City budget blues

This was the Cincinnati City Council that was supposed to get along. Yet the current fight over the budget leaves the public wondering if our elected officials even bother talking to each other.

Monday afternoon a five member majority declined to present their plan to the Finance Committee because only two of the five were members of the committee. If the plan failed in committee, it could not come up for a vote by the full council. If the five (Jeff Berding, Chris Bortz, Laketa Cole, Leslie Ghiz and Chris Monzel) take the plan straight to the full council on Wednesday they can get their majority vote -- for all the good it will do.

A budget proposal by the four-member minority (John Cranley, Jim Tarbell, David Crowley and Cecil Thomas) is supported by Mayor Mark Mallory. If the five-member plan passes, Mallory can veto it, and without a sixth vote, the veto can't be overridden.

The solution is either a last minute deal, or an agreement to extend the current spending rates for three months while negotiations continue. The points of contention are serious, but hardly insurmountable -- how much to pay into the pension fund, how much to give various social service agencies, what pools and rec-centers are expendable, how many new cops.

This shouldn't have gotten this far. The negotiations going on Tuesday night and the potential deals and compromises that will be worked out now, or in the next three months, should've/could've been cut already by public officials who were elected because they promised to work together.