Cincinnati taxpayers paid for 111 trips for Mayor Mark Mallory

But others said Mallory is taking credit for money and events that would’ve come to Cincinnati regardless of the mayor’s visits and lobbying.

The city has a Convention and Visitors Bureau funded by a hotel tax and that also gets additional funding from City Hall each year, they counter. And the city spends about $120,000 annually on a lobbyist in Washington.

“All of this travel is outside the boundary of the norm,” said Councilman Christopher Smitherman. “What was our return on investment? If you flew there, what did we get for it?

“I think the Convention and Visitors Bureau has done a great job and they include the right players to close these deals,” he said.

WCPO Digital contacted six comparably sized cities to ask about how often their mayors travel and how expenses are handled.

Five of the cities – Lexington, Ky.; Newark, N.J.; Pittsburgh; St. Paul, Minn.; and Toledo – either didn’t return calls and emails, or declined comment.

A representative from the sixth – St. Louis – did respond.

“Our mayor does very little travel,” said Maggie Crane, spokeswoman for Mayor Francis Slay. “When he does do it, it usually comes out of his campaign account. It’s a pretty negligible amount of travel.”

Mallory’s predecessor as Cincinnati mayor, Charlie Luken, also didn’t travel much while in office.

Luken was mayor from 1984-91, when the position was part of City Council and mostly ceremonial; and again from 1999-2005, as the city’s first directly elected mayor with expanded powers.

During his tenure, Luken’s foreign travel was limited to visiting Germany and Japan once, which was paid for by Sister Cities; and flying to Israel once.

“I have never found it productive in terms of generating business,” said Luken, who also is a former congressman.

“I found even trips to the (U.S. Conference of Mayors) not to be a productive use of my time or anyone’s money. I found them to be more self-promotional,” he said.

During his last mayoral term, Luken said he was focused on helping Cincinnati recover from the April 2001 riots and on items like repealing Article 12, an anti-gay charter amendment.

“After 2001, I thought my job was here,” he said. “The city was wounded and we needed to put it back together.

“We also had a recession in 2002 and had to make cutbacks at City Hall,” Luken added. “I thought it inappropriate to spend a lot of money on travel.”

Harrell and Matt Alter, who heads the local firefighters union, both agreed some travel is part of the mayor’s job. Still, the extent of Mallory’s travel disturbs them, they said.

“Obviously, that’s quite a bit of money spent on travel,” Alter said. “Excluding benefits, that’s the salaries of two firefighters for a year.

“We do realize that sometimes to make money, you need to spend money,” he said. “My hope is that it’s done wisely.”

Fund Aimed at Development

Documents show that the Business and Jobs Attraction account – created by the Cinergy settlement – and that Mallory sometimes uses to pay for travel has less than $4,000 left unallocated.

Spending from the account directly attributable to the mayor totals $49,853.

But Mallory’s travels are tallied differently than travel expenses for anyone else at City Hall, making it unclear if that number represents a complete picture of his expenses.

Documents show $431,236 in that Business and Jobs Attraction account has been spent. Another $314,776 had been “encumbered,” meaning it had been set aside for specific planned expenses – mostly planned website upgrades.

That left $3,988 unspent and unencumbered.

However, since WCPO Digital began looking into how the account is used, City Council decided to reallocate $107,500 into the city’s General Fund for operating expenses.

The account was created in May 2006, just six months after Mallory took office. It is funded by a $750,000 contribution by Cinergy Corp., as part of a settlement over its merger with Duke Energy.

Cinergy actually paid the city $1 million in total.

Of that amount, $250,000 was put into the General Fund, which is used for city government’s operating expenses.

The remaining $750,000 funded a Business and Jobs Attraction account. The ordinance passed by City Council to create it states, “the proper city officials are authorized to make expenditures from said accounts.”

Who the “proper city officials” are, however, is left open to interpretation.

Next page: ‘It’s The Taxpayers’ Money’

Cincinnati taxpayers paid for 111 trips for Mayor Mark Mallory