City County Cleanup Partnership: The details

Numerous media outlets covered our kick-off today of the City County Cleanup Partnership, which is expanding the successful inmate clean-up details in OTR across the County. A couple excerpts:

http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080724/NEWS01/807240319

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=70f11ae1-1090-4964-ae2b-95f53912eb17

This initiative, which kicks off next Monday, marks great progress for several reasons:

- most importantly, cleaner neighborhoods mean safer neighborhoods

- something that worked so well in one neighborhood, Over the Rhine, will now benefit sixteen--eight in the City, eight in the County; from Lincoln Heights and Colerain Township, to Forest Park and Price Hill, and a lot of places in between, each neighborhood will have a cleanup every two weeks

- the City will use its cleanups to focus on the major corridors of the City--those larger roads that run through the heart of our neighborhoods (Reading Rd., Glenway, Hamilton, Harrison, etc.). By lifting each corridor, which too often today are the most blighted parts of our communities, we will lift the livability and perception of entire communities.

- amid our budget crisis, the cost of the program (essentially, paying the Deputies who oversee the inmate crews) does not come from the County's general fund, but from grants from 3CDC, the HC Solid Waste District, and the City's Public Works Department.

- Keep Cincinnati Beautiful will augment the cleanup crews with litter and recycling awareness and prevention efforts, so we sustain the clean-up efforts by preventing litter in the first place.

This is a win in so many ways.

If you have locations in these communities you'd like to see cleaned up, please let me know through comments.