The Kenton County Mayors’ Group met Saturday morning at the Ft Mitchell city building. This was the first meeting without long-time mayors’ group participant Pat Crowley, who died suddenly just after Christmas, so chair Jessica Fette added him to the prayer at the beginning of the meeting.
A main topic of conversation was the snow event, and how each city was able to deal with it. All of the cities and county workers did a good job of clearing the streets, but many residents in the cities had complaints. Some thought cities should clear the sidewalks, and social media was full of complaints of snowy sidewalks that forced children to walk in the streets to school.
“I became a hero of sorts because I decided to plow the sidewalks, all the way to the school,” said Ft Mitchell mayor Jude Hehman. “Sidewalks are the responsibility of the resident, but we have a long distance of highway so we plowed the sidewalks.”
He said he doesn’t like to call a snow emergency, because then some of the residents want to know if the city will ticket the cars left out on the streets, and other residents want to know why the city doesn’t issue tickets for cars left out in the street.
Six years ago, Hehman decided to take another approach.
“A lot of people assume that when you are ticketing cars we’re trying to raise money when it is really the safety of people,” Hehman explained. “It is hard to get them to realize that snow emergency contingencies are for the safety of people.”
So he decided that if he had to issue tickets for the snow emergency, he would forgive those, as an executive power, but then he would collect canned goods for the Free Store Food Bank as a payment of sorts.
“Once we let it be known that we weren’t just trying to tow, just trying to ticket the cars, people did an amazing job,” he said. “I would say about 90 percent of the cars were off the road this time. In years past we didn’t have nearly that many.”
Hehman said that he coupled that effort with having police officers knock on doors to ask people if they could move their cars, and even sometimes offering to move the cars up to the city building.
Other mayors said that they were also knocking on doors and asking people if they could move their cars.
Edgewood mayor John Link expressed his thankfulness that the area was able to work together in communicating and sharing resources. He compared it to the California wildfire situation, and said he felt very fortunate, that Northern Kentucky areas worked well together.
Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Steve Hensley told about their snow emergency contact system, and he reassured the mayors that if they have a message, they could get the message to him and he would get it out.
Later, it was time for the changing of the guard at the mayors’ meeting, and the chairmanship was passed to a new mayor. Villa Hills Mayor Heather Jansen, who served as vice chair, had been filling in in the absence of chair Jessica Fette, Mayor of Erlanger, and had expressed interest in the lead position.
Messages were sent out in advance of the meeting that elections would be held on Saturday January 18. The candidates that were listed were Heather Jansen, and new Covington Mayor Ron Washington as the vice chair. Jansen could not be present at the meeting, but it was decided that since she had expressed interest, and no other mayors had put their name in as nominee, they should go ahead with the planned election slate.
Thus Heather Jansen and Ron Washington were unanimously elected, and they will serve as the chair and vice chair for the upcoming year, starting with February’s meeting.