By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati City Manager Valerie Lemmie wrote the budget, and Mayor Charlie Luken sent it to City Council. But much of the $2 billion, two-year spending plan City Council will pass Wednesday belongs to Finance Committee Chairman John Cranley.Through a series of secret meetings with council colleagues that lasted throughout the day Sunday, Mr. Cranley forged a consensus by adding a few council members' pet projects and enforcing budget discipline.

BUDGET HIGHLIGHTS

• Eliminates the Planning Department, merging planning and zoning functions into a Department of Community Development and Planning. • Continues with the hiring of 75 new police officers over two years. • Increases spending on capital arts projects to $2.2 million per year. • Maintains support for the Neighborhood Support Program at $10,000 for each of the city's 52 neighborhoods.

The result is a budget that leaves the mayor's proposed reorganization of City Hall largely intact, but keeps for City Council the prerogative of spending the $55 million Anthem Inc. "windfall." The Finance Committee unanimously passed Mr. Cranley's budget Monday.

"What I didn't want was for a minority of council members - or any council member - to distance themselves from the responsibility of shouldering the burden of a $35 million budget deficit," he said. "If, in the next couple of days, they try to unravel any part of the budget, the price of that unraveling will be the loss of their priorities in the budget."

Those priorities include:

$75,000 for a "neighborhood pride center" in Avondale, dreamed up by Mr. Cranley and other council members in a meeting Sunday at the Washington Platform Saloon. The pride center would deal with "crime and litter" on Burnet Avenue.

A $100,000 grant for Main Street Ventures, a technology incubator program in Over-the-Rhine. Mr. Cranley and Councilman Pat DeWine took credit for this line item.

$126,450 in changes to the Human Services Policy allocations proposed by Councilman David Crowley. Winners included Lighthouse Youth Services, Mercy Connections, Santa Maria Community Services and the Mallory Center. Losers were the Three Square Music Foundation, Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates, the Adolescent Health Center and Serving Older Adults Through Changing Times.

Republicans killed the city manager's proposed multi-purpose facility in Over-the-Rhine, which Mr. DeWine called a "$7 million Over-the-Rhine boondoggle."

Council members, like James R. Tarbell, who opposed the elimination of the Planning Department were thrown this compromise: the newly merged department will be called the Department of Community Development and Planning, and the city manager would appoint a staffer with the title of "city planner."

Councilman David Pepper took aim at the Cincinnati Institute for Career Alternatives, a job training and employment agency. He had language inserted into the budget that would cancel programs dealing with youth offenders, apprenticeships and dislocated workers and send its $1.3 million in funding to other workforce development agencies.

"All I'm saying is, this is a group that should have to bid on projects and compete like everybody else," Mr. Pepper said. "They've gotten contracts automatically year after year, and I'm just saying we should change that."

Mr. Luken said he knew City Council would tinker around the edges of his proposed budget - the first one he's submitted as "strong mayor." But he noted the most substantive operational changes amounted to just $270,000 of a $312 million general fund operating budget.

"All the structural reforms were approved. Those were my big issues," Mr. Luken said. "I view all these amendments as just expounding on my direction and making it better."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com