“I grew up on West 6th Street in the Mother of God neighborhood,” said Covington City Commissioner and unopposed mayoral candidate Ron Washington.
The work of the Covington Police in his old neighborhood inspired him to pursue a law enforcement career, “I always wanted to be a cop,” said Washington.
Washington announced his campaign in early December, shortly after current Covington Mayor Joe Meyer’s announcement that he would not run for another term.
LINK nky sat down with Washington to discuss his background and campaign plans. His roots in Covington informed much of his professional and personal life, not only as a police officer but also as a leader, both in politics and in business.
“We grew up very poor,” Washington said. He recalled spending his youth in and around the Covington Community Center, which later became the Center for Great Neighborhoods, and how it affected his perspective.
“My mom was also a community servant,” Washington said. “So she believed in helping the community as much as possible, as much as we could.”
His mother, Anna Washington, worked at the community center, and he observed many of the services the center provided, including various youth programs as well as showers and clothing drives for people who were homeless.
“As kids, we were there a lot,” Washington said. “After school, I’d go to the community center to wait for my mom to get off work. And she was very much involved in that program… That’s some of the earliest memories I have.”
“He always stood out because he was so quiet,” said Rosalyn Basey, longtime Covington resident who used to work at the community center. “He was a big guy, but he was very nice. He always wanted to help people, always wanted to do things.”
He graduated from Holmes High School, where he played sports, in 1986. As a young man, he worked in pizza restaurants throughout the region, but it was during his time as a student at Northern Kentucky University that he first showed an aptitude for police work.
One of his professors was former Florence Assistant Police Chief Tom Kathman, who encouraged Washington to take the police test.
He took the test, passed, and “became the first African-American police officer in Florence,” he said, in 1989.
Overall, Washington said the work, like any police job, was “stressful and rewarding at the same time. I got to help a lot of people,” but being the first Black officer in the city of Florence wasn’t always easy to navigate, both for Washington himself and for the people in the community.
“I think it was a little strange for maybe some of the citizens because it was not as diverse community as our community in Covington,” Washington said. “… So I faced some challenges with that within and without and out of the department.”
Current Florence Police Chief Tom Grau was Washington’s partner for a time in Florence and said that even with the challenges, Washington’s hire was a sign of progress.
“That’s a lot, you know, to put on somebody to break those barriers down at that time,” said Grau. “It’s something that needed to happen. And Ron was one of the first, obviously, out here in the city of Florence, and it was great for the city. It was great for the department.”
He served in the Florence department for ten years, where he eventually headed up the plainclothes criminal suppression unit, which handled a variety of criminal activities.
In time, however, he felt the need to come home to Covington, and it was there that he got his first taste of politics, working on the campaign for the Kenton County Sheriff.
“I wind up running the campaign, a county-wide campaign, and I got offered a position as the chief deputy sheriff here in this county,” Washington said. “That was extremely rewarding because we were building a sheriff’s department up, and it was under new leadership,” Washington said. “So that was very interesting… It’s a political role. Not only do you do that job but you also are somewhat involved in politics.”
He served in the Kenton County Sheriff’s office under Sheriff Chuck Korzenborn, who still occupies the position, for five years before retiring.
Life was quiet for a while, he said, but then “I had an opportunity to have a conversation with a person who talked about the opioid crisis… Back then, heroin was really, really bad.”
That person was the late Dr. Gary Shearer, who educated Washington on the science behind medication-assisted addiction recovery. It piqued Washington’s interest, and he saw that this was another way he could help the community.
“As a police officer, I looked at this totally different,” Washington said. “Now, I started looking at it through the families and the victimization and things like that, you know? It became a mission to open a clinic.”
To that end, he opened the Pinnacle Treatment Center on Madison Avenue. In time, Pinnacle opened up additional offices in Carrollton, Georgetown and Maysville. Washington sold the business in the late 2010s, but the centers continue to operate to this day.
Washington was elected to his first term on the Covington Board of Commissioners in 2020, and he will close out the remainder of his current term at the end of the year.
“I think that City Hall needs to be as representative as possible,” Washington said, referring to both his tenure on the commission and his hopes for mayor.
He said that anyone who works for the city, whether in an elected or professional role, needs to understand the diversity of the city.
“I think that’s important for every level of services to understand that,” Washington said. “There is a difference between us and the suburbs. There’s many families that have lived here for generations and generations that we need to respect and understand and to get them to help us as we help them… I think there are some people here in our city that feel like they’re left out of what I call the new Covington.”
The “new Covington” he refers to pertains to the parts of the city north of 12th Street. Although he said that he didn’t have a problem with the new economic development that’s occurred in the northern parts of the city as such, “there needs to be a focus in the South,” he said.
“I know that Latonia’s felt ignored before,” he also said. “It’s important to try to do as much as possible there.”
He said he hoped to continue recruiting businesses that could provide well-paying jobs to the city’s residents, pointing to the Central Riverfront Development at the former IRS site as well as developments in Latonia as examples. Moreover, bringing in more jobs to the city would help the local government diversify its tax stream and avoid the pitfalls, such as the city’s recent general fund deficit, that arise from over-reliance on large, singular employers.
He also emphasized the importance of maintaining good partnerships with the Covington public school system, having stayed active in Covington Independent Schools as the announcer of the Lady Bulldogs basketball team.
“Our school system is directly tied to how prosperous Covington is,” Washington said, “without a doubt. When it comes to the school district, I think there’s improvements that have been recently, and I think that the school should be applauded for that,” he said. “But by no means should we rest there. Being a volunteer and living in this city, the further you’re away from the problem, the easier the solution seems to be, and I think that some of the critics of the school system may feel that way. But these are complex problems… as a community, there’s no excuse for not continuously doing our best to move our kids forward.”
The need for greater investment in the city’s youth was a recurring theme in the conversations LINK nky had with people surrounding Washington’s candidacy.
“You want to give the opportunity to those kids and those families where they grow, and they become good citizens, and they want to live there [in Covington] and come back there,” Grau said. “And that’s how you get those community ties and strength.”
Basey said she would like to work with him to “get something for the youth in Covington. There’s nothing in Covington for the youth.”
Overall, Washington said, “If the people so choose me, I will be the type of mayor that will be on the ground and will offer assistance to people as much as possible. I will not be a stranger.”
“He’s engaged in that community,” Grau said. “If you see it down there, the projects he’s involved in, he’s always out there talking to the people in the city on what they need. And that’s something you really need, regardless of political stance or anything.”