Grants Helped 14 Neighborhoods

$170K spread throughout The Cov

When neighborhoods have a plan and the desire to improve their communities, they turn to the City for financial help. Covington leaders created the Neighborhood Grant Program in 2019 to enhance the physical appearance of small areas while enhancing the sense of social cohesion through shared projects. Since then, the City has distributed about $170,000 for 37 projects in at least 14 neighborhoods (plus a cemetery/arboretum), including things like tree planting, flower pots, banners, dog-waste stations, festivals, water fountains, signs and benches. [Read More]

Revenue 'Furnace'

Downtown glows red in a tax revenue heat map

Just under 60 percent of the tax revenue generated in Covington for the City’s General Fund comes from occupational license revenue (which includes both the payroll tax and net profit tax). The General Fund is the operations fund used to pay the salaries of employees who deliver most City services – such as Police, EMS, Fire, Public Works, and Parks & Rec. This heat map shows where that revenue was generated in calendar year 2023. [Read More]

Who Recycles?

Percentage of households that participate has increased in every neighborhood

The number of households that participate in the Covington curbside recycling program has grown tremendously in the last eight years. Here are the numbers by neighborhood. Numbers represent the percentage of households who contract for trash pickup that also use a recycling cart. Notice that every single neighborhood has increased over this period. The recycling program carries no additional cost beyond the annual trash collection fee. In all, some 2,410 tons of recyclable material was diverted from landfills in Fiscal Year 2024. [Read More]

Homebuyer Assistance

Helping families achieve the American Dream

In the last 10 years, the City of Covington has helped 426 families buy a home in The Cov by offering help with down payments and closing costs. The best part? The loans are forgiven a little each year the families stay in their house. The attached chart and map show how the loans have been spread across Covington’s residential neighborhoods. For example, there were 187 in Latonia’s four areas, 42 in South Covington, 68 in Peaselburg, and 21 in Eastside. [Read More]

Home Sales in the Cov

Costs run gamut across neighborhoods

What does a house cost in The Cov? Depends (greatly) on where you look. With the affordability of housing a frequent topic of conversation these days, the City of Covington’s analytics manager took a dive into 2023 sales by neighborhood and found a wide range of prices, with a few outliers. The median sales price in 13 of the 23 neighborhoods was less than $200,000. In seven neighborhoods, it was $161,000 or less. [Read More]

Covington Median Household Income

2009-2022

The median household income in Covington in 2009 was $38,700. By 2022, that number had grown to $53,800 – an increase of $15,100. Other Kentucky cities of similar size – such as Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, Hopkinsville, Owensboro, and Richmond – showed similar growth in that 13-year period, according to data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from the U.S. Census Bureau. Why is this important? Household income not only improves an individual family’s buying power but is also considered a valuable measure of the relative economic well-being of a city. [Read More]

Moon Phase or Temperature

Influence on Daily Calls for Police Service

There is a widely held belief that police are busier during a full moon. Why do people believe this? Perhaps the gravitational forces of the full moon cause cyclic fluid shifts between body compartments and thereby trigger emotional disturbances leading to more aggressive and erratic behaviors.1 Or perhaps there is a scintilla of truth to the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans and humans actually turn into wolves during the full moon…. [Read More]
Police 

Motorist Assists

January 2021 - July 2023

Since 2017 the Covington Police Department has responded to an average of 54,241 service calls each year (as of July, 2023). A small part of the service that the Covington Police provide is to respond when a person is in need of assistance in a motor vehicle–for example, if they are out of gas, stranded on the interstate, have a flat tire, or need a wrecker, etc. From January 2021 to July 2023, the Covington Police responded to 2,887 calls for assistance by a motorist within the City of Covington. [Read More]
Police 

Where Do Covington Workers Live?

Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Data

In a previous post we briefly looked at where Covington residents work within the Cincinnati-Wilmington-Maysville Combined Statistical Area (CSA) using the most recent LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) dataset for the year 2020. The dataset links home and work locations at the census block-level, making it easy to answer questions about where people work and where workers live. In this post, we look briefly at where people working in Covington live within the Cincinnati-Wilmington-Maysville CSA. [Read More]

Where Do Covington Residents Work?

Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Data

The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program is part of the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau. The LEHD program produces cost effective, public-use information combining federal, state and Census Bureau data on employers and employees under the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership. State and local authorities increasingly need detailed local information about their economies to make informed decisions. The LED Partnership works to fill critical data gaps and provide indicators needed by state and local authorities. [Read More]