The Nati

A little catching up to do, since I was swamped with Give Back Cincinnati's Paint the Town all week. Probably the biggest news story was the new information on the Banks. In general I'm glad to see it happen. However, I am a bit nervous how all this seemed to come together in a few weeks, and it was outside the process that was set up with the Port Authority and 3CDC for proposals for the program. Just seems strange that you have a group set up to manage the project on the riverfront, and you side step that and do your own thing the way the Hamilton County commissioners. The positive side is that the Reds, Bengals, and the city all seem to be on board, because that is required to make this deal happen. Reds/Bengals have rights to parking and to approval on what goes above the parking. The city owns the 'air rights' to most of the area, meaning they get to approve anything that gets built above the street level. So that fact that the city seemed to be left out of these discussions worries me about the long term prospects of this thing taking hold. The only city rep at the news conference was Charlie Luken, and Chaz will be long gone before any of the development actually happens.

So I am excited, but not overly excited to see the new developments. It's great to see Corporex involved. With his new condo development on the Southbank in Covington he has a vested interst in making sure the other side of the Roebling doesn't remain a dirt track. I was not so excited to see Vandecar involved, as their 'Center of Cincinnati' project is nothing but a bunch of big-boxes, and their other large 'development' is a Wal-Mart in KY. I'm assuming they are both smart enough not to ruin the banks with a Target.