Covington residents were split on whether to structure the city’s impending switch to a mayor-council form of government with an at-large model of representation or a hybrid model of representation at a public forum Wednesday evening.
The question of making the council seats partisan, however, was unambiguous: No one wanted partisanship brought into the local government.
“Most of the issues that the city deals with are the nuts and bolts of basic government, and I think it’s very important that party politics do not bog that down,” said Mike Baker, one of the attendees to the forum.
The forum took place at the American Legion Post in Latonia. It was better attended than the first forum from earlier this month, which only had eight people attend, even though the overall attendance to Wednesday’s event was about 15 people. Both forums aimed to collect public feedback on how to structure the city’s government switch, slated to take effect in 2027.
Although attendees were in agreement that the new council seats shouldn’t be partisan, there was disagreement among the attendees on whether the seats should represent the city at-large or if the council should have a combination of ward-representative seats and at-large seats. No one recommended a pure ward-based system. You can read LINK nky’s explainer to learn about the difference between the systems.
Self-proclaimed “local government nerd” Lauren O’Brien advocated for a hybrid system, arguing it allowed for the body to address both localized and broad problems within the city. She also advocated for an odd number of council seats – councils can have anywhere between six and 12 seats per Kentucky law. O’Brien had worked in city government across the river and in Northern Kentucky, and she argued that under a purely at-large system, sometimes neighborhoods felt”like they got left behind,” she said.
“Politicians would go there during election season and say, ‘I’m here,’ and then suddenly disappear,” O’Brien said.
Another attendee, Mike Lang, agreed, saying that pure systems could lead to lopsided representation on the council. He gave Springdale, Ohio, whose city council has three at-large council members and four district-based council members, as an example of a structure he thought worked well.
Lang also argued for staggering electoral terms.
“If you stagger those elections every two years, that provides continuity of government,” Lang said.
Not everyone agreed, though. April Coffee, a board member of Latonia Uptown, a local neighborhood association, argued that an at-large system would be better.
“If you’re elected coming into a position, personally, I would just feel that you’re supposed to be representing the city of Covington in general,” Coffee said, worrying that consigning seats to specific wards would end up “pigeonholing people to areas. You’re saying, ‘Hey, this is your area, this is what you’re responsible for, these are the people you’re responsible for.'”
Joyce Baker Murphy, a city resident and former member of the Covington Board of Education, likewise recommended an at-large system. She said it was always better to have people who were engaged with the process, regardless of where they came from in the city.
“There might be three qualified people -we’ll use Latonia – in the Latonia area, and I live in another part, and maybe there’s really nobody who has filed to run my ward, so to speak,” Murphy gave as an example “I would rather see those three people represent Covington than one idiot who might run in my area who really doesn’t know anything, he hasn’t been to any council meetings, isn’t involved in anything in the community.”
In addition to speaking, attendees filled out written surveys, which were then given to the city’s committee on government transition. The committee members attended the meeting but did not speak. The committee is expected to continue meeting regularly throughout 2025 and 2026, but there are no currently scheduled public fora about the transition.