On January 9th, the Green Party of Southwest Ohio endorsed the idea of putting a potential investment in a streetcar system for Cincinnati, Ohio on the ballot as a referendum. The list of organizations that support this move include the NAACP, the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxing, and We Demand a Vote. As the Cincinnati City Beat reports, Green Party representative Josh Krekeler said that social services are more important than expanded mass transit and for that reason they should warrant taxpayer money first. Krekeler added that, while the Green Party is supportive of mass transit, “How can Council commit millions of dollars to a speculative new project, but claim they can’t afford to keep city pools and health clinics open, reserve 1.5 percent of the budget for social services, or fully honor their contracts with retired city employees?”
Correction: It should be noted that these groups favor putting the issue up for referendum rather than having the city council vote on it.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Michael H. Wilson // Jan 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm
I can only hope that the LP in Ohio comes out in favor of opening the market to other providers. There is a lot of information on alternatives that work.
2 Ross Levin // Jan 12, 2009 at 8:36 pm
How active is the Ohio LP? It seems like they’re running more candidates than the Ohio GP, which only ran two in 2008.
3 Steven R Linnabary // Jan 12, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Ross, both of the Green candidates last year started their campaigns as write-in candidacies.
No party had ballot access, until the LPO won it’s lawsuit, which brought ballot access to the Greens, Socialists and Constitution Parties. Upon winning the LPO lawsuit, Tim Kettler immediately became a real Green candidate. Most of the state GP was unaware of Dennis Spisak’s write in campaign. I urged him to include himself in the Secretary of State negotiations, which he did, and he also became a ballot qualified Green candidate.
I would suspect that the Green Party and Libertarian Party are roughly the same size, with a slight edge to the Libertarians. Of course, we count “membership” in a different way.
IMHO, the LPO is better organized. The LPO also has in it’s favor a very energetic state chair who has a background in marketing.
PEACE
4 Steven R Linnabary // Jan 12, 2009 at 10:07 pm
“COAST” is a part of the coalition favoring street cars in Cincinnati??
I was under the impression they were more libertarian oriented. COAST is the organization that is fighting the red light cameras in Cincinnati, and according to today’s Dispatch, in Toledo.
PEACE
5 Ross Levin // Jan 12, 2009 at 10:12 pm
They favor putting it to a vote rather than having the city council vote on it. I should have specified, and I’ll fix that.
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