent company that owns the The Cincinnati Enquirer) that he clipped out and put on the wall. It was about Starbucks - with a location just about a half-mile down the road from him in Mariemont) - was finally getting to introducing the same thing. He said he has tried to pitch to local reporters who frequent his shop to do a story on his business - but no takers.

I can understand his frustration. I told him I would blog about his dilemma, let my readers know what a good coffee shop he is running and see if anyone else would link and/or write about it. It’s too bad that sometimes things like this are happening in our own backyard, yet we can’t find the space to fit it in our own local paper. I think just about every locally-owned business is worth writing about to some extent.

Below is a recording of an uncut phone interview recorded around 6:45 a.m. today (4/18/2008) with University of Cincinnati Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Bahram Shahrooz, PhD. Shahrooz is an expert on earthquake building design and earthquakes. I caught him at home about an hour after the earthquake that was felt in Cincinnati.

I apologize, but the audio is not perfect. I recorded it with my handheld digital recorder, which is mono and has fairly low quality.

powered by ODEO

I got this map here.

That means we felt the earthquake pretty much (or within one minute) of it actually happening. That puts us pretty close and probably felt pretty close to a 5.4 magnitude here, just a little less.

At 5:396 a.m. this morning the USGS is reporting an earthquake was epicentered in Illinois… Back in 2000 I wrote a piece for The Cincinnati Enquirer about earthquakes hitting in Cincinnati. But basically, the New Madrid seismic zone was responsible for an earthquake so big that it rung church bells in Boston, Mass Charleston, S.C.

Why? Unlike the earthquakes in California (where I lived for the better part of three years and never felt one earthquake ever and was told they happen - small ones - everyday), the plates here are very, very large and cover thousands of miles. So, when the earth’s crust slips in Illinois we feel it here - or in Boston.

This morning’s trembler came in two waves. The first one woke me up and I looked around to see the exposed ventilation swinging from the ceiling. I could hear pots clinging together. Then it stopped. About 30 seconds later , a smaller, less intense quake shook everything again.

It was a little unsettling. From my West Coast friends I have heard about how scary they can be - and now I can agree, from experience. I live in a building that is more than 150 years old and the first thing I thought was it might coming tumbling down.