Alison Lundergan Grimes brought her fight against Senator Mitch McConnell back to Covington on Tuesday and she brought one of the Senate Minority Leader’s colleagues with her.
Standing high atop the city at the Radisson Hotel with the Brent Spence Bridge strategically placed in the background, Grimes stood shoulder to shoulder with Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) who called on Kentucky voters to send its Democratic Secretary of State to Washington to replace McConnell.
Grimes and McConnell sparred the night before in a debate televised statewide by KET.
Back on the trail, Grimes reiterated her call to build the $2.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge project, finding the money by closing corporate tax loopholes, characterized by Brown as rewarding companies that move their jobs from the states to other countries.
The plan was not new. Grimes first released that call on the same day McConnell announced his own plan to move forward on the project, one that involved the repeal of the federal prevailing wage law. Neither plan impressed local leaders.
That was June.
Now, with three weeks to go before the election, both candidates are making frequent stops in Northern Kentucky. “Kentucky needs a senator that knows the Brent Spence Bridge needs to be taken from paper to the should-do list,” Grimes said. She said what is missing in Washington as it relates to projects like the bridge is coalition building. That’s what her appearance with Brown was, she said.Â
“A number of you in Kentucky won’t have to count me as your senator anymore (if Grimes is elected),” Brown joked to the crowd, made up of close Grimes supporters and union members. Prior to joining Grimes in Covington, Brown had met with the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. He said that those business leaders cited the bridge project as their number one issue.
The arrival of Grimes and Brown and their highlighting of the bridge project follows recent weeks of back and forth between proponents of the project and opponents of tolls, the only financing method seriously explored by Kentucky and Ohio authorities. A new group calling itself NKY United launched, urging folks to sign its anti-toll petition and has taken the position that the bridge is safe. Kentucky Secretary of Transportation’s Mike Hancock recently issued an op-ed stating that “structurally sound” is not the same as “safe”.
Asked by The River City News about which specific issues related to the bridge leads Grimes to believe that the project should move forward, she cited the 3-4% of national gross domestic product that traverses it. Brown called it a “public safety issue”.
NKY United’s Joe Meyer attened Tuesday’s press conference and was asked whether he agreed with Brown’s assessment. “That bridge is structurally sound,” Meyer said. He added that safety issues emerge from the related traffic congestion. He said that there are a number of ways to improve the traffic congestion, ways that have not been studied by toll proponents at the Ohio Kentucky Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI).
NKY United released a statement following Grimes’s appearance. “We are pleased to see national leaders from our region weighing in on this important issue. Using tolls as a means for funding the Brent Spence Bridge is a bad deal for Northern Kentucky,” Meyer said in the statement. “Tolls will impact everyone in Northern Kentucky, not just drivers who use the bridge. Tolling creates traffic diversion, congestion and safety issues on local or secondary roads, and will have negative effects on the Northern Kentucky economy.”
