Dollars follow commitment to boost Linden

Politicians and government officials usually talk a good game, but the proof of their words is best revealed when they start allocating dollars.

In the administration of Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, the city’s $1 billion 2018 capital budget includes a sizable project to back up his commitment to focus special attention on addressing challenges in the Linden neighborhood — a struggling community that Ginther has vowed to change for the better.

Capital budgets by their nature are not very exciting. Most of the money raised from bond packages goes to address boring essentials like repaving roads, maintaining utilities and keeping sewer lines in good repair. That’s how nearly $600 million of this newest capital budget is to be spent.

But for Linden, the typical invisible work of the capital budget will become very tangible in the form of a rebuilt community center at Linden Park. Along with a gym, it will offer a teaching kitchen, classrooms and space for agencies serving the neighborhood.

Having a glistening new building for community activities is helpful, but what’s inside will go a long way toward this facility’s ability to become the beacon of possibility the mayor envisions for Linden residents. While the bricks and mortar of the new Linden Community Center are being assembled, we hope the city is also amassing community and corporate leaders similar to those who have turned the Reeb Avenue Center on Columbus’ South Side into an active source of hope.

Around the same time Columbus City Council approved the capital budget last week, the mayor announced Linden will also receive special attention to stem violence through creative collaboration with public health officials for targeted counseling after homicides occur and with city crews fixing physical problems that can contribute to crime, such as burned-out street lights.

The city plans to spend $1 million in the capital budget on a gunshot-detection system to help police pinpoint and respond to gunfire. Whether that system will be deployed in Linden is yet to be determined, though we can think of no better neighborhood to give that technology a shot at reducing crime.

This year’s largest-ever capital budget is made possible by healthy income-tax revenue, about a quarter of which is dedicated to repaying the debt taken on to finance the capital-needs spending.

Franklin county commissioners were laying groundwork last week to finance their own capital projects, including the $266 million second phase of a new jail to replace two aging facilities. They were visiting national bond rating companies to seek their blessings to keep the county’s borrowing costs low.

Part of what enables the county to proceed with the rest of the jail project is its unanimous vote late last year to make permanent what had been a temporary five-year sales tax of a quarter percent. That vote made Franklin County’s 7.5 percent sales tax second highest to Cuyahoga County’s 8 percent.

A new “2018 State of the County” online report touts the “efficient, responsive & fiscally sustainable government operations” overseen by Franklin County commissioners Kevin Boyce, Marilyn Brown and John O’Grady, but it leaves out that key detail.

Efficient? Maybe. Fiscally sustainable? Probably. Responsive? Not to taxpayers.