Why Is Oakley Underwater When Cincinnati Has $1.8 Billion for Infrastructure?

Article Summary:
Cincinnati raised $1.6 billion by selling its railroad for infrastructure. Three years later, with the trust worth $1.8 billion, Oakley flooded, and only 12-14% of this year’s funds had been spent.

Friday night’s Oakley flooding hit hard enough that the neighborhood, along with Hyde Park, disappeared underwater.

Forty water rescues. I-71 underwater in both directions.

A Metro bus with water past the seats. Oakley flooding was also reported during these storms. Madisonville and Pleasant Ridge took on water too. Flash floodwaters killed one person in Fairfax, and hospitals treated three others.

A stalled storm dumped over six inches of rain on Oakley in a few hours. It didn’t spread out the way storms usually do here. That’s a genuinely unusual amount of rain. A normal drainage system would struggle with it. It’s also the third time this year local contractors and utility crews have had to respond to severe weather damage across the region. That includes downed power lines, widespread outages, and a surge in storm-related roofing repairs. Friday’s flooding fits a pattern rather than an isolated event.

Three years ago, Cincinnati voters agreed to sell the city-owned railroad, the only one in the country. The price: $1.6 billion, specifically to fix aging infrastructure. That money is sitting in a trust now worth $1.8 billion. As of this spring, the city had spent only 12 to 14% of the $56 million the trust board authorized for this fiscal year.

Before getting to why that money is moving so slowly, it’s worth understanding how the sale happened in the first place. The same name shows up on both ends of this story.

The Buyer Paid for the “Yes” Campaign

Norfolk Southern didn’t just buy the railroad. It paid for the campaign that convinced voters to sell it.

Campaign finance filings show Norfolk Southern spent $6,023,172 through “Build Cincinnati’s Future,” the committee formed to pass Issue 22. That’s the most any group or candidate has ever spent on a Cincinnati city election. Norfolk Southern was the only donor. Some of that money paid for ads featuring Mayor Pureval. The ads promised the sale would “deliver for every neighborhood.”

Voters narrowly approved the sale, 52%. The company buying the railroad also bankrolled the pitch for why Cincinnati should sell it. Both things are true.

That’s the origin story. What happened to the money afterward is where the can-kicking actually starts.

Oakley Flooding Didn’t Have to Happen. The Railroad Money Was There.

WVXU reported in May that City Council had allocated the full $56 million for specific projects. Only 14% had actually been spent, with another 37% under contract but not yet underway. A city Public Services deputy director’s words: “We are not where we want to be in terms of spend.”

Mayor Pureval cited $350 to $400 million in backlogged capital infrastructure projects when the city made its case to sell the railway. On top of that, the city was already running about $35 million a year behind on deferred maintenance before the sale ever happened.

The money that has moved went toward real things: a $2 million overhaul of Victory Parkway near Eden Park, renovations to the Dunham Recreation Center in Westwood. Per the city’s FY2026 budget, a majority of the $29.2 million allocated that year went to the streets-and-bridges category. This isn’t a fund doing nothing. It’s a fund moving at roughly a third of the pace its own spending plan called for.

State law restricts the railway trust to “the rehabilitation, modernization, or replacement of existing infrastructure improvements,” under Ohio’s Ferguson Act. In practice, the trust’s own materials list what that covers: roads, municipal buildings, parks, recreation centers, fire and police stations. Sewers aren’t on that list, but that’s not because state law singles them out. It’s because MSD runs on a completely separate track. Hamilton County owns the sewer district and sets its rates, budget, and capital plans. The City of Cincinnati operates it day-to-day and employs its staff. That arrangement runs under an agreement that technically expired in 2018 and has been a source of ongoing city-county friction ever since, all under a federal consent decree for combined sewer overflows.

That program’s price tag: roughly $3.1-$3.2 billion total. Phase 1 alone cost about $961 million. MSD projects Phase 2B, still underway, to cost $1.82 billion through the mid-2030s. Nobody has ever tried routing CSR Trust dollars into that system. The full $1.8 billion trust wouldn’t come close to covering MSD’s price tag anyway.

Worth noting: Hamilton County’s Board of Commissioners, which owns MSD and controls its budget, is also entirely Democratic. All three commissioners, Stephanie Summerow Dumas, Alicia Reece and Denise Driehaus, belong to the same party that controls every seat at City Hall. The city and the county body that owns its sewer system aren’t politically divided in any way that would explain the disconnect between the two funding streams. It’s the same political coalition on both sides of the gap.

That doesn’t mean the two governments get along on MSD. They don’t. The city and county have fought for years over control of the utility since their operating agreement technically expired in 2018, including a 2019 dispute in which the county accused the city of withholding millions in reimbursements. That’s a real, ongoing turf war. It’s just not a partisan one. Both sides of the fight are the same party fighting itself over jurisdiction, which is arguably a worse explanation for slow progress than a partisan standoff would be.

The railway sale was never going to fix a sewer main directly. Streets, though, are literally one of the CSR Trust’s core categories, right alongside bridges and public buildings. Better-maintained streets and functioning storm drains can move water off the road faster in an ordinary heavy rain. They don’t add capacity for a genuinely unusual event like Friday’s. The trust money could have helped at the margins on the streets that flooded Friday. It was never going to prevent what happened underneath them. Slow spending isn’t a new complaint for this administration, either. It’s the same pattern showing up in a completely different fight that broke out this summer.

A Track Record That Predates the Flood

Skepticism about whether Cincinnati can deliver on a $1.8 billion promise doesn’t start with Friday’s flooding. It has a paper trail.

A city commission survey released in March ranked road maintenance dead last in resident satisfaction among 13 city services, with just 12% of residents saying the city handles it well, compared to 35% in comparably sized cities. Pavement condition has declined for five straight years, according to the city’s own transportation director, and now rates 63 out of 100. Pothole-related service requests were up 46% year over year as of this spring. Pureval acknowledged the problem directly at a budget press conference: “The conditions of the roads are not meeting our expectations.”

Snow removal drew a harder public reckoning. After a January 2025 storm dropped nearly 11 inches, 20% of the city’s plow fleet was out of service, some trucks so old that replacement parts are no longer manufactured. Streets in Northside, Mount Adams, Mount Washington, Westwood and CUF went unplowed for days. Council member Seth Walsh didn’t soften it: “Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve come up short. We keep talking about unprecedented, historic, and the like. Almost every time we have a snow emergency, we come up short.” Council ordered a formal review of what one official called a “system breakdown.”

None of that is about the CSR Trust specifically. It’s about whether a city that struggles to plow known streets during a forecasted storm, and to keep its pavement above a failing grade, has earned the benefit of the doubt on a $1.8 billion account with a three-year head start and a spend rate stuck in the teens.

City Hall’s Fight Over Railroad Dollars and a Procurement Reorg

On June 10, City Council unanimously passed an ordinance merging the city’s Department of Economic Inclusion with its Office of Procurement. The new Department of Economic Inclusion and Procurement takes effect September 1. On July 2, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno sent Mayor Pureval a letter calling it a “potentially illegal and wasteful DEI Procurement Ordinance.” Moreno claims Cincinnati spends $3 to $5 million a year on “DEI initiatives, grants, and departments.” The city hasn’t confirmed that figure. He says that money should go either toward the city’s roughly $30 million budget deficit or toward public safety. He sent a copy to the Justice Department and threatened federal funding cuts.

Pureval’s office says the merger doesn’t create a new diversity program or increase spending. Council member Scotty Johnson defended the reorg by tying it directly to the railway trust money sitting unspent. He told WCPO the change should help move “railroad dollars” out the door faster. The city’s own defense of the reorg concedes the exact problem this piece is describing.

If Johnson is right, that’s a testable claim. Check the CSR Trust spend rate again next year.

A reorg that concedes its own city has a spending problem doesn’t happen in a political system with real opposition pressure. It happens in one where the only checks come from inside the same party.

A One-Party City’s Infrastructure Money Problem

None of this happens in a vacuum. Cincinnati hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1971, 55 years of one party running City Hall without serious two-party competition at the top. Cincinnati’s elections are technically nonpartisan; no party label appears on the ballot for mayor or council. But the results aren’t close: Democrats currently hold all nine City Council seats and the mayor’s office, and have for two straight elections. A Charter Committee campaign staffer put it this way during the last council race: with “all nine Democrats all the time,” council risks becoming “an echo chamber of everybody saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes.'”

That matters specifically for the infrastructure story. A city government that doesn’t face real electoral pressure from an opposing party has less built-in reason to move fast on unglamorous, unpopular-with-nobody-but-nobody’s-demanding-it work like sewer pipes and street repaving. There’s no rival administration promising to spend the CSR Trust faster if voters just switch parties. The competition that exists runs through primaries and individual personalities, not through a genuine “we’ll fix this, they won’t” choice at the ballot box. That’s one plausible reason capital dollars can sit uncommitted for three fiscal years without costing anyone their job.

Voters keep choosing this setup anyway. Pureval won re-election with roughly 80% of the primary vote. Democrats have swept all nine council seats twice in a row. If one-party rule is part of why infrastructure money moves slowly, the responsibility for that arrangement lies with voters, not just City Hall.

Iris Roley’s contracts. The city has paid community consultant Iris Roley between $570,000 and $664,300 across contracts tied to youth violence prevention and police-community relations work. That figure includes hiring her own two sons as paid subcontractors. The city manager signed one contract on Election Day. A former council member called the arrangement “patronage.” Todd Zinser, a retired federal Inspector General, has flagged the timing and nepotism publicly.

The Climate Migration Readiness Plan. In May, Cincinnati’s Office of Environment and Sustainability released what it says is the nation’s first municipal plan to prepare for “climate migrants.” The plan cites projections of half a million new residents in the region by 2050. The city’s own sustainability coordinator, Oliver Kroner, said while unveiling it that Cincinnati still has “work to do on stormwater management, both our pipes and our green infrastructure.” That was two months before Oakley flooded.

Every one of these- the reorg, Roley, the climate plan- is defensible in isolation. Taken together, they describe an administration with plenty of bandwidth for new initiatives and consultants, and considerably less urgency once the task is repairing something that already exists. That’s the definition of kicking the can: it’s not that nothing gets done; it’s that the popular, photogenic work crowds out the unglamorous work the city already funded and already promised.

Local Fight, National Currency

Losing federal funding doesn’t fix a sewer pipe. Pureval spoke at the 2024 DNC. National outlets widely describe him as a Democratic rising star in Ohio. A fight with a Republican senator plays differently in that arena than it does on a flooded street in Oakley. There, the only question that matters is whether the pipes hold next time.

Moreno’s letter didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a direct response to a choice City Hall made: to reorganize around economic inclusion and procurement rather than visibly prioritizing the basics. That choice gave a Republican senator the opening to write it. The letter isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of the same one this piece keeps coming back to: City Hall spending its attention and political capital on the reorg, the Roley contracts, the climate plan. Meanwhile, a $1.8 billion infrastructure trust sits mostly unspent, and streets stay unplowed. Every one of those choices invites exactly this kind of fight, and every one of those fights is a distraction from the actual, boring, expensive work of fixing pipes and pavement.

That’s the gap this piece keeps returning to: what plays well versus what actually gets fixed. Closing it doesn’t require a new investigation. It requires someone to keep checking the same three numbers.

What Cincinnati’s Infrastructure Money Should Answer For

• How much of the $350–400 million backlog Pureval cited in 2022 has been closed three years later?
• Where do MSD’s stormwater capacity upgrades for Oakley, Hyde Park, and Norwood sit within its own capital plan, and on what timeline?
• What $570K–$664K in Roley contracts has produced, measured the same way this piece measures the CSR Trust.

Three years after Issue 22 passed, the trust has grown to $1.8 billion. Residents in Oakley are probably less interested in whether City Hall wins its next fight in Washington. They’d rather know if the next six-inch storm closes I-71 again.

FAQs

How much money did Cincinnati make from selling its railroad?

Cincinnati sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for $1.6 billion in 2023. The proceeds went into a trust specifically earmarked for city infrastructure, and that trust has since grown to roughly $1.8 billion.

How much of Cincinnati's railroad trust money has actually been spent?

As of spring 2026, the city had spent only 12 to 14% of the $56 million authorized for that fiscal year, with another 37% under contract but not yet underway, according to WVXU reporting and city officials.

Can Cincinnati's railroad trust money be used to fix the sewers that caused the Oakley flooding?

No. The trust is legally restricted to repairing existing city infrastructure like streets, bridges, and public buildings. Stormwater and sewer systems are operated by the Metropolitan Sewer District, a separate entity funded through its own rates and a federal consent decree, with a total program cost of roughly $3.1-$3.2 billion.

Who paid for the campaign to sell the Cincinnati Southern Railway?

Norfolk Southern, the company that ultimately bought the railroad, was the sole donor behind “Build Cincinnati’s Future,” the committee that campaigned for Issue 22. It spent just over $6 million, the most ever spent on a Cincinnati city election.