Cincinnati City Council: Update on Brent Spence Bridge project

Notes

SCENE: The Climate, City Services and Infrastructure Committee met in Council Chambers (Room 300), City Hall, 801 Plum St., at 10:05 a.m. (scheduled time was 10 a.m., according to the city meeting calendar), led by Committee Chair Meeka Owens. The committee went into recess (11:43 a.m. until 11:54 a.m.) because the chair did not have a quorum to file reports or advance motions to council. The meeting, once reconvened, adjourned at 11:55 a.m.

Committee Members

Council Member Meeka Owens, chair

Council Member Ryan James, vice chair

Council Member Mark Jeffreys

Council Member Seth Walsh

Council Member Jeff Cramerding (guest/not a committee member)

Time Spent

55 minutes: Brent Spence Bridge Update

36 minutes: Emergency Benchmarking & Building Performance Standards Update

02 minutes: Public comment

11 minutes: Forced Recess

00 minutes: Mitigation of Traffic Delays (motion)

00 minutes: Parking Meter Infrastructure (report)

Brent Spence Bridge Update

More than 2 million hours of design and project development has gone into the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor project, Tommy Arnold (Ohio Department of Transportation project manager) said, noting the corridor is one of the most severe traffic bottlenecks in the nation. Still, an estimated $1 billion of freight passes through the corridor every day.

Arnold and Bryan Williams (division manager, city Department of Transportation and Engineering) offered the presentation, which included details about planning, collaborative work to support travel, communication with key groups, details about work in progress, upcoming street and bridge closures, and ways the public can learn about project and traffic updates.

A key project milestone is 2031 (completion of the companion bridge), which will cover the 2.15 miles in Kentucky and Ohio at a cost of $4 billion. The full cost of the corridor project is not known now, Arnold said.

There is enough structural steel being used to build five Paycor Stadiums, he said.

Williams said a feature of the overall project will be a revamped Sixth Street bridge from Queensgate into downtown, which will include a storyboard about the history of the Cotton Club.

Arnold said detours and closures are prompting ODOT and the city to monitor traffic counts in Queensgate and Camp Washington for the next few years. A website, e-newsletter, video drive-through, GPS coordination with Google, Waze and DriveWyze (the freight-focused GPS system) are in place to help motorists navigate the corridor.

Currently, utility relocation and some building demolition on both sides of the Ohio River have taken place. Some of it began June 8, Arnold said. In the next three months, he said, the Texas Turnaround in Covington is to be closed, and, in mid-July, short-term closures are planned for West Third Street and Central Avenue in Cincinnati.

Asked why there is no environmental impact report filed with the corridor project, Arnold said the federal highway administration in 2012 found that the project had no significant environmental impact. Litigation involving a 2024 question about the project’s environmental impact continues, he said.

The project website brentspencebridgecorridor.com provides links to everything residents want to know, Arnold said.

The committee filed the report.

Energy Benchmarking & Building Performance Standards Update

A main purpose of the update was to review findings from four “engagement sessions” on the consideration of a Building Performance Standards policy for the city. Stakeholder sessions involving 50 people each were convened June 27, July 29, Aug. 16 and Sept. 30 to provide council with a summary of the community feedback, collected as part of the Resilient and Efficient Codes Implementation (RECI) grant. The U.S. Department of Energy grant was awarded to the University of Cincinnati to support exploration of policies to improve energy performance in large buildings in Ohio cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton.

Council adopted the Green Cincinnati Plan (GCP) in May 2023, setting goals of a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 100% carbon neutrality by 2050. Approximately 30% of emissions come from the operation of city commercial buildings. The GCP includes the strategic priority action to “improve building performance by implementing policies like benchmarking, building performance standards, or other relevant energy standards.”

Ollie Kroner, director of the Cincinnati Office of Environment & Sustainability, said: “We have made major progress toward these goals. Clearly, buildings are at the center of this plan,” referring to a presentation showing the city’s largest buildings account for nearly half of total building emissions.

Amanda Webb, associate professor of architectural design, University of Cincinnati (she attended virtually), explained the technical aspects of energy benchmarking (EB) and building performance standards (BPS). She leads the local RECI team.

According to the Kroner and Webb presentation:

Many cities, counties and states have implemented energy policies like benchmarking and BPS to reduce energy consumption, lower owner and tenant energy bills, and make local building stock more desirable.

Energy benchmarking refers to measuring the energy performance of a building over time. This helps owners and occupants understand their building’s energy performance relative to similar buildings. Benchmarking also helps in the evaluation of more cost-effective operational and capital investment options. Studies have shown that benchmarking policies can result in a 3% to 8% reduction in gross energy usage over a four-year period. Midwest cities with benchmarking ordinances include Columbus, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

Building Performance Standards (BPS) require existing buildings to meet a stated energy use target by a specified date. BPS uses building utility data to track compliance with the targets. The policy specifies a target that buildings must meet but does not prescribe steps building owners must take to meet it. Studies have shown that BPS policies can lead to a 25% to 45% total energy use reduction in aggregate. 

There are three steps council could consider to advance energy performance in large buildings:

° Energy benchmarking ordinance – It would establish a mandatory benchmarking program for commercial buildings, including multi-family buildings over 100,000 square feet (such as Music Hall and Union Terminal) and all city buildings over 10,000 square feet. These buildings would be responsible for reporting their energy use annually.

         ° Establish a technical committee to identify the components of future building energy policies – It would use its knowledge and feedback from stakeholders to draft building energy policy recommendations to council.

         ° Building energy ordinance – It would incorporate recommendations from the technical committee to pass a city building energy policy. The ordinance would include policy elements as well as compliance and enforcement procedures.

A “one size fits all policy” is not workable because of the complexities of the city’s large building stock, Kroner said. For example, he explained that a hospital is not like an office building in terms of square footage and energy consumption.

Already, there are more than 300 buildings in the city where owners are monitoring energy consumption through CincyInsights (the city’s official open data portal), he said, which has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs.

Webb said approximately 300 commercial and multi-family buildings would be affected by a benchmarking ordinance involving structures of 100,000 square feet.

The committee filed this report.

Mitigation of Traffic Delays (motion)

City administration is being asked to have its Department of Transportation and Engineering (DOTE), Cincinnati Police Department and Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) work with appropriate agencies and jurisdictions to identify and create temporary measures to mitigate traffic delays caused by the Brent Spence Bridge corridor project.

The committee sent this motion to the full council for passage.

Parking Meter Infrastructure (report)

Mark Riley, director of the city’s Department of Public Services (DPS), said in a memo to the committee that his department’s Parking Division plans to expand parking payment options to include text to pay, QR code payment, and new mobile payment options. The administration is in negotiations with a vendor selected through a request for proposal and will begin refreshing signage and mobile parking payment infrastructure late this year and in early 2027.

Riley, in the same memo, said his department also will review paid parking areas this summer to determine whether these areas need more paid parking infrastructure. Any additions will be completed with existing parking infrastructure money.

The Parking Division also is working to replace 456 single-space meters in OTR and the Central Business District and replace them with multi-space parking payment stations by the end of 2026, Riley said in the memo. The associated meter poles will be removed.

These findings were generated because Council Member MArk Jeffreys asked city administration in March for a report estimating the one-time cost to remove “blighted, broken parking meters” across the city.

The Parking Division of DPS has an infrastructure that includes single-space parking meters, multi-space payment stations, and signage indicating payment by mobile application, according to the report from Riley. The city has approximately 2,265 parking meters and 164 multi-space pay stations in use. Decades ago, the city had 8,000 coin-operated parking meters and as parking demand changed, coin-operated meters were removed and often the associated pole was left in place.

Since the movement of the Parking Division to the DPS in 2025, DPS has made an effort to remove the known inventory of meter poles that have no meters. Beginning in August 2025, DPS Traffic and Road Operations and the Parking Division removed 895 poles throughout the city but with “heavy concentration” in the Uptown neighborhoods, OTR and Central Business District.

DPS does not have a remaining inventory of meter poles that have no active parking meter. Residents who see a pole without a meter head on it should submit a request to add/remove parking meters through www.311cincy.com, he said, and the Parking Division will decide to add or remove the meter pole based on parking demand in the area.

The committee filed this report.

Public Comment

Sam (last name not given) addressed the efficacy of building tiny homes.

The meeting recessed at 11:43 a.m. because a quorum was not present. Owens reconvened the meeting at 11:54 a.m. after wrangling members Jeffreys and Walsh, who left the meeting early. The committee completed its business and Owens adjourned the meeting at 11:55 a.m.

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