This story was prepared in conjunction with Meghan Goth’s reporting and writing class at the University of Cincinnati with additional help from UC’s student newspaper, The News Record.
Ben Baker and Charlie Cleves have each other’s backs.
The mayors of Dayton and Bellevue, respectively, readily admit that they are in this together. The two river cities, separated by O’Fallon Avenue, have their own mayor and city council but have created strong connections with each other to inspire and lead change in their communities. Whether it’s a snow emergency, passing ordinances like smoking bans or collaborating on events, the cities’ collaboration has thrived under Baker and Cleves’ leadership.
“When they fail, we fail,” Baker said. “When they succeed, we succeed.”
Bellevue’s Cleves agrees.
“We go to a lot of events for each other,” Cleves said. “When you have this back and forth, it helps both cities.”
Ryan Salzman, who serves on Bellevue’s city council, applauds the way the mayors work together.
“Bellevue and Dayton, at this moment, have a very strong working relationship with one another,” Salzman said. “I credit the people who are leading those cities.”
The cities’ similar sizes – they both have just under 6,000 residents – and their proximity to each other and the river help when it comes to working together, both mayors told LINK nky.
Northern Kentucky has long been brainstorming ways to help its 36 municipalities within three counties address issues associated with siloed local governments. In 1996, an organization called Forward Quest published a document intended to identify inefficiencies across the region. The work Forward Quest conducted helped form the basis of other future-oriented strategic planning under the names of Vision 2015, later Skyward, and now the OneNKY Alliance.
The main question leaders have sought to address: How does Northern Kentucky create a regional identity beyond an extension of the city across the river? While consolidation of the region is a consistent topic of conversation among regional leaders, most agree that a stronger regional identity would at the very least help the region get state funds for various projects or nonprofits.
“We hear people complain about too many governments in our counties, but then the responses are often workarounds that create new governments atop the existing governments and make it more complex and difficult,” Covington Mayor Joe Meyer said. “One of the big problems that we have here is that we have no government in Northern Kentucky that’s responsible for the big picture.”
Meyer said NKY’s city governments have very broad general responsibilities within their jurisdictions. “Counties and state-run special districts generally have a more limited focus, so who do you go to for issues related to affordable housing for the region, for example?” he said. “The reality is that no such regional institution exists.”
Meyer said some leaders in the region assume his city can solve social issues, such as affordable housing, for the entire region.
“We have been doing way more than our share for a long time,” Meyer said. “The simple fact is that Covington can’t do all that for this entire region, and the reality is there are more people in need of social services in Kenton County outside of Covington than inside Covington, and more people in need in Boone County than Covington.
“Yes, we are welcoming here, but the region collectively is not meeting the needs of the people by pushing all these services into Covington,” he said.
Meyer said that, for regionalism to work for Northern Kentucky, it should have institutional responsibility for the big picture and include a way to resolve inevitable conflicts.
“I’m very much for regionalism, and I believe Northern Kentucky would be so much better off if it developed a true vision of regionalism that was institutional, not personality- or interest-driven,” Meyer said. “It has to be responsible for the entire region, have regional funding sources and a conflict-resolution mechanism built in.”
Another roadblock to regionalism is that many of the more urban cities and municipalities along the river have conflicting values and priorities, he said.
“We are not comfortable with the idea of regional entities imposing their vision on Covington, but we’re perfectly willing to cooperate with regional motion so long as our vision and values and interests are respected,” Meyer said. “We very much believe that our uniqueness, our history and social attitudes are what make us unique, and those attributes aren’t shared with much of the rest of Northern Kentucky.”
In order for Northern Kentucky to consolidate, legislation would need to be introduced at the state level, which most agree is unlikely. But that doesn’t stop the region from wondering how to become one place – without technically being one place.
“I will tell you, if Northern Kentucky was one city, we would be more effective lobbying for resources,” said Brent Cooper, president and CEO of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. “We would be more effective in our economic development efforts. We would be more effective in bringing talent here.”
In fact, Cooper said, if Northern Kentucky – Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties – were one city or county, it would be the second largest population base in the state behind Louisville.
An example for the rest of NKY?
Since consolidation is unlikely in the near future, it’s all the more important for cities to find ways to work together, Salzman said. He thinks Bellevue and Dayton are a great example for the rest of the region.
“They’re always willing and eager to celebrate each other’s successes and then lend a hand when that is needed,” he said.
The Bellevue council member is also project director at OneNKY Alliance,
Both cities’ mayors decided to go into public service – albeit at very different times in their careers – because they weren’t happy with how things were being run.
Baker described an incident leading to his decision to run for office involving an effort to create more murals in Dayton. City council overwrote the mayor’s approval of the murals, Baker said, and it seemed to be motivated by council members’ opinion of the mayor personally.
“When I ran for city council, everybody knew why I was running for council,” Baker said. “To stop the silliness.”
Similarly, Cleves’ involvement stemmed from his dissatisfaction with how Bellevue was being run. With free time after retiring from his jewelry business, Cleves thought it was the right time to enter politics.
“They weren’t doing it as well as I knew I could do it,” he said.
Since taking on public service roles, Baker and Cleves have worked to improve their cities and enhance the lives of both cities’ citizens.
In 2022, Dayton enacted a smoke free ordinance, banning smoking and the use of vapes in its public spaces and places of employment. Kentucky does not currently have a statewide smoking ban in place. Bellevue followed suit, passing the same ordinance in 2023.
“We saw the smoking ordinance that Dayton did first, and we saw that it went over very easily,” Cleves said.
Going further back, in 2019, Bellevue adopted a designated outdoor refreshment area, commonly known by its abbreviation, DORA. This allows residents to walk freely with alcoholic beverages on designated sidewalks so long as the drink is in a district-specific cup.
Dayton created its DORA in 2023.
“One person doesn’t have to do all the testing out and the other one just steals their ideas,” Cleves said. “They test ideas and we come up with ours. It’s like a 50-50 deal with them. We’re always helping each other.”
Bellevue and Dayton also share resources such as police and fire departments.
Even when resources are less formal, the mayors help each other out.
“So if Bellevue needs a salt trucker during a snowstorm, I got their back,” Baker said.
In 2023, Bellevue and Dayton passed an interlocal resolution that allows residents to drive golf carts on some city streets.
The resolution states, in part, that “the cities of Dayton and Bellevue believe it is convenient and prudent to allow the use of golf carts to travel to, through and from both cities.”
Embracing new, fresh ideas
Breathe Easy’s goal is to adopt a comprehensive smoke-free ordinance in all public areas and workplaces throughout Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties. Its strategy for enacting smoking bans across Northern Kentucky was a direct result of the region’s fragmentation, said Karen Finan, OneNKY Alliance’s CEO.
“As we put the strategy together, it was very important that we were able to find courageous political leaders and elected officials who were willing to take this on and find the support among these councils to push a smoke-free ordinance,” Finan said.
While it would be much easier were Kentucky to pass a statewide ban, Finan said the state hasn’t made many inroads on that front. “So it falls back to the cities,” she said, “and that’s been part of the strategy.”
Enter Bellevue and Dayton.
“The most important piece in Bellevue and Dayton was finding the elected leader who had the courage to bring this on,” Finan said. “And then also the council folks. I think there were many similarities between Bellevue and Dayton.”
Finan said both mayors supported the idea of going smoke free.
“If you go back and look, they have embraced a lot of new, fresh ideas,” Finan said. “So it wasn’t abnormal for them to decide to embrace this.”
But that doesn’t mean Breathe Easy NKY hasn’t faced challenges. Just one other Northern Kentucky city – Highland Heights – has passed a smoking ban. While Kenton County has a smoke-free ordinance, it still allows smoking after a certain time in bars and restaurants.
“That fragmentation really has an impact not just on this effort, not just on the health effort, but across the board,” Finan said. “And, in Northern Kentucky, we have some great elected officials who understand how to work around that. But it just makes it tough when you have that many in a small geographic area. So, to our coalition, that was probably the biggest challenge.”
Alternatively, some smaller cities with small budgets and staff just don’t have the capacity to work effectively with other cities.
“Sometimes it’s not that you’re not cooperating or collaborating because you don’t want to,” Salzman said. “It’s just not happening because you don’t have that ability or you don’t have that sort of institutional memory to be able to tap into that.”
Salzman said he wouldn’t describe himself as pro-consolidation. Actual consolidation is an institutional hurdle, though, he said, and there are many opportunities short of that to act in a more collaborative way.
“I think that all opportunities for cooperation between cities and counties should be on the table, regardless of how institutionalized they are,” Salzman said.
At the end of the day, Dayton’s Baker said, it’s about looking out for your neighbors. “If your neighbor’s house burns, your house is in trouble too,” he said.
For Cleves, who is retired and in what he calls his “give-back stage,” he is more than happy to share ideas or things he comes up with that Baker, who has a full-time job and less time to spare, may not have had the time to address.
“I’m working on all these things that he doesn’t have time to do, and I’m willing to share anything I come up with,” Cleves said.
Baker did admit that there are two days out of the year he doesn’t like Bellevue. “That’s when we are playing them in football.”
University of Cincinnati students Caleb Brewer, Camilo Chaves-Galeano, Alex Givens, Ella Moyer, Harry Peterson, Raymon Render, Lydia Schembre, Taania Sukumar, Juanito Tavares and Lucas Griffith contributed to this report.