Covington City Commission

Eight candidates, listed in the order they appear on the ballots below, are vying for four open seats on the Covington City Commission this November.

• Tim Acri
• Aaron Wolpert
• Shannon Smith
• Bradie Bowen
• James Toebbe
• Bill Wells
• Tim Downing
• Maria “Cari” McMurtry Garriga

The commission is the primary legislative body in the city. It’s responsible for establishing local laws, passing a budget and approving various city operations. Commissioners serve two-year terms, and the seats are nonpartisan.

The four commissioners share power with the mayor, who chairs the commission meetings, signs contracts and acts as the public face of the city. Unlike a mayor in a mayor-council form of government, the mayor in Covington’s city manager form of government casts votes with the rest of the commission and cannot veto legislation. Read LINK nky’s explainer (linked here) for more information on how Covington’s municipal government works.

Covington was the only city in Kenton County to have a primary in May. That election saw the elimination of two candidates, Morgan Davenport and Devin Kroner. The incumbent candidates dominated the field in the primary, winning by large margins.

Tim Downing and Shannon Smith are the two incumbent candidates. The challengers are Tim Acri, Bradie Bowen, Maria "Cari" Garriga, James Toebbe, Bill Wells and Aaron Wolpert.

LINK nky did introductory interviews with all of the candidates in May, which you can read below to get a better idea of their backgrounds. The remaining candidates corresponded with LINK nky in the subsequent months, sharing their views on everything from housing to youth to the city's overall financial health.

Covington Commission profiles

LINK nky reached out to all of the candidates in May to learn about their backgrounds and ask them about their priorities.

Read more here.

A dearth of affordable, entry-level housing is an ongoing concern in both Covington and the region generally. A housing study published by the Northern Kentucky Area Development District last year posited that the largest need is for what the study called “workforce housing,” which refers to households whose wages ranged from $15 to $25 with monthly housing costs between $500 and $1,500. The development district's region, which includes Boone, Kenton, Campbell and five of the other northern most counties in Kentucky, needs about 3,000 more housing units to provide for people within that income range.

The City of Covington owns and controls numerous properties in the city and contains the lion's share of the county's publicly-owned housing.

Wells, who formerly sat on the commission and is active in the city's neighborhood associations, recommended packaging the empty properties into groups of ten then soliciting developers to buy up the properties on the condition they would be rented or sold to residents in lower and middle-income brackets for five years. Alternatively, the City and Housing Authority of Covington could form a land bank, pooling the available properties owned by the city together under one organization so they could be better managed, refurbished and prioritized for lower earners.

The incumbents, Downing and Smith, both pointed to work of the current commission in securing partnerships with housing nonprofits and in reforming the city's development code to better account for affordable housing.

Bowen similarly pointed to zoning practices as a means of addressing the issue, advocating for inclusionary zoning practices, which exists in various forms throughout the country but often requires developers to guarantee a portion of their developments go towards affordable housing units.

Garriga advised a similar approach but also recommended stepping up enforcement against negligent landlords. Additionally, she argued the city should consider repurposing old commercial and industrial space as "a way to increase the number of units of affordable housing, perhaps with micro-condos through adaptive re-use initiatives."

Acri, a veteran and business owner, recommended offering tax credits to developers building affordable housing. He also wanted to "get local developers and landlords together in a room and discuss this and other options, so our lower income residents have more options." He pointed to City Heights, a publicly-owned housing community that officially shuttered earlier this year, as one such place where new affordable housing could go.

Wolpert argued that building more housing was the best way to fix the shortage. He recommended various policies incentivizing lower construction costs with contractors and developers, incentivizing the construction of the entry-level, infill housing (i.e. housing on empty lots) and rental housing, all of which the current market discourages.

Toebbe, also a veteran, similarly pointed to the need to fill the numerous vacant lots throughout the city with new housing. He recommended partnering with the local school district to create tax incentives to draw developers to the region, especially developers building multi-family housing.

Besides organized sports programs, many of Covington residents have expressed a lack of recreational spaces for youth and children to safely congregate and socialize.

Generally speaking, the candidates advocated for greater community involvement in mapping out opportunities for recreation. Most candidates recommended stepping up promotion for existing youth activities through the city's Parks and Recreation Department as well as the Covington Schools after-school program, which is among the more robust after-school programs in the region. Several candidates--Wolpert, Toebbe and Wells--were outspoken in the view that kids themselves needed to be involved in the process "to ensure that we are offering activities that they are actually interested in," Toebbe said.

Bowen, who's worked at Covington Schools as a teacher and administrator for over 20 years, advocated using federal funds currently allocated to the city to construct a centrally-located community center where kids could go when they weren't in school.

Garriga recommended building out the number of recreational clubs in the city, encouraging the establishment of everything from STEM clubs to writing groups to arts programs to community service groups.

Smith spoke to the need for private-public partnerships to reinvest in existing recreational facilities. She also said she'd like to see more facilities like the FC Cincinnati mini-pitch in Austinburg Park.

Finally, the candidates spoke to the city's financial picture. Covington's general fund is still in the throes of a budget deficit, which arose in conjunction with work-from-home policies instituted at the city's larger employers during the pandemic. This had the effect of reducing the city's payroll tax income, which is an outsized portion of Covington's tax base.

The current commission has put its hope in the Central Riverfront Development as a means of dealing with the shortfall in the long-term, but they also instituted other policies to deal with the gap in the short-term, such as a limited hiring freeze and a general reassessment of the city's overall financial picture. Most candidates, including the two incumbents, were in favor of these measures.

Many also recommended assessing the city's current contracts and partnerships to ensure it was getting the best deals.

Downing pointed to long-term planning in the form of multi-year budget projections to ensure the city wasn't overshooting its spending.

Smith, on the other hand, recommended advocacy at the state level to secure novel ways for the city to diversify its revenue stream, something that current Mayor Joe Meyer has done in the past, as Kentucky tax law constrains the ways in which cities can raise money.

"I plan to continue those conversations," Smith said.

Garriga advocated for greater investment in workforce development "to fill local job demands, offering entrepreneurship support, and work on attracting skilled workers at all levels."

Toebbe, on the other hand, emphasized that the city needed to stop taking on new debt.

"Relying too heavily on future development projects, like the CCR site can be risky if that project faces delays or does not meet revenue expectations," Toebbe said.

Attracting new businesses would be crucial to solving the budgetary shortfall in the immediate future, he added.

Bowen, like many of the other candidates, recommended a clear assessment of the city's current financial situation. Specifically, she said, "identifying departments with excessive overtime pay and reorganizing them to run more efficiently to reduce the costs should be the first priority."

Acri recommended assessing the city's numerous properties and selling some of them to meed financial demands in the short-term. He also recommended cashing-in some of the city's investments and more aggressively seeking taxes from companies with work from home policies. "If their company is paying them to work from their home in Covington, they should be paying Covington income tax," Acri said.

Tune in to LINK nky's virtual candidate forum on Oct. 10 to hear from the candidates directly.