The Kenton County Mayors Group met Saturday morning, where they engaged in continued discussion on the region’s housing needs as well as police recruiting, both of which have been frequent topics of conversation in the past.
The topic of affordable housing was broached by Pat Crowley, the vice president of government affairs with the Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Apartment Association, who talked about a interim committee in the state legislature about affordable housing.
John Link, Edgewood’s mayor, asked about the term affordable housing, saying it was difficult to tell what it actually meant. Terms related to housing change frequently and include terms like workforce housing, income-aligned housing and low-income housing, which can mean varying things depending on who’s uttering them.
Crowley said that the term affordable housing is often associated with public or subsidized housing, but really the topic spans a variety of topics, all of which, he said, the legislature is planning on looking into. These topics include dealing with the current high interest rates at the federal level, supply chain issues, an unwillingness among certain demographics to sell their homes, potential zoning reform and a lack of apartments in the region.
“Baby boomers like me, and most of people in this room, aren’t selling their houses,” Crowley said. “A couple reasons: one, interest rates are so damn high, and there’s no supply. So it’s really crimped things, and we’re growing a population. It is something that’s good the legislature’s looking at.”
The attendees referenced a housing study sponsored by the Northern Kentucky Area Development District, released in September. The study suggested that the eight counties in the district have “to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next 5 years, which equates to 1,330 units per year.”
Understanding NKY’s housing shortage
A study of housing in Northern Kentucky has revealed troubling trends for housing in the region, with the largest need being for “workforce housing” for households earning between $15 and $25 per hour, with monthly housing costs between $500 and $1,500. The region needs about 3,000 more housing units to provide for people within that income range, according to the study. The demand for one- to two-bedroom rentals and owned properties consistently exceeds their supply, while supply for three and four-bedroom properties consistently exceeds demand. The study suggests that the region needs to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next five years, which equates to 1,330 units per year. Read more here.
There was also discussion about attempts to block new developments in the region by established residents. Independence Mayor Chris Reinersman, for instance, referenced a recent conflict over a development off Madison Pike and how it was emblematic of some of the push-back that can occur when developers attempt to build new properties, on top of all the broader market forces that disincentive construction of small houses and apartments.
“I’m not necessarily advocating, it’s just we got to figure out how to solve the problem,” Reinersman said. “We’ve got to educate ourselves, and we got to educate our residents.”
As it related to the issue of police recruiting, which the region has been struggling with in recent years, Pat Morgan, the chief deputy of the Kenton County Sheriff’s Office, gave an update on some recent changes to police training requirements at the state level. This dovetailed into a discussion about school resource officers, often referred to as SROs.
A new police training academy in Madisonville will begin its first class on Aug. 1. Unlike the academy in Richmond, where the majority of police trainees in Kentucky go to get basic training, the Madisonville academy will be a commuter academy, one that doesn’t mandate the trainees live at the school while training. Morgan believed that this would help alleviate the training backlog the state has dealt with since the pandemic.
The issue of school resource officers also prompted discussion. SRO positions often attract recent retirees who are looking to stay involved with police work but are unable to perform the more strenuous work of conventional patrolmen. This creates competition with basic training instructor positions, which also pull from recent retirees. Both SRO positions and instructor positions are usually done on a contract basis.
“When you retired you used to go be an instructor,” Morgan said. “That was one of the jobs that paid halfway decent. Now, I think, their top out pay is $46-$48,000. As I mentioned before, you have SROs who work anywhere from 12 to 1,500 hours making $70, $80, $90,000 a year.”
In 2022, the state passed House Bill 63, which required all schools to have dedicated SROs, but the state provided only partial funding to facilitate this. Instead, the brunt of the cost of hiring and retaining resource officers fell to local jurisdictions, and this has made it difficult for some districts to hire SROs.
Morgan concluded by saying that Mike Bosse, a deputy commission with the Department of Criminal Justice Training, which is responsible for administering police training in the commonwealth, had expressed interest in attending a mayors group meeting in the future.
The next meeting of the Kenton County Mayors Group will take place on Saturday, July 20 at 9 a.m. at the Erlanger City Building on Commonwealth Avenue.