Brian Hemminger

The hidden costs of building a data center

Ohio's 15-year sales tax exemption cost the state $1.6 billion last year alone, and the $600 million Upper Sandusky proposal could qualify for the full waiver.

The race to the bottom

I’ve made my opinion known about gerrymandering and the harm it does to voters, but things have become so blatant across the country that it’s time everyone takes a stand against it on both sides of the aisle. It started last July, when President Donald Trump, fearing that he was going to lose the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections due to his growing unpopularity, demanded Texas redraw its electoral maps. Redrawing maps typically only happens every 10 years after each U.S. census, so new maps weren’t due for another five years. With new census data, the government learns that some states have grown or reduced in population and some may gain seats or lose seats in the House of Representatives. Additionally, with new information about the electorate, fairer maps can be drawn by governing bodies. But that has not been the case recently. Across the country, electoral maps are becoming more partisan, and Trump’s demand for mid-cycle redistricting was the final nail in the coffin that sent the country into a gerrymandering doomsday spiral. Instead of growing a spine and telling Trump that you can’t just demand more votes by disenfranchising the electorate, the Texas state legislature dropped to its knees, bowed and did his bidding, creating maps that look like jig-saw puzzles to split up likely Democratic voters and spread them across red districts and create five new likely Republican districts. Democrats weren’t going to take this sitting down, so the state of California responded, putting forth a ballot measure last November asking its voters if it was OK with the state redrawing its maps to take away Republican seats as long as Texas kept its gerrymandered seats. The measure passed overwhelmingly, which disenfranchised millions of Republican voters in our country’s most populous state. But the gerrymandering didn’t stop just with Texas and California. Not to be outdone, Missouri redrew its maps in September by splitting Kansas City up into multiple rural districts. Our own state of Ohio was required to redraw its maps because our state legislature ignored the Ohio Supreme Court last election cycle and used its gerrymandered maps anyways. The new maps released in October were even more gerrymandered than the ones the previous Supreme Court had ruled against, but with Ohio now having a GOP supermajority in the Supreme Court, the judiciary no longer cares if voting districts are fair. North Carolina also redrew its maps in October, likely adding one more red seat, and Florida followed suit in January, spreading its districts extremely thin in an attempt to erase almost all state representation from the Democratic Party. Democrats in Virginia responded by asking voters to approve a gerrymandered map to counter all the Republican gerrymandering happening around the country. The measure passed by about 1% of the vote and it currently is in litigation after the state’s Supreme Court overthrew the decision. But the biggest blow to fair maps nationwide took place April 30 when the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew key measures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing states to racially gerrymander as long as they don’t say they’re specifically targeting race. It should shock absolutely no one that the state of Tennessee immediately redrew its electoral maps, splitting the city of Memphis into multiple rural districts and eliminating the state’s only Democrat seat in Congress. Preventing situations like this in the 1960s Jim Crow south was literally the reason the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in the first place. Republicans in Alabama have already passed a law ignoring the results of its upcoming primaries next Tuesday if the federal court allows it to remove one of its majority Black districts so it can have one more Republican seat. Challenges are ongoing in Georgia and Louisiana as well. This is a war that no one wins. Blue states become bluer. Red states become redder. Voters across the country are getting disenfranchised at an alarming rate. With gerrymandering, the roles are reversed. Instead of voters choosing their politicians like the U.S. Constitution demands, politicians scheme behind the scenes to carve up their districts and choose their voters. There is a solution, however, but we’re going to have to do it all together. We need to demand our politicians support a ban on gerrymandering. This is a bipartisan issue and shouldn’t be difficult. Republicans hate it when Democrats do it. Democrats hate it when Republicans do it. Independents should hate it too. No politician should get your vote unless they publicly say they are in favor of legislation banning gerrymandering and supporting independent redistricting. Until then, we’re in a race to the bottom and everyone loses.

Ohio's property tax problem

If you’ve been paying attention anywhere on social media or perhaps have seen people trying to collect signatures for petitions lately in Ohio, you likely are aware of a grassroots movement to create a state amendment to abolish property taxes. Ohio’s property taxes generate about $24 billion each year. Property taxes fund Ohio schools, EMS, fire departments, senior services, services for people with developmental disabilities, public libraries, county health departments, social services, road and bridge maintenance and public parks. So why would anyone want to abolish them? Well, it’s a long story. I asked Ohio Senate President Rob McColley about Ohio’s property tax dilemma at the Wyandot County Lincoln Day Dinner in March. He explained that unlike other taxes, property taxes are tied to something that now is treated like an investment commodity. Property values have consistently increased beyond the rate of inflation, so when properties were reappraised by state and county officials, the property values increased much more than people were prepared to pay. Property taxes are based on a specific percentage of the property value, so any major property valuation increase causes property taxes to spike drastically. That sounds like a serious problem, but if you really look at the current issue, it’s only surface level. How did we get here? The real problem with property taxes in Ohio traces back to the state legislators and their insistence on cutting taxes for the wealthiest individuals and then passing the responsibility for paying for services on to regular folks at the local level. Since 1934, Ohio has had something called the Local Government Fund. The LGF provides state-shared revenue to counties, municipalities, townships and park districts to aid with operating expenses. For over generations, the LGF paid out enough to local governments that they didn’t need to ask for much more money. Then Ohio Gov. John Kasich came along, and he began slashing Ohio’s income tax, as well as its tax brackets. Ohio used to have nine different income tax brackets, which meant people who made more money paid a little more into the system, but in 2005, under Gov. Bob Taft, Ohio passed HB 66, which reduced income taxes by 21% over a period of five years. In 2013, under Kasich, another 10% income tax cut was enacted over a period of three years with HB 59. In 2015, another 6.3% income tax cut was introduced as part of the state’s budget bill. In 2017, the number of tax brackets was reduced from nine to eight. Then in 2019, another 4% income tax cut was implemented and tax brackets were reduced from eight to six. In 2023 under current Gov. Mike DeWine, House Bill 33 reduced the percentage paid by the top income tax bracket from 3.99% to 3.75%, then to 3.5% a year later. They had previously paid as high as 7.5% into the system. The number of tax brackets was reduced to two in 2024, then the highest tax rate was reduced to 3.125% in 2025. Ohio legislators finally killed the state income tax bracket system once and for all with its 2026-27 biennial budget this past year, making one tax bracket at a flat income tax of 2.75% for all, with almost all of the $1.1 billion in “savings” for taxpayers going to the wealthiest people in the state and shifting the tax burden to regular schmucks like you and me. So why does this matter, and what does this have to do with property taxes? Well, by reducing the amount of taxes brought in, the state paid out less and less through its Local Government Fund. Townships, counties and municipalities all had to either do more with less, or pass their own tax increases to maintain their standards of living. There also was less in the budget to assist all the other services at the local level. Just in the past eight years that I’ve been writing for The Daily Chief-Union newspaper in Upper Sandusky, we’ve had to pass new property tax levies for libraries, for schools, for senior services, for developmental disabilities services, for fire and EMS and more. When current U.S. Sen. Jon Husted was running for lieutenant governor in 2017, he visited our newspaper office. Doing my due diligence, I reached out to local mayors asking if there was anything they wanted me to ask him on their behalf. The response was unanimous: “Would you pleas stop cutting the Local Government Fund?” The state was lauding its tax cuts and its “rainy day fund” while stripping its funding at the local level, then passing the buck on to local politicians so they had to take the hit when asking for tax increases to make up for what they had lost from the state. With all those new levies at the local level to make up for lost state revenue, it was only a matter of time before Ohio hit a property tax crisis. The solution to this crisis is so glaringly simple, but the politicians we have in place today will never implement it. We need to increase the income tax on the wealthiest of Ohioans. Return the tax brackets to what they used to be. Undo all the damage the state has done. But what is the state attempting to do instead? They want to remove the income tax entirely, like in Florida or Texas, where sales and property taxes are exorbitant. McColley said so himself on the campaign trail and at that Lincoln Day Dinner in March. The state also is throwing away over $1 billion every year to pay for private school vouchers, which go to families that by a rate of 94% were already attending private school before the voucher system was enacted, but that’s an argument for another day. If Ohio was able to properly pay out its Local Government Fund, we wouldn’t be so reliant on property tax levies to pay for everything. Property taxes wouldn’t be in crisis because properties wouldn’t need to be taxed as much to make up for what the state doesn’t have the guts to do itself. More money would be available to properly fund our schools. Districts like Wynford wouldn’t need to pass a new income tax just to keep maintaining school services and Upper Sandusky schools sure as hell would have additional funds from the state available to pay for desperately-needed new school buildings. We need to stop trying to put Band-Aids on our wounds at the local level and instead address the root cause of the infection that created this mess in the first place. Vote for politicians that can fix Ohio’s problems instead of claiming they’re solving them while secretly passing them on to be handled at the local level.

Ohio State's chickens are coming home to roost

I’m a lifelong fan of Ohio State University. My parents both went there and I attended for four years while trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It was the only college I even applied for. So to say I’m appalled at the latest information that’s been getting released about the university’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and its continued involvement with alleged Epstein collaborator Les Wexner is an understatement. There always were rumors about Wexner and his ties to Epstein going back decades, but with the latest batch of documents released by the U.S. government, it only makes the university look worse. For those unfamiliar, billionaire American businessman Les Wexner, 88, is a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret. He also was co-founder of Bath & Body Works Inc. With an estimated net worth of $9.1 billion, he is the wealthiest resident of the state of Ohio. Wexner retained Epstein as his financial manager from 1987 to 2007. He initially was the main client of Epstein’s money management firm. In 1991, Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney and also installed him as a trustee on the board of the Wexner Foundation. Wexner has been accused of failing to take action when complaints were raised about Epstein, especially after reports of Epstein abusing his power in the mid-1990s by posing as a recruiter for Victoria’s Secret models. Additionally, a woman, Maria Farmer, who had been working as an artist-in-residence on one of Wexner’s Ohio properties in 1996, contacted local federal authorities about an assault she allegedly endured from Epstein. Wexner didn’t cut ties with Epstein until 18 months after Epstein first was arrested on multiple counts of molestation and unlawful sexual activity with a minor in 2006. According to documents released by the government recently, Wexner was served in a Jane Doe lawsuit against Epstein around August 2008. In July 2019, Wexner was included on a list of Epstein’s 10 coconspirators within an FBI email, along with the infamous Ghislaine Maxwell, who currently is serving 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking. Just four days ago, Wexner was named as an unindicted co-conspirator of Epstein by U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, who’s bipartisan petition forced the U.S. government to begin making the Epstein files public. Just this Sunday, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman who created the petition with Khanna, called for the department of justice to open an investigation into Wexner. Wexner is Ohio State University’s largest benefactor, having donated over $156 million of his fortune to the university, which has his name plastered all over it. There’s the Wexner Center for the Arts, located on the main campus. There’s Wexner Plaza, adjacent to the arts center, which is used for outdoor events, art installations and community gatherings. There’s the Les Wexner Football Complex within the athletic department and the Wexner Jewish Student Center, an area for Jewish life on campus. And of course there’s the Wexner Medical Center, the university’s sprawling main campus which includes multiple hospitals (including a new 26-story university hospital opening soon) which was renamed in his image after a $100 million donation in 2011. Donating $156 million sounds like a lot — and it is — but for someone with over $9 billion, that’s about 1.6% of his total wealth. That’s like someone with $1,000 to their name donating $16 to charity. Wexner served on Ohio State University’s board of trustees until resigning abruptly in 2012, with eight years remaining on his term. His wife, Abigail Wexner, also served on the board of trustees from 2014 to 2019. And it’s not just the Epstein ties that make Wexner look bad. He recently was ordered to testify in a lawsuit against Ohio State University from abuse survivors of Dr. Richard Strauss, a disgusting man who allegedly abused young men at Ohio State, mostly under the guide of “doing physicals” from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. An investigation revealed at least 177 male students were abused by Strauss at Ohio State. Strauss never was held accountable for his crimes, being allowed to retire from Ohio State under emeritus status in 1996, which allowed him to continue to abuse others until he died by suicide in 2005. The rats are starting to flee the sinking ship. Multiple Ohio politicians are scrambling to return campaign donations that were tied to Wexner in an attempt to distance themselves from him. Rep. Mike Carey said he is donating all his campaign contributions from Wexner to organizations that help prevent human trafficking. Rep. Joyce Beatty said she is donating Wexner’s contributions as well. Everyone from state representatives and senators to city council members are announcing they are donating their campaign donations that have Wexner ties, although Columbus Mayor Mike Ginther has declined. U.S. Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted of Ohio, who both received Wexner campaign donations, have not announced they are returning them. Moreno even said he’s keeping his. Husted and Moreno also initially voted against making the Epstein files public. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there. The time has come to make the tough choice. If Ohio State ever wants to regain any credibility in this scandal, which is making the university look worse every day, it needs to cut all ties with Wexner. Wexner’s name needs scrubbed off every building like the stain that it is. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get treated for cancer at a hospital named after a known pedophile co-conspirator. The longer university officials wait to make a decision, the worse they look. Stop the bleeding now before a full amputation is required.

Enough is enough with ICE

With heavy snow predicted this past weekend, I attempted to avoid the weather entirely by moving up a planned visit to Racine, Wisconsin, by one week to watch my good friend Rich perform in the community theater production of “Ripcord.” (He was great by the way). I naively thought I could escape some of the craziness happening both at home with the weather and nationally with all the protests against the extreme actions being taken by immigration and customs enforcement. But while I was driving to Racine, border patrol agents shot and killed U.S. citizen Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA intensive care nurse with no criminal record. Then when I was at the theater on Sunday afternoon, I overheard a conversation of a woman sitting behind me. She said one of her children worked with Pretti at the VA and also was a neighbor of Renée Good, another U.S. citizen shot to death by ICE on Jan. 7. I haven’t stopped thinking about what’s happening in our country since. I typically try to limit my political editorials to one per month, but if I don’t write about this today, I’m going to boil over like pasta water left on a scorching hot stove for too long. I vehemently disagreed with what happened to Good, who was shot three times by an ICE officer while attempting to drive away from them. It blew my mind that instead of allowing Minnesota state officials to investigate the shooting, the federal government chose not to investigate the shooting and Good was immediately labeled a “domestic terrorist” by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem and Vice President JD Vance. The killing of Pretti was even worse. He had been observing agents at a protest and he stepped forward to get in between an agent and a woman the agent had just pushed to the ground. For his efforts, he was pepper sprayed in the face, struck repeatedly in the head and tackled to the ground by seven agents. Pretti had a gun in a holster (legally with a concealed carry permit) and an agent took the gun from him. Moments later, the now-disarmed Pretti was shot in the back by an agent and then shot at least nine more times. It wasn’t just a shooting, it was murder, plain and simple. Even extreme voices in the right-wing media couldn’t defend Pretti’s killing. The only way to even attempt to justify it was to lie — and that’s exactly what the federal government did. Noem claimed Pretti “attacked” officers, as did FBI Director Kash Patel and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, but video footage from every angle refutes their claims entirely. Noem claimed Pretti “brandished” his gun, but he never touched it at any point in the interaction. Perhaps most disgusting of all, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Pretti as “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents,” a claim Vance then reposted on social media. In a sane world, every single one of those people would be fired for their dangerous lies, but they’re all still going about their business leading our country. Even the agents who shot Pretti were back working on Sunday as if nothing had happened— not even placed on leave — they had just been reassigned out of Minneapolis. It was like the Catholic diocese moving a troubled priest to a different parish instead of firing them and reporting their child abuse in the 20th century. About two weeks ago, just after the death of Good, The Daily Chief-Union newspaper received more complaints than at any time in my eight-plus-year history there when a political cartoon that was extremely critical of ICE was published. People emailed, called and came in person to let us know how angry they were, that it disrespected local law enforcement. But just in the two weeks since that cartoon was published, a whistleblower memo was revealed stating the Trump administration had told ICE it could completely disregard the Fourth Amendment and break down doors without a judicial search warrant when performing operations, a massive violation of basic human rights. And then we had the death of Pretti on Saturday. In trying to defend the actions of the government, several officials have said Pretti deserved what he got because he brought a gun to a protest. It reminded me of back in June 2020 when a Black Lives Matter protest was organized in front of the Wyandot County Courthouse. It was peaceful. They mainly chanted, brought signs and then marched around the block of the courthouse before observing a nine minute moment of silence. The only potential threat of danger was when group of counter protesters showed up open carrying several semi-automatic weapons. By the logic of people defending Pretti’s killing, it would have been completely justifiable for law enforcement to gun down all of those counter protesters in Upper Sandusky five and a half years ago for showing up armed. Do you see where I’m going with this? Undocumented immigrants continue to be vilified by those in power who claim they are dangerous, but I did some fact checking. When violence happens, it’s magnified exponentially like with Laken Riley in 2024, but there have been as many U.S. citizens shot and killed by ICE/Border Patrol in the past 20 days as there were murdered by undocumented immigrants in the entire year of 2025. It’s time for everyday people to start asking themselves and their representatives some serious questions. Why has ICE’s budget ballooned by $175 billion, making it the largest law enforcement agency in America? Why are ICE agents still wearing masks when the FBI, police, deputies, troopers don’t? Why were so many ICE agents sent to Minnesota, a state with less than 7% the undocumented immigrant population of Texas? Why have less than 8% of all people detained by ICE in fiscal year 2026 ever committed a crime on U.S. soil? Why do ICE members require such little training? Why did 32 people die in ICE custody in 2025? The ends simply don’t justify the means. That controversial political cartoon is looking more and more prophetic each day we don’t hold our government officials accountable for their actions.