
Illustration by Jeremy Sancha
Rud Hynicka stood alone on the dark train platform, steam from the idling locomotive engine hissing angrily. He glowered at the yellow Western Union telegram a messenger had just delivered. He dropped his arm to the side, the telegram bristling in the breeze, as he tried to focus his disbelieving eyes through the fall night’s gloom.
The reforms of America’s Progressive era had finally taken root in Cincinnati, the city he and his mentor, George “Boss” Cox, had bullied for 40 years. On November 4, 1924, voters overwhelmingly approved a new city charter to establish a council/manager form of government.
Bossism was dead and, back in the Queen City, men and newly enfranchised women crowded into the muddy streets to celebrate the beginning of the city’s Charterite era. Citizens rejected the graft that had earned their city government unwanted attention as the nation’s most corrupt and rewrote the municipal constitution, or charter.
Hynicka contemplated his next move. Did he have one? He loved his life of luxury in New York City, where his vaudeville business, racetrack, and handsome mansion had been financed thanks to Cincinnati’s taxpayers.
He was on his way to his midtown Manhattan burlesque house, having spent the weeks before Election Day in Cincinnati trying to hold back the charter reformers. Should he grab his suitcase, cross the platform, and take the next train back? Murray Seasongood, he muttered contemptuously under his breath. Henry Bentley, Victor Heintz, and that damnable suffragist, Agnes Hilton. All of those Charter Committee members over their heads. Talkers, not doers. He thought about heading back and reclaiming his vassal state.
But he no longer had the firepower. His political machine had been steadily eroding since Cox’s death in 1916. Gone were the days when Hynicka had card files on every single voter in Hamilton County, when he knew where you lived, who you worked for, and how much money you made. His deck of cards was his leverage, and he used it every election cycle to round up votes, collect bribes, and hand out city jobs.
But Hynicka was a realist, and it hit him as cold as the nighttime chill: The people had spoken. His voter cards no longer mattered. Neither did his orders. There were no more arms to twist.
Head bowed, Hynicka returned to his sleeper compartment, still the Boss of Burlesque but no longer the King of Cincinnati. A heart attack would take him to his grave two years later.
Seasongood and his reformer colleagues ended up sparking a new political movement in Cincinnati after passing their charter revisions. While Charter Committee members worked with Republicans or Democrats depending on the issues of the day, Charterites also served as a third party at certain times. City Hall Charterites included Marian Spencer, the first African American to serve on city council; Ted Berry, Cincinnati’s first Black mayor; Bobbie Sterne, the first woman elected mayor; and more recent names like Jerry Springer, Tyrone Yates, Roxanne Qualls, and Ken Blackwell.
Kevin Flynn was the last Charter candidate elected to city council, winning a four-year term in 2013 and then stepping away after feeling that he’d done all he could. He famously never missed a council meeting and earned the respect of his colleagues, many of whom publicly pleaded with him to run for re-election.
Flynn did run again in 2021 but finished out of the running in 12th place, followed by other Charter-endorsed candidates Steve Goodin (14), Jim Tarbell (15), Jackie Frondorf (20), Bill Frost (25), and Galen Gordon (26). The top nine vote-getters are elected to city council.
Goodin, the Charter Committee’s new chairman, is mapping out a return to relevance. The Porter Wright attorney has been busy over the past several months recruiting young blood to the reformist cause he believes it is still sorely needed.
He points to the pay-to-play scandals that forced three councilmembers out of office in recent years and cites “the disconnect I hear among voters who don’t feel City Hall really listens to them” as evidence the time is right for a Charter return. “We need a reset,” says Goodin. “Cincinnati is unique, and we were recognized in the past as the best city government in the country thanks to our charter. But it’s been eroded piece by piece, and now it’s a structure that’s been bastardized as we tweaked it along the way.”
“We need the Charter Committee even more now than we did 100 years ago,” says Flynn.

—Dawn Johnson
Photograph by Andrew Doench
After sitting out the 2017 city council cycle, Flynn watched a Republican—Jeff Pastor— and two Democrats elected that year—Tamaya Dennard and P.G. Sittenfeld—plead guilty to or be convicted in bribery schemes. Each resigned from council.
The Democratic slate doomed his 2021 campaign, says Flynn, crediting the party with endorsing nine candidates for the nine council seats and promoting them with an avalanche of mailers, campaign ads, door-knockers, and phone banks. Eight of the nine won; two years later, Democrats finished the job by defeating the lone council Republican, Liz Keating.
“Truthfully, I really didn’t want to run,” Flynn says of 2021. “I figured one term and four years were enough. If I couldn’t change hearts and minds in four years, well, I didn’t want to beat my head against the wall. But, and I believe this today, one-party rule isn’t good government.”
Flynn seems to be channeling Seasongood’s 1923 “Shot Heard ’Round the Wards” speech launching the reform movement that would, a year later, dramatically change the way Cincinnati was governed.
The Harvard-educated lawyer and leading member of the progressive Cincinnatus Association sensed the time was right to attack the city’s endemic corruption when the Hynicka machine “persuaded” city council to increase taxes. The city was flirting with bankruptcy, the streets were a morass of mud and potholes, and the schools were failing. No one counted on basic services like police, fire, or sanitation. Meanwhile, politicians lined their pockets with bribes and kickbacks, with Hynicka—perched in New York—at the front of the line.
“We have the fourth-largest per capita expenditure of any city in the country,” railed Seasongood. “And what do we get for it? The time has come to cut out every extra tax levy, bond issue, or anything else that will give [this] bunch a chance to squander money. Make them produce the goods on what they have or get out!”
Machine men, sensing an unwelcome restlessness among the masses, tried to counter. But Seasongood had been captain of his Harvard debate team, and Hynicka’s hacks were so outclassed they started to avoid civic events where the silver-tongued orator appeared. Seasongood, undaunted, debated an empty chair.
Those reformers, Flynn notes, were linked to the majority Republican Party and were energetic and committed. That, he says, is what’s needed now for the Charter Committee to become relevant again.
Flynn, who briefly served as Charter’s interim president in 2012 and 2013, speaks wistfully about his efforts to recruit new members to the good government cause “only to see them, as I stepped away, become an auxiliary of the Democratic Party.”
“Stepped away” is a polite way of saying “stormed out.” Charter leadership fractured when Mayor John Cranley proposed a permanent Cincinnati Parks tax levy in 2015. The campaign was heated and, while Charter officially remained neutral, many of its iconic members—including Spencer and Qualls—opposed the measure. Flynn, serving on city council at the time, says he agonized over his vote but eventually supported the tax levy, a position that led to recriminations.
“It boiled down to the 2013 election for mayor and whether you’d been for Cranley or Qualls,” Flynn remembers. (Cranley beat Qualls 58–42 percent.) “I didn’t look at it that way, but, after the levy lost, I went to the Charter board meeting and found out quickly that it was personal.” A quarter of the board resigned, including, Flynn says with sorrow in his voice, “a big exodus of the young blood that we’d brought in.”
What remained was largely a board of well-intentioned men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, not exactly the foundation on which to build a future. The results were what you’d expect: Just one council candidate endorsed by Charter, Keating in 2021, has been elected since the schism, and she was bounced two years later.

—Amber Kassem
Photograph by Andrew Doench
The original Charter Committee reforms 100 years ago had three main components: They reduced city council from 32 members to nine and required the city be run by a council-approved city manager. They abolished the existing political patronage system in favor of a civil service hiring process. And they established what was called the “birdless ballot.”
Back then, city election ballots featured an eagle designating Republican candidates and a rooster for Democratic candidates— which theoretically helped illiterate voters to simply mark an “X” in the circle below their bird of choice. The new charter, however, required candidates to run without party affiliation and be elected by proportional representation.
Better known as “ranked choice voting,” proportional representation asks voters to choose among candidates in order of preference: Who is your first choice? Your second? Your third? And, in the case of the 2021 council election, who is your 35th choice?
When the votes are tallied, the last-place finisher is eliminated and the second choice of those voters is added to the tallies of candidates who remain. The new last-place finisher is then eliminated and second-place votes are transferred, with the process continuing until a candidate reaches 50 percent plus one and is elected. In the case of Cincinnati City Council, the process would continue until all nine slots are filled.
In the 2021 council field of 35 candidates, Jan-Michele Kearney finished first with 7.5 percent of the total vote, but there is no way of knowing how many of those were “first choice” votes. In a ranked-choice world, she likely would still have won, but it might have been on the strength of second-choice or third-choice votes.
Cincinnati abandoned the ranked choice voting system in 1958, led by Republicans who had returned to power in the Eisenhower years and successfully labeled the Democratic-leaning Charterites as “socialists.” A change in the voting process enabled Republicans to block Charterite Ted Berry from finishing first in council elections; the reward for that position, under the charter, was to be named mayor. Berry’s election as Cincinnati’s first Black mayor would have to wait until 1972.
Goodin sees ranked choice voting as Charter’s first move in 2025. “Ranked choice tends to elect more women, minorities, and moderate, open-minded candidates who are more representative of our community and less apt to be extremists,” he says. “It will also bring new energy to our politics by encouraging young candidates with good ideas to run.”
Today, he says, you hit a brick wall if you’re not endorsed by the Democratic Party. “The slate was everything,” says Goodin. “I have to give the [Democratic] party credit. They run effective campaigns, but that doesn’t always mean you end up with a better government.”
Democrats pushed Charter away in 2021, telling their candidates they could no longer accept a Charter co-endorsement, forcing Councilmember Victoria Parks to decline an endorsement she’d already accepted. She won along with Charter-supported Keating, whose Republican Party accepted any help it could get.
Goodin notes that only 10 total candidates ran for the nine council seats in 2023: Keating and the Democratic-endorsed slate. Ranked-choice voting, he says, could chip into that one-party dominance by giving independent candidates a chance to win.
He hopes to inspire his new board to take up the fight. While council itself could place a reinstatement of ranked choice voting on the 2025 city ballot, Goodin has no illusions. “Democrats don’t like it because it threatens their power,” he says. “And Republicans don’t like it because they know that’s why Sarah Palin didn’t win her U.S. House race in Alaska. So they both hate it, which tells me we’re on the right track.”
Goodin thinks a citizen petition drive would provide the Charter Committee with renewed community visibility and help its youthful recruits focus their energy, enthusiasm, and digital know-how effectively. Good government amendments have been signature accomplishments of the Charter Committee, he notes. It helped push through four changes in recent years: a basic charter language clean-up, a change in the mayoral primary election, rules to allow council executive sessions, and elimination of the mayor’s power to use a pocket veto to kill legislation.
And yet, Goodin says, reforms always need to be defended. The “birdless” ballot remains—council candidates still run without official party affiliation—but official endorsements prepared primarily by the Democratic Party place a heavy burden on those who don’t make the cut.
What it might take for real change, he says, are actual Charter candidates—a slate of reformists to persuade voters that, while the Democratic machine of the 2020s isn’t the same as the Cox/Hynicka machine of the 1920s, it still does little to encourage dialogue, dissent, and compromise. Goodin is certain the reinvigorated Charter Committee can field candidates quickly this November and be ready to endorse good government candidates from either or both established parties. “So many people have come forward and expressed interest in this, I expect to have a slate this year, and a good one,” he said. The filing deadline for council candidates is August 21.
Goodin says that any candidates Charter fields or endorses this fall need to be politically viable: well-known leaders in their communities who—via their intelligence, contacts, and communication skills—can break through “a very challenging one-party rule environment.” He introduces me to two exciting newcomers on the Charter Committee board.
Dawn Johnson grew up North Avondale, and, as she speaks, memories of a happy childhood visibly light up her smile. Her parents live across the street. Her sister’s backyard adjoins hers. They eat dinner together every night. Her uncle was O’dell Owens, who served in community capacities from Hamilton County coroner to public health advocate to college president. She moved to California for 10 years but says her heart stayed in this neighborhood.
And she’s fired up to defend it against what she views as City Hall’s insensitivity to her community’s hopes and fears about growth. “I come from a family that are doers and were never afraid to go against the grain,” Johnson says. “When I moved back, I knew I wanted to make a difference and knew I had a lot to offer.”
After a brief stint living in Evanston, she had an opportunity not just to move back to North Avondale but to purchase her late aunt’s home. It wasn’t long before she joined the North Avondale Neighborhood Association and, just a year later, was elected president.
By then, the City Hall–backed Connected Communities initiative was underway to encourage urban growth through major changes in the city’s zoning and land-use policies. It includes efforts to increase neighborhood population density by relaxing restrictions that discourage construction of multi-family units, reducing or eliminating minimum parking requirements, and incentivizing construction of affordable housing.
Johnson calls the plan a prime example of how city government has lost touch with citizens in the neighborhoods Connected Communities would fundamentally change. In essence, she says, City Hall didn’t ask them what they want.
“I was there,” she recalls with an edge in her voice, “when [former Councilmember] Reggie Harris came to our community council meeting with some of the urban planners, and it was a joke.” She stops for a moment as the memory of that evening snaps back. “They asked us to put our opinions on Post-It notes they stuck on a board, and that was it. No discussion. It was all just a check-the-box exercise.”
Charter, she says, offers a different path. She speaks of the commitment to transparency, dialogue, respect for diverse opinions, and compromise. When listing the attributes, she says “transparency” twice.
She emphasizes that she’s not necessarily against the concept of managed, sensible growth. “If you look at Connected Communities closely and maybe turn your head in a circle, you’ll see some great ideas wrapped in it,” says Johnson. “But something as big as this, that will fundamentally impact the future of our communities, deserves attention and input from the community.”
Meanwhile, Amber Kassem feels her community, Price Hill, has been neglected by the city and no one in local government cares. Maybe, she says, a challenge to the city’s existing power structure will help.
“Today reminds me of 100 years ago when the Charter Committee was starting up and exposing how slum landlords were getting away with everything,” she says. “I see it happening here now in Price Hill, Bond Hill, and elsewhere, and those of us living with it are thinking, Whose city is this anyway?”
Kassem, who heads the East Price Hill Improvement Association, is a lifelong resident and speaks from personal experience of what she views as a deterioration in the quality of life in her small but populous section of town. The dilapidated apartment building across the street from her home had become an open door “trap house” invaded by prostitutes, drug dealers, and petty criminals. The neighborhood is littered with discarded liquor bottles, garbage, and condoms. Pleas and complaints to the city, she says, fall on deaf ears.
Describing herself as a rebel who questioned authority starting in grade school, Kassem has collected data she says proves Price Hill is neglected. Like Johnson, she thinks Connected Communities was the brainchild of out-of-town urban developers who believe a one-size-fits-all neighborhood approach will effectively manage Cincinnati’s growth. It won’t, she says. If Cincinnati wants to continue to pride itself on its neighborhoods, leaders need to recognize that each of the 52 is unique.
Johnson, Kassem, and others on the Charter Committee board will shape the future of what Goodin hopes is a return to Murray Seasongood’s good government principles. That could include running candidates for council or focusing on charter amendments or the city budget. But, he says, the group will no longer be moribund.
“The reason the Charter Committee resonates and has endured is it’s based on a clear-eyed view of human behavior that our Founding Fathers recognized when they formed our country’s governing charter,” he says. “People are corruptible, so power needs to be diffused and diversified and the use of that power must be transparent. It’s time for a refresh.”
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