JobsOhio says that it’s been transparent and that its board has been free of conflicts as it has handed out $2 billion in what used to be public money to private corporations. 

But the chairman of its board is a lobbyist who represented Intel just as the board of which he was a member disbursed more than $2 million to the company as part of a package of grants for what is now a severely delayed megaproject.

The lobbyist, Josh Rubin, was being paid to promote Intel’s agenda to the governor’s office in September 2023 when Gov. Mike DeWine appointed him to the JobsOhio board, which he had also actively lobbied on Intel’s behalf as recently as a year earlier.

Earlier that year, JobsOhio had awarded the chipmaker a $25 million workforce-development grant before DeWine gave Rubin the top spot at Ohio’s controversial, quasi-private economic-development agency.

The workforce-development and other grants were part of a $150 million package JobsOhio pledged toward the Intel job. For its part, the state pledged more than $2 billion for the chip-making project.

Even after Rubin joined the JobsOhio board in September 2023, he and other members of his firm were paid by Intel to lobby DeWine, then-Lieutenant governor Jon Husted, and other executive agencies on the $20 billion project near New Albany, state lobbying disclosures show. 

That’s an arrangement that Paul Nick, executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission, said appeared to violate assurances that Rubin gave DeWine’s office before his appointment that his lobby firm would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio. 

Nick said that if Rubin were a state employee, it would be illegal for him to lobby for a company with business before the state. But because of JobsOhio’s legal status as a private nonprofit corporation, it’s exempt from Ohio ethics law, he said. 

Despite assuring DeWine that he and his firm would avoid all conflicts, Rubin and several partners renewed their annual registrations to lobby JobsOhio for Intel and other clients until the start of this year, when the registrations were terminated. 

All except one. In December, that partner renewed her registration to lobby JobsOhio through 2026.

Suspicions that Rubin’s lobbying might conflict with his role on the JobsOhio board have already been raised. Last month, John Kulewicz, the Democratic nominee for Ohio attorney general, asked the state inspector general to investigate whether Rubin’s representation of utility giant AEP conflicted with the fact that JobsOhio will soon be handing out $100 million to develop small-modular nuclear reactors.

JobsOhio denied that it did. Rubin didn’t respond to calls and emails for this story or a Capital Journal story about Kulewicz’s request.

JobsOhio also said that it has strong policies in place to ensure that board members recuse themselves from matters in which they might have a conflict.

A JobsOhio spokesperson said, “Any board member with an actual or possible conflict of interest on specific grant or loan proposals for a company must disclose it and… will recuse themselves from discussions and voting on such proposal.”

Questions of conflict

The revelations about dual roles come in a scandal-plagued state where megabusinesses have paid Capital Square insiders and then have gotten large sums from taxpayers and electricity ratepayers. 

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said Rubin’s presence atop JobsOhio only deepens suspicions about the organization’s transparency and freedom from conflict. 

Lobbyists are paid by corporate clients to help them get contracts and other considerations from the government. As chairman of the JobsOhio board, Rubin has a top decision-making role in an organization whose job is to distribute billions of what used to be taxpayer dollars to such businesses.

“Because JobsOhio is being run by a lobbyist, we have to question everything,” Turcer said. “I’m sure some of those development dollars were reasonably spent. But we have to question everything. And because there’s such a lack of transparency, we are left imagining the absolute worst.”

Promises made

On July 26, 2023, a lawyer in the governor’s office wrote to the Ohio Ethics Commission seeking guidance.

“Mr. Rubin is a registered lobbyist in the State of Ohio and has, to date, regularly lobbied the executive branch, the legislative branch, and JobsOhio,” it said. “If appointed he has affirmed to me that both he and (Rubin’s firm) The CJR Group would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio and would fully comply with the separate JobsOhio conflicts policy as to any current or past clients.”

State lobbying disclosures show that at that time Rubin was registered to lobby the governor’s office and JobsOhio on behalf of Intel. 

Activity and expense reports also show he was actively lobbying the governor on the company’s behalf. As recently as April this year, Rubin still was, according to his state disclosures.

Despite filing annual registrations to lobby JobsOhio through 2025, Rubin hasn’t filed any “activity and expense reports” saying he was actively lobbying the agency for Intel since 2022 — a year before he joined the board.

He has continued to lobby the government for the company, and Intel has continued to receive money from the state and from JobsOhio.

Tax documents filed by JobsOhio for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 show that JobsOhio gave Intel more than $2 million during that period. 

Just before Rubin joined the board, JobsOhio gave Intel a $25 million workforce-development grant — part of $150 million JobsOhio has committed to the now-delayed project.

Asked about the grants, JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said it wasn’t a conflict for Rubin because the board had already decided to award the funds before Rubin joined the board.

“JobsOhio’s offer of JobsOhio incentives to Intel were approved by the JobsOhio Board in December 2021 — before Mr. Rubin was appointed by Governor DeWine to the JobsOhio’s Board of Directors on Sept. 1, 2023,” Englehart said in an email. “Disbursement of funds is a staff function, based on 2021 approval by the JobsOhio Board.”

As chairman of the JobsOhio board, Rubin is in a position of authority over that staff. JobsOhio also places performance requirements on its grants and says it can claw the money back if they’re not met. That’s a process in which Rubin could have a say.

The massive Intel project was to receive more than $2 billion in state incentives, and factories were supposed to begin production last year. With the company facing economic hardship, production has been pushed back to at least 2030. 

The state has already given Intel a $600 million “onshoring” grant, and it’s unclear whether the state will claw any of that money back when the company misses a 2028 deadline.

As a member of the JobsOhio board, Rubin — whom Intel continues to pay to lobby DeWine — presumably could weigh in on whether to claw back any part of the more than $150 million JobsOhio committed to Intel. 

JobsOhio didn’t respond when asked whether its board has any say in decisions to recover money from companies that don’t deliver on their promises.

Intel didn’t respond to questions for this story — including how much it has paid Rubin and other members of his firm.

Keeping his promise?

According to his state disclosures, Rubin continues to lobby the governor on the delayed Intel project, a matter that JobsOhio is also dealing with.

Is that consistent with what Rubin promised DeWine’s legal team — that “The CJR Group would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio…”?

DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney said it was.

“Lobbying an agency that is not JobsOhio on behalf of Intel does not qualify as having business before JobsOhio on Intel,” he said in an email. “Our office is not JobsOhio. You are conflating two separate issues that produce different legal and ethical obligations.”

Paul Nick, the executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission, had a different answer to the same question. He said the fact that Rubin and his partners kept registering to lobby JobsOhio after Rubin joined the board appeared to violate the lobbyist’s pledge.

And the fact that Rubin this year was still actively lobbying DeWine on the Intel project?

“That would also appear to contradict his representation to the Governor’s office,” Nick said in an email.

He explained that the Ethics Commission plays a role in helping identify potential conflicts of JobsOhio board members. But other than to compel complete financial disclosures, his office didn’t have power over Rubin and other members of the JobsOhio board, he said.

“Because Rubin is not subject to the Ethics Law, none of his actions could be potential violations of these laws,” Nick said. He later added that they would be if Rubin was a state employee.

In answer to the governor’s 2023 query, Nick encouraged Rubin to seek an advisory opinion of his own from the Ethics Commission to ensure he steered clear of conflicts. Rubin never did, Nick said.

Rules of its own

The Ethics Commission advocated against exempting members of the JobsOhio board from ethics and transparency laws when then-Gov. John Kasich and his allies in 2011 said JobsOhio should be exempt so it could “move at the speed of business.”

“During the legislation that enacted JobsOhio, the Commission encouraged that all of the Ethics Laws should apply to JobsOhio and its board,” Nick said. “Instead, the final legislation required that JobsOhio create its own conflict of interest policy.”

Members of the JobsOhio board are subject to what Tierney, DeWine’s spokesman, called “a strong policy to ethically address conflicts.”

And Englehart, the JobsOhio spokesman said, “Any board member with an actual or possible conflict of interest on specific grant or loan proposals for a company must disclose it and… will recuse themselves from discussions and voting on such proposal.”

He added, “Yet this entire process is often unnecessary because a potentially conflicted member will typically recuse themselves from any discussion and voting by the Board on the matter involved.”

JobsOhio board meeting minutes going back to 2021 appear to contain no mention of the words “conflict” or “recuse.” They also show that on at least one occasion — June 13, 2024 — JobsOhio CEO J.P. Nauseef discussed how he wanted to “…capture the Intel supply chain” while Rubin was in the meeting.

A review of minutes going back to through Rubin’s tenure indicates that much of the sessions have been devoted to celebrating JobsOhio. But initial decisions about individual awards to companies are made in committee meetings which are not required to be open to the public. 

“Conflict acknowledgments from the prior year” are required to be made public. But records produced by the Ohio Department of Development in response to an open-records request appear only to contain documents in which officials acknowledged they were aware of JobsOhio’s ethics policy.

Englehart didn’t respond when asked if Rubin, a lobbyist with dozens of clients, had ever declared a conflict or recused himself since joining the JobsOhio board in 2023.

Possible conflicts for members of the JobsOhio board have been identified in the past.

In 2014, the Ohio Ethics Commission notified two Marathon Petroleum Corp. executives who sat on the JobsOhio board that they had potential conflicts because Marathon was receiving benefits from JobsOhio. Other corporations enjoying JobsOhio largesse who have had employees on the board include Sherwin-Williams, Bob Evans, and Procter & Gamble. 

Last year, Youngstown’s WFMJ reported that JobsOhio granted more than $2 million to a company run by a man who headed up a regional entity created by JobsOhio. 

Private company?

Then-Gov. Kasich oversaw the birth of JobsOhio in 2011. Even then, it was controversial.

The legislature created it, the governor appoints the board, and it was allowed to make the sole bid to lease the state’s liquor franchise for much less than it was worth. It spends the difference on its large staff, marketing and making grants, and providing other things of value to businesses.

Despite the fact that it and its funding are rooted entirely in the state government, its supporters call JobsOhio a private nonprofit corporation that spends money from a private source. They say that rightly exempts JobsOhio from the ethics and transparency rules state employees were subject to when the Ohio Department of Commerce controlled the liquor franchise. 

JobsOhio has since disbursed just over $2 billion in grants, loans, and other incentives, Englehart, the JobsOhio spokesman, said.

As critics warned, in some cases that money has appeared to go to the well-connected for questionable economic-development reasons.

For example, Ohio State fired then-President Ted Carter in March. When it did, the public learned that JobsOhio paid a woman with whom Carter had an “inappropriate relationship” $60,000 to make a podcast.

JobsOhio justified the spending on economic-development grounds, but it refused to say whether it had sponsored other podcasts or how much it had paid for them. A spokesman said he couldn’t answer because any podcast would be part of its “marketing playbook” and that “other states try to replicate what we do.”

In 2020, Ohioans were stunned by news of a dark-money scandal in which Akron-based FirstEnergy paid more than $60 million in bribes for a $1.3-billion bailout. FirstEnergy admitted to paying Sam Randazzo — DeWine’s pick to be the state’s top utility regulator — a $4.3 million bribe. Among other services, Randazzo helped write the corrupt legislation. He died by suicide after he was charged.

Rubin, who would within weeks become a FirstEnergy lobbyist, attended a December 2018 dinner with Gov.-elect DeWine, Lt. Gov.-elect Husted and FirstEnergy’s top executives. They discussed Randazzo’s suitability to be Ohio’s top utility regulator. 

Rubin advised the executives not to tell DeWine that they were going straight from the dinner to meet with Randazzo, the Associated Press reported in February. It was at that meeting that Randazzo’s bribe was negotiated, prosecutors said.

JobsOhio had already lent a hand to the struggling utility a few years before the bribes began to flow. In 2015, it forgave a $12 million loan to help FirstEnergy clean up one of its money-losing coal plants.

Private money?

Good government advocates have also raised questions about how fair JobsOhio’s deal has been to taxpayers.

JobsOhio paid the state $1.4 billion for its initial lease of the state liquor franchise. Last year, a DeWine-controlled board extended that lease to 2053 without taxpayers getting any additional money.

Even though all that money used to flow into the state general fund, JobsOhio insists that “absolutely no tax dollars or other public dollars are used to support it.”

Turcer of Common Cause scoffs at the claim.

“Of course it’s taxpayer money,” she said.

DeWine himself didn’t dispute it being called taxpayer money in a TV appearance earlier this month, despite his spokesman’s insistence that JobsOhio and its funding are private.

CNBC had declared Ohio the Best State for Business — a designation about which JobsOhio is crowing.

During an interview with CNBC reporter Scott Cohn, DeWine quickly credited JobsOhio for the state’s success and touted data-center development as a big win for the Buckeye State.

“I think one thing we have is what we call JobsOhio,” he said. “We basically privatized a number of years ago under Gov. Kasich… we privatized our economic development… It gives us, I think, a strategic advantage.”

But Cohn pushed back on the governor’s praise of Ohio’s “privatized” economic development operation.

“You mentioned that you privatized the jobs agency and of all the economic development organizations that we deal with as we’re coming up with (state rankings), it is one of the most opaque,” Cohn said. 

“And it’s gotten a lot of criticism for that. I know there’s a bill pending to make JobsOhio more transparent, because this is taxpayer money ultimately. What do you do about that to keep the deals coming in, but also make sure the taxpayers are being looked out for?”

DeWine didn’t dispute Cohn’s description of JobsOhio as a nontransparent organization spending taxpayer dollars.

“I think there’s a happy medium that can be reached,” he said. “I think what JobsOhio has done is give us a competitive advantage.” 

Still lobbying

Despite promises to avoid conflicts, Rubin and other members of his firm paid $25 each year to register to lobby JobsOhio even after he was on the board.

Then, according to documents obtained through an open-records request, Rubin on Jan. 27 emailed the Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee, the agency that handles lobby disclosures. 

“Please find below my executive registrations for 2026,” it said. “We need to make sure JobsOhio is no longer listed in any of them.”

He added that the commission should be receiving similar emails from other members of his firm, including Brittany Warner. But no such email ever came. 

Instead, Warner is currently registered to lobby JobsOhio on behalf of Intel and other clients.

“My quarterly activity and expenditure reports plainly show that I have not lobbied JobsOhio since 2023,” Warner said in an email to the Capital Journal. “The registration reports you are separately looking at are created at the beginning of an engagement with a new client, and those all pre-date September 2023. Those ‘initial filings’ you are referencing were all created in 2019-2022.”

Warner’s email did not address the fact that, according to the Ohio Lobbying Handbook, agents have to register each year and pay $25 for each client and name the agencies they might lobby on its behalf.

Warner filed her most recent annual registration saying she might lobby JobsOhio for Intel on Dec. 12, 2025.

As with Rubin, Warner’s activity-and-expense reports show she continued this year to lobby the governor and lieutenant governor for Intel. 

Tony Bledsoe, the Ohio Legislative inspector general, said that as with the state Ethics Commission, the JobsOhio board operates largely outside of his agency’s jurisdiction.

The Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee “handles lobbying reporting (disclosure) relative to those lobbying JobsOhio as well as JobsOhio’s lobbying reporting relative to their legislative advocacy,” Bledsoe said in an email. “Beyond that, we have no jurisdiction concerning JobsOhio.”

Turcer of Common Cause Ohio said one doesn’t need the niceties of Ohio ethics law to see problems inherent in Rubin’s dual roles.

“One of the things we know is that you can’t serve two bosses well,” she said. “So Josh Rubin-lobbyist and Josh Rubin-the-chair-of-JobsOhio is only serving one of them.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.