About 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians are living in the United States with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that allows people from specific countries in conflict or facing natural disasters the chance to live and work in the United States for a set period of time.

About 30,000 Haitians with temporary status live in central Ohio and an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians call Springfield home, with a mixture of temporary protected status, citizenship, and other legal status.

“Today’s decision is painful,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, in a statement.

“But our calling has not changed. Scripture teaches us to stand with the vulnerable, tell the truth about our neighbors, and refuse to let fear have the final word. Haitian families belong in our community, and we will continue to stand beside them with courage, compassion, and conviction.”

Springfield experienced a shrinking population for decades as manufacturing jobs disappeared, but Haitian immigrants have grown Clark County’s workforce by more than 10,000 workers.

Springfield became a flashpoint in the 2024 Election when Trump and JD Vance spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants there.

Haitians were initially granted temporary protected status after Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 killed 222,570 people. 

The Biden administration extended Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in 2021 after the assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse. 

Syria was first granted TPS in 2012 and the country continues to experience ongoing armed conflict, terrorist violence, kidnapping, hostage taking, and crime. 

Haiti is currently plagued by gang violence and instability, with many fleeing the small Caribbean nation to the United States for their lives. A top security official and chief of staff to the nation’s defense minister was recently kidnapped.

Many of the Haitian refugees in America have no homes to return to in Haiti. 

The U.S. Department of State currently has a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti and Syria. 

Deporting Haitians in Springfield would eliminate roughly $300 million in annual spending from Clark County, with an estimated economic loss projected to exceed $400 million.

Ohio Immigrant Alliance’s Executive Director Lynn Tramonte is calling on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno and Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted to do something. 

“You cannot let Haitian-Ohioans be deported to a country where they will be killed,” she said in a statement. 

“They are our family members, co-workers, friends, and neighbors. They are our people now. You cannot sit back and let this happen. You have power.”

At the federal level, the U.S. House voted in April to extend TPS for Haitians through 2029. The bill is now in the U.S. Senate, but the White House said President Donald Trump would veto the bill. 

TPS for Haitians was set to expire Feb. 3, but U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end temporary protected status for Haitians living in the United States. 

The Trump administration quickly appealed the decision and lower courts blocked its efforts to end Haiti’s TPS. 

This story will be updated. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The decision halts, at least until a nearly certain appeal is heard, efforts by the U.S. Postal Service to require states to submit the names of likely mail voters before it delivers ballots. It also stops the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from compiling lists of voting-age citizens in each state.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of President Barack Obama in Massachusetts, is the first judge to block the March 31 executive order. State and local election officials have raised concerns that its requirements would inject chaos into preparations for the November midterm elections.

Talwani ruled that Trump had asserted too much control over elections in several parts of the order as he directed federal officials to quickly take actions that he argues are needed to prevent noncitizen voting, which rarely occurs.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Talwani wrote.

Order overpowered states

The executive order directed Postmaster General David Steiner to put forward a rule requiring states, at least 90 days before a federal election, notify the Postal Service whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would then have to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Talwani wrote that the Postal Service lacks any authorization by Congress to put forward binding regulations on mail-in voting. The Constitution, she wrote, “reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.” 

The executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security, with help from the Social Security Administration, to compile a list of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state and then provide that information to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election. The order does not tell states how to use the data.

The list of citizens would be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It would also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases. 

The executive order pointed to no relevant constitutional or legal authority supporting the compilation of the citizenship lists, Talwani wrote. Trump “lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State,” she wrote.

A day before the decision, Steiner told a U.S. Senate committee that a proposed Postal Service rule to implement the executive order would lead to non-delivery of ballots in states that don’t provide lists of anticipated mail voters — a position condemned by Democrats.

“Trump is trying to turn the Postal Service into a voter suppression machine. This is not election security — it is election interference in broad daylight,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a Wednesday statement.

Latest setback

Trump has suffered a series of setbacks in recent days in his efforts to influence the administration of state-run elections. 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Department of Justice wasn’t entitled to state voter rolls. Senators also continues to rebuff the president’s attempts to pressure them into passing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship.

Talwani’s decision came in a lawsuit brought by Democratic state attorneys general. It is the second major district court ruling over the executive order, after a judge in Washington, D.C., declined to stop the order because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement it.

Under Thursday’s decision, federal officials must notify their employees within a week that sweeping portions of the executive order are void.

And on Monday, a judge blocked the use of SAVE to search for noncitizen voters.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, threw out a $1.25 million verdict a Missouri court awarded to a man who said long-term use of the weedkiller Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. 

The herbicide, produced by Monsanto, does not include any warning of carcinogenic material and Monsanto and parent company Bayer deny there is any link.

The decision created an unusual split for the conservative-dominated court, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion and his fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joining a dissent written by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The majority ruled that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, which governs herbicide use, preempts state claims like the one awarded to John Durnell of St. Louis. 

Roundup’s label complied with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations, to which states cannot add requirements, Kavanaugh wrote.

“In sum, federal law requires Monsanto to sell Roundup with the label that EPA approved at the initial registration and that EPA has subsequently re-approved on multiple occasions—that is, the label without a cancer warning,” he wrote. 

“Durnell’s state tort claim, by contrast, would require Monsanto to add a cancer warning to its labels. That Missouri-law requirement is ‘in addition to’ and ‘different from’ Monsanto’s federal-law labeling obligations.”

In her dissent, Jackson wrote that the majority’s decision improperly prioritized national uniformity over consumer protection.

“In accepting Monsanto’s argument and holding that Durnell’s failure-to-warn claim is preempted, the Court misunderstands FIFRA’s requirements, misinterprets the scope of FIFRA’s preemption, and ultimately leaves Durnell without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered,” she wrote.

Durnell sued Monsanto and parent company Bayer in 2019, claiming that exposure to Roundup over two decades led to his cancer diagnosis. A Missouri trial court awarded him $1.25 million, and a state appeals courts affirmed the ruling.

The Supreme Court was the first federal court to hear the case. 

Federal law typically trumps state law, which Monsanto and the Justice Department emphasized during April oral arguments. Industry groups across the economy tend to support federal supremacy because it saves companies from complying with 50 separate regulatory schemes across states.

The EPA, which regulates labeling requirements for herbicides, does not require the kind of warning the Missouri jury said was appropriate.

T_his is a breaking news story and will be updated._

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

White House budget director Russ Vought wrote in a letter that in addition to addressing “urgent needs” for the Defense Department, the funding would help the U.S. government assist with the Ebola outbreak and provide aid to American farmers.

Funding for the Energy Department, he wrote, would “support nuclear and other energy security requirements, primarily for the National Nuclear Security Administration.”

The supplemental spending request asks Congress to provide money for “restoration and construction projects in and around Washington, D.C.,” as well as the project that would modernize Penn Station in New York City. 

The proposal asks lawmakers to add a few policy changes, including the year-round sale of E-15 gasoline, to any supplemental spending bill they may approve in the weeks and months ahead. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, praised the move on social media. “Pres Trump’s admin is exactly right 2say yr-round nationwide E15 is ‘urgent’ & ‘needed’ Congress MUST pass yr-round nationwide E15 by end of fiscal yr Im very glad 2 see it incl in Defense Dept’s supplemental request,” said Grassley.

The proposals didn’t appear to have broad consensus among Democrats, who would likely be needed for any emergency funding to become law. 

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote in a statement the administration’s request “is not merely meant to pay for the president’s disastrous war, but an attempt to secure tens of billions of additional dollars for unrelated Pentagon priorities that should rightly be considered through the annual appropriations process.”

“I will closely review this request in its entirety and ensure we take care of our servicemembers, but I will not rubberstamp tens of billions more for this disastrous war of choice,” Murray added.

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, wrote in a statement she will “evaluate the Administration’s supplemental budget request.”

“I plan to convene an Appropriations Committee hearing so that Senators can hear directly from the relevant Administration officials,” she said.  

The supplemental spending requests ask lawmakers to provide:

• $67.15 billion for the Defense Department

• $11.1 billion for the Agriculture Department to provide aid to farmers

• $3.36 billion for the State Department for diplomatic, security and global health programs

• $2.03 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard

• $1 billion for the Transportation Department to “to assist in the final design and construction of a modernized Penn Station in New York City”

• $1 billion for the Labor Department to “increase the benefit levels for participants of certain pension plans that were sponsored by Delphi Corporation and terminated as a result of General Motors’ bankruptcy in 2009″

• $767.5 million for the Energy Department

• $600 million for the General Services Administration’s federal buildings fund

• $500 million for the National Park Service to upgrade a seawall and improve the World War II Memorial

• $40.26 million for the FBI for its role in the Iran war and “other classified needs”

• $36.18 million for the Treasury Department’s office of terrorism and financial intelligence

• $13.1 million for the Homeland Security Department’s operations and support account that was part of a “classified request.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The United States added 172,000 jobs in May, more than doubling economists’ expectations. But Ohio saw a modest decrease, losing 2,400, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. 

However, that followed strong gains in previous months — 8,100 in April and 10,100 in March. 

Amid those mixed numbers, unemployment continued to fall. It was down to 3.7% in May, the third consecutive monthly decline.

One of the reasons for the drop is concerning, said Molly Bryden, a researcher with the think tank Policy Matters Ohio. 

That’s because unemployment only measures the portion of people without jobs who are in the labor force. It doesn’t count people who are too old, too sick, have departed the state or just stopped looking.

“Both statewide and U.S. job gains have consistently surpassed expectations this year,” Bryden said said in a written statement.

“While Ohio’s job losses in May don’t give cause for concern on their own — as monthly job estimates are always subject to revision — job growth doesn’t tell the full story. There are 58,000 fewer working Ohioans in the labor force than there were at this time last year, despite growth in Ohio’s working age population, which increased by 38,000 over the same period.” 

It’s hard to say why fewer Ohioans are participating in the labor force, but the portion has now dropped down to the national average.

“Ohio’s shrinking labor force has been driving down the labor force participation rate, which, until May, had hovered above the U.S. rate,” Bryden said.

“Now, that gap has closed. The weakening labor force participation rate could have long-term consequences for Ohio’s economic growth.”

Other dynamics could also have consequences. 

Consumer spending — a huge pillar of the economy — has fallen in recent months as Ohioans have become rattled by rising gas prices and other inflation, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported earlier this month. And overall inflation hit 4.2%, a three-year high.

While gas prices have fallen on news that the United States and Iran have started to negotiate a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, experts warn that energy prices could take months to return to their pre-war levels.

Bryden, of Policy Matters, also warned of pain even if Ohioans return to the job force and Ohio keeps adding jobs.

“Even if Ohio sees a hiring turnaround next month, economists warn that stagnant wage growth nationwide could exacerbate the growing affordability crisis,” she said.

“At 4.2%, inflation is the highest it’s been in three years, reflected by the ongoing decline in consumer confidence. In the near term, Ohio’s working families are vulnerable to the inflationary impacts of U.S. economic policy, facing greater challenges to afford the rising cost of groceries and other necessities, along with global energy price shocks caused by the war in Iran.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

State data cited by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio showed that 10.6% of Ohioans are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a 2026 Health Value Dashboard released by the institute showed health disparities particularly in the area of mental health for LGBTQ+ Ohioans.

The data showed that gay, lesbian, and bisexual state residents are 2.6 times more likely than other Ohioans to report “frequent mental distress,” and transgender individuals are 3.5 times more likely to report it.

For researchers who study the impacts of policy and other efforts for and against the LGBTQ+ community, a consistent theme exists when it comes to a lack of support, resources, and even data showcasing this particular population.

“Stigma and discrimination against this community is a serious factor,” said Dr. JaNelle Ricks, an associate professor of public health at Ohio State University.

“It influences so many things, but it’s definitely going to influence things like the negative political rhetoric that we’re hearing in this country.”

Ricks has spent her career studying sexual and reproductive health for historically marginalized communities, and diving deep into the data surrounding HIV risk and prevention.

While there has been a strong focus on eradication of HIV for decades and some improvement over the years, “those who are most at risk and have the worst outcomes aren’t seeing the same level of improvement.”

While medications and treatments are available, the ability to disperse not only treatments but prevention education to the general public, especially communities of color and women, depends on stronger support at higher levels.

“It really has to do with the powers that be, in terms of funding that’s available and where they think the importance is to target, so if there isn’t the money to try to educate and get access for the communities that are most in need, it’s difficult to see change,” Ricks said.

Being able to access healthcare in general is a struggle for LGBTQ+ individuals, and with legislation in Ohio and elsewhere that banned gender-affirming care for minors, for example, a need for healthcare can often clash with the hesitation to seek help.

Through her studies primarily of LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, Dr. Lauren McInroy has observed a population that may be experiencing similar things to their peers, like mental health issues caused by bullying and cyberbullying, but the added layers of identity and struggles that come alongside them complicate matters.

“So it’s not that the population inherently has different health and mental health outcomes, it’s the realities that they live with every day,” McInroy said.

The stress of stigma and a lack of representation in their every day life, often combined with “minority stress,” for communities of color and other populations, creates “chronic cumulative stress,” a struggle that McInroy says has been coined “death by a thousand cuts.”

“All of that stress and the lack of social support and community is really what leads to disproportionately poor health and mental health outcomes, because you’re carrying that stress through the day with you,” she said.

Negative impacts online and in the world can create more longterm effects, not just for the individual, but also for the state and world as a whole.

“We see lowered productivity, so work in adults, and school successes in young people,” McInroy said. “There’s an increase in medical costs, because they are waiting longer to access care and that means they’re getting worse a lot of the time.”

Recognizing the ripple effects of one population’s health outcomes can be a powerful message for other Ohioans whose attention might be elsewhere.

LGBTQ+ individuals seek care less because of fears of discrimination, and also a lack of insurance access, which creates a sicker population, and one that risks dying as a result.

“Even if they had insurance, again, stigma and discrimination is an issue,” Ricks said. “You might have untrained providers, you might have unwelcoming environments, you might experience discriminatory treatment which is going to make you less likely to follow up, or seek additional healthcare, which again influences death and illness rates.”

A lack of data

Before any care can be given, though, advocates say it would be helpful to have a full picture of what kind of care is needed, and where the resources should go.

Ricks is part of Greater Columbus Insight, a group of researchers collecting data on the health and wellness of LGBTQ+ Ohioans in Columbus, home to the largest population in the state.

Through a community advisory board, listening sessions, and surveys, the group hopes to help local organizations establish programs, obtain funding, and advocate for policy.

Ricks said it’s important for the group to be able to collect data, partly to be able to provide it to advocates working on the ground to improve things.

“For those organizations, and policymakers, and decision makers who are interested in equitable distribution of resources, they need the information to be able to justify making decisions,” Ricks said.

But the data provided through the group’s research doesn’t only provide supplemental help for advocates, but in some cases represents the limited data that exists on LGBTQ+ health.

A report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found measures related to gender identity and sexual orientation were removed from federal data collections, which the institute attributes largely to executive orders and policies from President Donald Trump saying that “transgender, nonbinary, and intersex identities would not be recognized by the federal government.”

In a study of the data from January 2025 to January 2026, the Williams Institute found that 94% of data elements that were removed from federal demographic collections were gender identity measures, and at least 60 collections also removed sexual orientation-related elements.

The analysis found that 23 collections removed sexual orientation or gender identity data “from bias motivation questions, precluding the ability to report discrimination on these bases,” and the majority of the eliminations were made through change requests made to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, not through a formal “notice-and-comment process.”

“These removals span multiple data collection types, including national surveys and surveillance systems, government-funded research studies, programmatic monitoring systems and evaluation studies, and administrative forms and records,” the institute’s study stated.

The type of data that had been removed is “essential for understanding the characteristics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations … assessing and addressing their needs, allocating public and private resources, and developing impactful policy at the local, state, and federal levels,” according to the study.

Even when presented with data, however, Ohio lawmakers and national policymakers have still passed laws that experts say go against scientific evidence and public opinion about LGBTQ+ policy.

“A lot of lawmakers have access to data and have heard numbers and still are not making decisions that are in the best interest of this community,” Ricks said. “I think it really goes back to the stigma and discrimination piece.”

How to move forward

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio provided a look at an ideal environment for LGBTQ+ Ohioans through a proposal of what state data would look like if disparities for the population were eliminated.

According to the institute, removing disparities in health would result in 97,000 less gay, lesbian and bisexual Ohioans reporting frequent mental distress, along with nearly 31,000 less transgender residents reporting such distress.

More than 55,000 LGBTQ+ Ohioans would have the opportunity to see a doctor without the barrier of cost, and 54,000 fewer members of the community would report “poor overall health,” according to the institute’s 2026 Health Value Dashboard.

Putting that data into quantifiable steps requires nuance and commitment, according to McInroy and Ricks.

For McInroy, who studies the impacts of technology on LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, being online can have its faults, but can have its benefits as well.

“Technology is a risk, but also offers them a lot of opportunities to meet their mental health, behavioral health, and social needs that a lot of them don’t have access to otherwise,” McInroy said.

“They can go online, they can see media that reflects their identities, they can see alternative discourses they don’t otherwise have access to.”

There are also community-building opportunities, access to role models, and helpful resources.

Being able to access “LGBTQ-competent” care could go a long way to help improve the health of many youth and young adults in Ohio, and even just a change in the way the care is discussed could create a better landscape for those who need it, according to McInroy.

“Sometimes at the moment (gender-affirming care) is viewed as encouraging LGBTQ+ identity, particularly in the context of the discourse around minors,” she said.

“But what it really is is the ability to acknowledge and affirm their identity as they express it, and understanding … providing identity-specific care.”

The rhetoric at the higher levels of government can seem overwhelming to those fighting against LGBTQ+ stigma and negative impacts, but Ricks said smaller wins are building up to bigger ones.

“We are seeing, particularly on a local level in a lot of places, where people are amplifying their support,” Ricks said.

“And I think if we are focused on what we can do locally, and continue to be thoughtful about how we can build on that, that’s where, at this point in time, we can have the most impact.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Located in Hamilton, Ohio, the Butler County jail is separated into three facilities: the Corrections Center on Hanover Street, which is the main complex and holds the most people, including ICE detainees. Then the Resolutions Jail on Second Street, and the Court Street Jail on Court Street, which handle overflow. 

The jail holds roughly 1,063 people. According to data from ICE updated in February, 362 of the jail’s inmates at that time were ICE detainees. The Butler County sheriff renewed the jail contract with ICE in March of last year.

One hundred thirty-one EMS calls have been made since March 5, 2025, records show. One hundred ten were sent from the Corrections Center itself. Collectively, twenty-one were made from the overflow facilities Resolution and Court Street.

Comparatively, 105 calls were made from the jail in 2024. From March to December of that year, 100 calls were sent from the Corrections Center. Four from Court Street Jail and one from Resolution. 

Butler County does not retain audio recordings of 911 calls. It is also unclear how many were made on behalf of ICE detainees as opposed to members of the regular prison population. 

EMS logs show the reasons for these calls range from pregnancies to seizures. “General illness” is the most common category, appearing thirty-one times from March of last year to present. “Chest pains,” appear twenty-eight times. 

Other reasons listed in the logs are as follows:

• Seizures: 12

• “Trauma”: 10

• Fall: 5

• Unconscious: 5

• Stroke: 4

• Assault: 2

The jail has faced allegations of medical neglect and abuse by lawyers, activists, and former detainees. 

Law enforcement authorities deny any mistreatment.

“There is a completely false narrative going on with the community that are activists, and I will say that definitively,” said Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer in a phone interview. 

Dwyer listed the facilities personnel, including one doctor, a physician’s assistant, a nurse practitioner, a dentist, three nurses, nine full-time paramedics, seven part-time, four EMTS that are full-time and two that are part-time. 

“In our facility, we have medical staff in the building 24/7,” Dwyer said. 

“There’s medical care here. And in a facility with a thousand inmates, you’re always dealing with something… but I can guarantee you if you come to this facility as an ICE detainee and you have a medical need, it’s going to be solved. It will be dealt with.” 

Others disagree. Among those who say Butler County Jail is unfit to hold ICE detainees is Pastor Irvin Heishman from West Charleston Church of the Brethren in Tipp City. 

Armando Reyes Rodriguez, a member of Heishman’s church, was detained by ICE on April 14, held in Butler County Jail for three months. 

He now resides in Honduras, his birth country.

Heishman visited and spoke about the conditions inside the jail. Heishman also discussed guard treatment of detainees, and recounted being introduced by Armando to a man who was “beaten badly enough that he had to be put in the hospital.”

“They threw him against that so hard that his arm was all messed up. And I saw him a week after it happened, and that was still oozing, like, liquids and blood from the wound. And he had no bandages. I was like: they’re really not even going to provide a bandage or something like that?”

The detainee was Luis Tenelanda. Deported to Ecuador, Tenelanda is filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, alleging that a sergeant punched him so hard he needed to be hospitalized. 

“(The) Defendant punched Mr. Tenelanda in the stomach, under his ribs….As a result, Mr. Tenelanda fell back and hit his head and his arm on the metal bunk bed, causing him to pass out,” states the court filing about the incident, which allegedly occurred on June 8 last year. 

The suit claims it took 40 minutes to an hour for the medical person to arrive, and when Tenelanda went to the jail’s medical unit, they told him he was in good condition. 

Only after Reyes-Rodriguez noticed his bleeding arm was Tenelanda taken to an outside hospital, the suit alleges, on June 10.

“Mr. Tenelanda’s stomach and arm continue to cause Mr. Tenelanda extreme pain. Mr. Tenelanda is still currently unable to bend or to lift his left arm. There is pain from Mr. Tenelanda’s elbow to his shoulder at all times. As a result, Mr. Tenelanda has difficulty getting dressed and showering because he cannot use his arm,” states the court filing. 

Butler County Jail strongly denies these allegations.

Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, slammed the treatment of detainees at the jail in an interview with the Ohio Capital Journal.

Tramonte’s organization is representing Tenelanda, and has represented other ICE detainees from the Butler County Jail. Tramonte recounted how numerous clients have said Butler County Jail didn’t address their medical needs. 

“This is like the punishment and torture of people who haven’t committed crimes or are not even being accused of crimes,” Tramonte said. “And they’re being put in this jail. And it’s all simply as a strategy to get people to give up on their cases and deport.”

Julie Nemecek is the founder of the Nemecek law firm in Columbus, Ohio, and has represented several ICE detainees held in Butler County Jail.

Nemecek spoke about a doctor who “comes maybe every two weeks,” saying that the wait for medical care is very long.

“But especially clients who have mental health conditions, serious mental health conditions, they are not getting care, they are not getting the medication they need, and it’s inhumane,” Nemecek alleged.

Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer spoke about the tours given to people who want to inspect the facility.

“I have hosted religious organizations. I had pastors from the area come in and tour the facility, and saw it, got to see ICE inmates in their environment. The state has come down for their inspections. And I can only say it any more boldly, that it is a false narrative.”

Dwyer added that he believes no amount of inspection will change the attitudes of people who oppose the jail’s ICE contract.

“I’ve had some of the activists come in and see it. It doesn’t matter. They stick with whatever narrative they want.”

Heishman was one of a dozen church leaders who toured the jail last August. According to him, access during the event was limited. 

“We were able to look into the pods where the detainees are kept, but were not allowed to go in,” Heishman said. “We weren’t allowed to talk to anybody. They showed us the medical facilities, but there were no doctors there. They were just empty rooms. Yeah, so we really didn’t get to see much.”

In Heishman’s eyes, the jail doesn’t distinguish between ICE detainees and regular criminals. 

“There’s supposed to be a difference when a person is detained for a civil matter. But you don’t get that difference at the county, at least, I certainly haven’t seen it at Butler County Jail.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ninty percent of children over the age of two play video games, and online games have become a huge part of how children play and learn today.

In fact, about half of all American children under 16 have played Roblox. The platform has become as much a part of modern childhood as the school bus, and is now an important part of how millions of kids play, learn, and socialize.

As the president of Ohio PTA, I hear from parents every week who feel overwhelmed by technology and worry they’ve already lost ground to algorithms and apps they don’t understand.

I get it. But our responsibility as parents is to prepare our children for the world safely and confidently online and offline.

PTA encourages community collaboration to ensure safe, inclusive, and positive digital experiences for all children, youth, and families, fostering learning and healthy lifestyles and ensuring they are equipped with the technological literacy and access to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

I encourage every Ohio parent to do what I did: sit down with your child and play with them online.

There are silly and imaginative games, but there is also real substance.

Through Roblox’s learning hub, I found thousands of popular games that are just as educational as they are entertaining, like Mission Mars, where kids design and operate rovers to complete scientific tasks, and Lua Learning, which introduces real coding concepts used by professional developers.

Some of the most popular creators on the platform are even kids themselves.

As much as I love how my kids are learning new tech skills, keeping them safe is my top priority.

Parents can restrict or disable chat entirely, block specific users or experiences, and set limits on screen time and spending.

Images and videos cannot be shared in chats, and text and voice communication pass through strict filters.

Roblox recently went even further by announcing they would divide the platform into age-based accounts — “Roblox Kids” for ages 5 to 8, and “Roblox Select” for ages 9 to 15.

These build on their facial age estimation system that requires checks for chat access, helping ensure children are only communicating with others in similar age ranges.

While these are meaningful steps, Roblox isn’t the only responsible party here. The other part is engagement from us, the parents.

We don’t keep children from the playground because there’s a chance they might fall off the monkey bars or encounter a bully.

We take them to the park, we watch, we intervene when needed, and we gradually trust them as they learn how to stay safe, even when we aren’t with them.

Rather than removing our children from platforms that have become central to how their peers connect and learn, parents should lean in. We should be understanding the tools, setting boundaries, and staying engaged in how our children are using these platforms.

Parents should be asking questions and consistently using the parental tools the platform provides. In our house, we play together, on shared computers, in our family room.

In 2026, our children need us in these spaces alongside them, teaching them how to navigate safely, just like we do in other aspects of their lives.

Nicole Lesnick is the current President of the Ohio Parent Teacher Association and a parent to eight children.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

House Bill 472, sponsored by state Rep. Jodi Salvo (R-Bolivar), would have required absentee voters to either upload a photo ID and electronic signature to a state-built online portal or mail a photocopy of their ID to their county board of elections. In his veto message, DeWine said the requirement would do nothing to stop fraud while making it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot.

“House Bill 472 would not discourage fraud, would not add any real security, and would create an additional and significant burden for Ohioans who vote by mail,” DeWine wrote. He added: “H.B. 472 is all burden for so little benefit. Therefore, this veto is in the public interest.”

The veto blocks, for now, what would have been a substantial change to how more than a million Ohioans vote. Ohio has required photo ID for in-person and early voting since 2023, but absentee voters currently verify their identity using a signature and either the last four digits of their Social Security number or a driver’s license number. Under H.B. 472, those steps would have remained and a photo ID requirement would have been layered on top, taking effect with the 2027 general election.

A homeless-ID bill that became a voting bill

H.B. 472 did not begin as a voting measure. As originally introduced, the bill was a bipartisan effort to waive fees so Ohioans experiencing homelessness could more easily obtain state identification cards and vital records such as birth certificates. Senate Republicans added the absentee photo ID language late in the process, shortly before the bill cleared the legislature.

The amendment was tied to a separate Republican priority: a proposed constitutional amendment, headed to the November ballot, that would let the state require photo ID for absentee voting. Lawmakers folded the mail-in ID requirement into H.B. 472 in part to satisfy House members who were reluctant to back the ballot measure without also writing the requirement into state law.

The late change appeared to cost the bill support. It had originally cleared the Ohio House with a single dissenting vote; after the Senate added the ID language, the House concurred 60–34 and the Senate passed it 23–10, with Sen. Bill Blessing (R-Colerain Township) joining Democrats in opposition.

The bill’s original Democratic co-sponsor, Rep. Christine Cockley (D-Columbus), asked to have her name removed and urged DeWine to veto it.

“The bill was hijacked by the Senate Republicans and turned into something completely different,” Cockley said. “What started out as a great piece of bipartisan legislation turned into a bill about voting rights.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which had urged a veto, said the late amendment grafted an unrelated voting fight onto a bill meant to help vulnerable residents. “What started as a straightforward, nonpartisan bill addressing fees for birth certificates and IDs for homeless individuals has now been co-opted by election deniers still re-litigating President Trump’s 2020 defeat,” ACLU of Ohio Advocacy Director Collin Marozzi said in a statement before the veto.

DeWine: an ID can’t be matched to a face through the mail

Much of DeWine’s veto message focused on a practical objection. A photo ID works at a polling place because a poll worker can compare the picture to the voter standing in front of them, he wrote — a check that is impossible with a mailed ballot.

Requiring the ID for mail voting, DeWine wrote, “does not provide election officials with any opportunity to verify if the ID picture matches the face of the voter and thereby serves as no additional verification of the voter’s true identity.”

He also argued the bill stacked new steps onto a process that already works, pointing to the existing requirement that absentee voters provide identifying information and a signature. The added requirements, he wrote, “are burdens, nonetheless, and when layered upon the existing steps already required to vote absentee and vote by mail, there would certainly be voters discouraged from exercising their right to vote.”

DeWine cited warnings from election officials and seniors’ advocates that the change would fall hardest on older and less-connected voters. Quoting the bipartisan Ohio Association of Election Officials, he noted that “senior citizens, individuals living in long-term care facilities, voters with mobility challenges, and those with limited access to technology may face additional burdens that could discourage participation or prevent otherwise eligible voters from casting a ballot.” The AARP, he wrote, echoed that concern, cautioning that “increased complexity can make it harder for eligible voters to successfully complete the process.”

The governor also flagged the cost. Building and maintaining the secure online portal the bill required would force the secretary of state to spend significant unfunded money, and county boards of elections would absorb new administrative costs with no added resources — what DeWine called “an unfunded mandate both for the Ohio Secretary of State and for every county in Ohio.”

He reserved praise for one piece of the bill: a provision letting voters apply for absentee ballots online. That reform, DeWine wrote, “is much needed, and I commend the Legislature for passing it. It is unfortunate that it is in a bill that I must veto.”

The same governor signed a ballot deadline restriction in December

The veto lands six months after DeWine took the opposite action on a different voting bill. In December, he signed Senate Bill 293, which eliminated Ohio’s four-day grace period for mail-in ballots and required that all absentee ballots reach county boards of elections by the close of polls on Election Day. That law took effect in March.

DeWine signed S.B. 293 while saying he disagreed with it. “I normally would veto a repeal of this four-day grace period. And, frankly, that’s what I wish I could do,” he told reporters at the time. He said he signed it anyway because a pending U.S. Supreme Court case out of Mississippi could strike down such grace periods nationally, and he did not want Ohio’s rules thrown into question close to the 2026 election.

That sequence has left DeWine, who is term-limited and in his final year in office, drawing an idiosyncratic line on voting law: signing a restriction he said he opposed when he felt cornered by litigation, and vetoing one he viewed as pure cost and obstruction. As far back as 2023, he had said a sweeping package of election changes he signed that year would likely be the last he would approve.

What happens next

Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers and could override the veto, but the legislature is on its summer recess. Senate Finance Chair Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) said he was disappointed by the veto but was unsure whether lawmakers would return to attempt an override.

The fight is unlikely to end with H.B. 472. Ohio voters will decide in November on the constitutional amendment that would allow a photo ID requirement for absentee voting — the same requirement DeWine just rejected in statutory form. The state’s two secretary of state candidates are split on the issue: Republican nominee Robert Sprague, the current state treasurer, backed the mail-in ID requirement, while Democratic nominee Allison Russo, the former House minority leader, urged DeWine to veto it and pointed to drafting errors in the rushed bill.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Postmaster General David Steiner defended the rule at a Senate hearing and dismissed accusations that the Postal Service was acting politically after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March restricting voting by mail. 

“If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposed rule?” Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, asked Steiner.

“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner replied.

Steiner’s testimony, before the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, marked the clearest acknowledgment yet by a federal official that the rule threatens to upend voting by mail across the country. 

If the rule takes effect and Democratic-led states refuse to comply, the requirements would effectively limit mail voting to Republican-led states during November midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

The Postal Service put forward the rule after Trump ordered Steiner to require states to submit lists of anticipated mail voters to the agency as a condition of having ballots delivered. 

Trump cancels signing ceremony

The executive order is one of several steps the Trump administration has taken this year to influence how elections are administered, along with the Department of Justice suing states to obtain sensitive voter data.

Underscoring the depth of Trump’s interest, as Steiner was speaking Wednesday morning the president abruptly called off a U.S. Capitol ceremony to sign a bipartisan housing bill because of the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act. The legislation would require voters to show documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship.

“Now we have this new rule you’ve put out saying that states have to turn over their voting rolls and you, the U.S. Postal Service, will decide who’s approved to send their ballot through the mail,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said. “It’s just another backdoor way of trying to influence this election.“

Slotkin said Trump’s decision to cancel the housing bill signing demonstrated the “level of obsession this president has” over elections.

Turning over names 

Every state would have to provide the names of residents expected to vote by mail. Additionally, eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct elections by mailing all voters a ballot, meaning election officials would have to provide information on every voter. Those states include California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.

Trump and his aides argue the restrictions are needed to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs very rarely. Democrats and voting rights groups have sued over the order, arguing it’s an unconstitutional assertion of presidential authority over state-run elections. No judge has yet halted it.

Steiner sought to place himself outside the controversy and said, in response to a question, that the Postal Service would adhere to a court order blocking the rule if one were issued. Asked about the legal authority underlying the rule, he said he would “have to defer that to the courts to understand the authority.”

Steiner, who became the postmaster general in July 2025, cast the rule as primarily focused on best practices for election mail, a description that understates the scope of the proposal, which postal experts call unprecedented.

“I’m not a political person and the Postal Service is not a political organization,” Steiner said.

Dems urge Steiner to withdraw rule

Democrats expressed sharp disagreement with Steiner and accused him of folding to Trump’s efforts to exercise more control over elections. Steiner answers to the USPS Board of Governors, not the president, and his critics say he is endangering the agency’s independence by complying with the executive order.

Every Senate Democrat, as well as two independents who caucus with the party, on Tuesday signed a letter to Steiner urging him to withdraw the rule. The letter warns that aside from the rule’s legal and constitutional problems, it’s not feasible for state and local election officials to meet its requirements.

“The proposed regulation demands that the Postal Service set up an entirely new system and database to process and transmit millions of absentee ballots that is secure and accessible to every American election official, just months prior to a general election,” the letter says.

At Wednesday’s hearing, GOP senators mostly steered clear of the mail ballot rule, instead focusing on the official topic, the Postal Service’s finances. But Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, accused Democrats of hypocrisy over their past support of the “For the People Act.” 

The sweeping bill, offered when Democrats last controlled Congress, would have required states to offer same-day voter registration and expand mail voting. Opponents said it amounted to nationalized elections.

“Three years later all of them are testifying, ‘It’s outrageous, President Trump is trying to nationalize elections.’ No, he’s not, he’s trying to get rid of voter fraud,” Moreno said, adding that Democrats had now “dug up from their bottom desk drawer” the Constitution.

“Should we get back to post office stuff now?” Moreno said.

“Absolutely,” Steiner replied.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Shaver, the president of Fostoria City Council and the Democratic nominee in Ohio’s 5th Congressional District, introduced a restored 1939 Nash LaFayette — which his campaign is calling the “Brian Mobile” — in a post on the campaign’s Facebook page.

“Meet the Brian Mobile!” the post reads. “Be on the lookout for this union-made 1939 Nash Lafayette (components of which were made in OH-5) as Brian travels this district, turning every mile into something meaningful — building real connections.”

The campaign framed the vehicle as more than a curiosity. “We’re traversing something more important than just a campaign trail,” the post said. “Every stop is a chance to share stories and hopes for our future.”

The 1939 Nash LaFayette was the entry-level series produced by Nash Motors, the Kenosha, Wisconsin, automaker that later merged into American Motors Corporation. The campaign describes the car as “union-made” and says some of its components were built within the present-day 5th District.

The blue sedan, with whitewall tires and a “Brian Shaver for Congress” placard on its door, fits the retail-politics approach Shaver has leaned on since winning the nomination. In June, he launched a district-wide “Tacos and Transparency” listening tour, with stops at Mexican restaurants across the district’s nine counties.

Shaver, 48, teaches social studies at Fostoria Junior/Senior High School and was elected president of the Fostoria City Council. He won a four-way Democratic primary on May 5 with 28.68% of the vote, earning the nomination to challenge U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, a Bowling Green Republican who has held the seat since 2007.

The matchup is a steep one. The Cook Political Report rates the district R+14, and Latta defeated his 2024 Democratic opponent by roughly 35 points. Independent candidate Dalton Franklin will also appear on the November 3 ballot.

Shaver has built his campaign around government accountability and access, pledging support for campaign finance limits, term limits and stronger congressional oversight. He has repeatedly contrasted that message with Latta’s record on constituent access, noting that the incumbent has not held a town hall in more than a decade.

A full schedule of campaign events is posted on Shaver’s website, brianshaverforcongress.com/events.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That vote is now a backdrop to the race to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine. The Republican nominee, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has a long public record opposing abortion — one he built largely during his 2023 campaign for president, and one that stands in tension with the amendment Ohioans approved.

Ramaswamy’s stated framework is that abortion belongs to the states, not Washington. He has repeatedly said he opposes a federal ban, arguing the issue should be decided at the state level. A governor also cannot unilaterally repeal a constitutional amendment; Ohio’s protection for abortion up to fetal viability remains in force regardless of who occupies the office, and altering it would require the courts or another statewide vote. Ramaswamy’s campaign has not publicly detailed whether, as governor, he would support new legislative restrictions on abortion access.

What is on the record is how Ramaswamy has described his own position. He has called himself “unapologetically pro-life,” a phrase he used on his own account on July 11, 2023, and repeated to reporters that week. In that same July 11 post, he praised the lawmakers behind Iowa’s six-week abortion ban, writing that he was “proud of” the Iowa governor “and the Iowa legislature for protecting life.” Speaking at the National Conservative Student Conference later that month, he described Iowa’s six-week standard as “progress that should come from the states.” A six-week ban prohibits abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, often before many women know they are pregnant.

On the ruling itself, Ramaswamy has said the justices got it right. During an August 2023 presidential debate, he said he believed “Dobbs was correct to overturn” Roe, framing abortion as a matter for state law. He has also said abortion should be treated as a “human rights” question rather than a “women’s rights” one.

Ramaswamy’s running mate brings a more direct legislative record on the issue. Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, was a cosponsor of Senate Bill 23, the 2019 law known as the Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act, according to the Ohio Legislature’s official record. At the time, McColley said in a statement from his office that he was “proud” to cosponsor the measure. The law banned abortion after a detectable fetal heartbeat and made no exception for rape or incest; its only exception was for a medical emergency threatening the life or a major bodily function of the pregnant patient. DeWine, who signed it, said at the time that government’s role is “to protect the most vulnerable among us.”

That ban is not currently in effect. It was blocked in court, and a Hamilton County judge struck it down in 2024 after the passage of the reproductive-rights amendment, which protects abortion up to viability — generally 22 to 24 weeks — and later when a physician determines it is needed to protect the patient’s life or health. Even with the amendment in place, Republican lawmakers have continued to pursue measures that test its limits.

The Democratic nominee, Dr. Amy Acton, a physician and former state health director, has made reproductive freedom a central contrast in the race. “Ohioans have made it very clear that they trust women to make their own decisions about their bodies,” an Acton campaign spokeswoman said. “As Governor, Dr. Amy Acton will protect reproductive freedom.”

Ramaswamy won the Republican primary on May 5, 2026. He and Acton meet in the general election on Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The endorsement was announced in a June 18 letter from OFT President Melissa Cropper, who cited Jones’s support for public schools, higher education, libraries and the workers who staff them. The union represents about 20,000 educators, higher-education faculty, support staff, librarians and public employees across Ohio.

“We need people like you in office fighting for the working people of Ohio,” Cropper wrote.

Jones, a production supervisor at the Toledo Molding & Die plant in Tiffin and a member of Tiffin City Council, said the support reflects what is at stake for the district’s schools.

“Public schools built this district — in Tiffin, Clyde, Fremont, and every town in between,” Jones said. “The people who teach our kids and keep our libraries open shouldn’t have to wonder whether their state representative is in their corner. They’ve got my word that I will be.”

A 1991 Clyde High School graduate and U.S. Army veteran, Jones served four years in the Army, including with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard — before returning to Tiffin and building a career of more than twenty years on the factory floor. The OFT endorsement adds to a list of labor and veterans’ organizations backing his campaign, which earlier this year drew the support of the national veterans group VoteVets.

A reliably Republican district, narrowed by a bruising primary

District 88 has long been considered reliably Republican. But the incumbent, Rep. Gary Click of Vickery, emerged bruised from the May 5 Republican primary, winning by fewer than 600 votes — 52.28 percent to 47.72 percent — over challenger Eric Watson. Click carried his home county of Sandusky but lost Seneca County to Watson, surviving only on his Sandusky margin. Watson declined to endorse Click after the race.

Jones, who lives in and was elected in Seneca County — the county Click lost — ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. Seneca County Democrats have pointed to the primary turnout and the incumbent’s narrow margin as evidence of momentum heading into the fall.

The two candidates enter the general election with contrasting records. Click, a Baptist pastor first elected in 2020, is the primary sponsor of House Bill 68 — the Saving Ohio Adolescents from Experimentation, or SAFE, Act — which bans gender-affirming care for minors and, through its Save Women’s Sports Act provisions, restricts transgender participation in school sports. Jones has centered his campaign on economic issues, including utility and housing costs, property taxes, manufacturing jobs and public school funding.

Jones’s campaign says he is not accepting corporate PAC money in the race. More information is available at the Jones campaign website. The general election is November 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A pressure ulcer slowly tore open a hole in the skin over Sam Frank Ray’s tailbone, leaving his raw bone exposed over weeks to the infection that eventually killed him, according to a lawsuit his family filed late last year. 

Bedsores, the byproduct of cut-off blood circulation when the body lies still in one position for too long, are considered highly preventable injuries. They can be avoided by repositioning an immobilized person once every two hours. But they can turn lethal if they’re allowed to progress. 

Ray’s lawyers say he was left in the same position through 33 separate eight-hour shifts in September 2024. Staff failed to reposition him and take him to the toilet, instead directing him to use adult diapers and await being changed, likely increasing his infection risk, the lawsuit alleges. 

Ray’s family didn’t know anything was wrong until he was hospitalized as the infection spiraled out of control, according to Michael Hill, a lawyer representing Ray’s family. The family’s lawsuit against the Arbors at Sylvania, in Toledo, is pending.

“It’s a catastrophic situation at that point. And he passes away,” Hill said in an interview. “It’s one of those things where he should have never gotten a bedsore to begin with.”

The lawsuit Hill filed notes Ray’s death is similar to that of a woman named Lucy Garcia, a patient at the Arbors at Oregon, a nearby nursing home in the same chain. A lawsuit filed by her estate said the same thing happened there, with an infected bedsore leading to her death in July 2024. 

“All the tissue on her backside down to her bone had died off, including muscle,” Garcia’s lawsuit states. “The open bedsore was exposed to Lucy’s own feces and urine from Arbors at Oregon leaving her in soiled adult diapers, and the wound was infected with bacteria causing sepsis.”

Garcia’s estate dropped the lawsuit against the Arbors at Oregon with prejudice, which means she can’t make the same claim again and suggests the parties reached a private settlement. Neither side would confirm. 

About a year after Garcia’s death, regulators cited the facility for bedsore problems and other shortfalls.

State inspectors have repeatedly flagged patient deaths and treatment errors at Arbors homes. And lawyers suing some of the facilities say the operators pare down staffing to bare minimums, leaving patients exposed to preventable falls, bedsores, infections and escapes. 

Taken together, lawsuits and regulatory inspections of the 16 skilled nursing homes facilities that comprise the Arbors at Ohio – places to stay for those who need less care than a hospital but more than most families can provide at home – paint a picture of care that at times ranges from poor to dangerous. 

Since Jan. 1, 2024, at least 11 plaintiffs have filed lawsuits accusing Arbors facilities of negligence or medical errors that caused patients’ deaths, according to thousands of pages of court records analyzed by Signal Statewide. 

In that same time frame, state inspectors have faulted three Arbors facilities in Ohio for contributing to the death of three patients via different sorts of medical errors. 

And that’s to say nothing of disturbing incidents at some Arbors nursing homes, documented by state health officials on behalf of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including a summer zoo trip that led to multiple heat-related hospitalizations, a forgotten ventilator application that nearly killed a patient, instances of residents going missing for days, and others, according to a review of hundreds of pages of nursing home inspection reports. 

Administrators at several Arbors facilities named in this report deferred comment to Prestige Healthcare, a Louisville management company that operates the chain. Bill Gray, a company spokesperson, declined to comment on a list of written questions. Attorneys representing the company in court didn’t respond to written questions. 

“The company’s position is no comment,” Gray said. 

Spotty penalties from regulators

Accountability from regulators is spotty, as control of the facilities is divided between unique operating companies for each facility, related entities that own the land the nursing homes sit on, and Prestige Healthcare. 

The Ohio Department of Health considers violations on a one-by-one basis, and doesn’t consider that facilities are a member of a chain or larger system, a spokesperson said.  

Over the most recent three-year period, CMS, the final arbiter for discipline of nursing homes, has fined Arbors facilities on 18 occasions for a total of more than $648,000, according to agency data as of mid-June. The Ohio Department of Health recommends that a facility be fined, but CMS sets the amounts. The final figure typically reflects a 35% reduction in exchange for facilities agreeing not to contest the penalty. 

The fines comprise a small sum compared to facility revenue. Data provided by the Ohio Department of Medicaid shows Medicaid has paid Arbors facilities a total of $233 million in revenue over the past three calendar years. That sum doesn’t include payments from private insurers. 

ODH spokesperson Ken Gordon added that the department can also withhold future Medicaid reimbursement payments if the facilities fail to remediate any shortcomings in 15- and 180-day windows.

“It is important to understand there is a wide range of enforcement actions, which are governed in part by the severity of the violations and also a facility’s past history,” Gordon said. “Fines are only one of those actions. The idea is to prompt swift action to correct the issue.”

CMS inspections state that poor care at three Arbors facilities – Milford, Stow and Minerva – contributed to patients’ deaths. Only one facility paid a fine – the Arbors at Milford, where CMS claims a nurse’s failure to notify staff physicians of a patient’s worsening diabetes attack contributed to the resident’s “untimely death.”

The facility paid a $35,000 fine in connection with the incident. That year, it received more than $6.2 million in revenue from Medicaid repayments. 

At the Arbors at Stow, CMS blamed a patient’s “medication non-compliance” that caused her death on the facility’s staff. Regulators fined the facility $48,000 but suspended the payment – the facility received $6.8 million via Medicaid reimbursement revenue that year.

Staff’s failure at the Arbors at Minerva to notify a doctor before a patient’s downward spiral and death, as described by CMS, in January 2025, according to an inspection report. Records as of mid-June don’t reflect any fine. 

CMS declined to comment or answer written questions.

Lawsuits allege negligence

The wrongful death lawsuits identified by Signal Statewide filed against the Arbors all allege that thin staffing led to the falls and bedsores that caused patients’ deaths. 

Along with Lucy Garcia, the estates of now-deceased patients of at least two other Arbors facilities have filed wrongful death lawsuits since January 2024 that have ended with plaintiffs dropping their cases with prejudice, suggesting a private settlement.

That includes Brenda McNeil, who died of a brain bleed caused by a fall that occurred two days after she checked in to the Arbors at Oregon. 

And it includes the estate of Sharon Kay Abner, a 68-year-old West Virginia woman, which sued after a pressure ulcer devolved into sepsis and osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone. 

Lawyers for both sides declined comment on the final outcome of the lawsuits. 

The claims from alleged victims of Arbors’ care are similar from case to case. The family of Philip Rice alleged he died from an infection caused by a pressure sore while residing at the Arbors at Marietta. The family of Nancy Altizer said she died following a fall and pressure sore while staying at the Arbors at Gallipolis. And Gary Wade Conner died after allegedly falling while staying at the Arbors at Oregon. 

These cases are all pending and haven’t been ruled on by a court. Will Eadie, a Northeast Ohio attorney representing Conner’s family, declined to discuss a pending case but said he has filed “a fair number” of lawsuits against Arbors facilities. 

He said the key indicator to gauge quality of care is staffing – a facility’s biggest source of overhead, and often the culprit behind preventable issues like bedsores or falls. 

Arbors facilities average 2.9 out of 5 stars on staffing, according to CMS’ analysis of payroll data.

“Staffing is kind of the root of most nursing home problems,” Eadie said. “You’re really talking about nurses and aides who might want to do well, but they are burned out, overworked, or there’s a bad culture of it being OK to not have adequate care.” 

Plenty of research backs up the idea. More nursing home staffing tends to produce better health outcomes for patients, studies show. 

And a recent white paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, relying on more detailed data required by regulators in Illinois, has accused nursing home industry operators of “tunneling profits” to related entities to understate their earnings. Those “hidden profits” would equate to a 36% increase in a ratio that measures staffing hours per resident. 

A hellish trip to the zoo 

Some of the problems flagged in the CMS inspections – which are carried out regularly or in response to complaints by the Ohio Department of Health – were nonfatal in nature but still injurious and troubling. 

Case in point – a field trip for 13 residents that the Arbors at Pomeroy, in Southeast Ohio, organized to the Columbus Zoo in June 2025. 

While the heat index crept up to 90 degrees, the residents spent a long six hours at the zoo. Some complained about the heat and duration. According to the report, the day started to sour on the drive home, where residents were boarded onto a bus that hadn’t been cooled down, where they ate fast food on board with the doors open. 

“The Administrator stated the van was really hot inside (all the doors and windows were open at that time) and she did not know why it was so hot,” a state inspector wrote.

One resident started to get “restless, jerking on other people’s seats” before opening the emergency window on the bus. He then became unresponsive, according to CMS’ writeup of the incident. He was unconscious for about 15 minutes until an ambulance arrived. 

“[He] had a temperature of 105.7 degrees Fahrenheit and was transferred to the hospital where he was placed on a ventilator and treated for heat stroke,” an inspector wrote. 

Another resident found unresponsive had a temperature of 104 degrees and was treated for heat stroke. 

“[She] stated she went to the hospital but stated she did not remember much about the day,” the CMS inspection states. “The resident did not recall eating a sack lunch at the zoo or eating at a fast-food restaurant on the way home. The resident was unable to recall when she got too hot.”

They didn’t make it home until midnight. A custodian who inspectors summoned for an interview said she was told by her superiors to “only say nice things and not be negative,” according to CMS. She wrote out a statement for inspectors, but it was re-written by the director of nursing “due to the things she had written.”

CMS fined the facility $37,551 in connection with its inspection, according to data tracked by investigative journalism outlet ProPublica. 

An abrupt discharge

Sherry Kemp Woodyard knew her husband, a 71-year-old veteran wrestling with dementia and post-traumatic stress disorder, had been through a tumultuous few months at the Arbors at Delaware. This at times included aggressive behavior, police intervention and a trip to a behavioral health facility to stabilize him. 

But she didn’t know that the facility administrator refused to take Walter Woodyard back to the facility after his last hospitalization, instead attempting to drop him off at Kemp’s home. The administrator didn’t provide any advance notice, she said.

Kemp wasn’t home, and could only communicate with her confused husband and the facility administrator by phone and Ring doorbell camera as they stood outside in an unusually bitter February chill. 

“The administrator is saying ‘I’m not taking him back, I’m leaving him on the porch,’” Kemp said in an interview. “It’s 12 degrees there.”

Instead, Woodyard was taken to Grady Hospital, which doesn’t offer behavioral care. A social worker called Kemp. 

“She says, ‘I have your husband.’ And the words she used to me was that he was ‘dumped’ here,” Kemp said. “And saying that word, I was like, ‘What do you mean he was dumped here?’”

Kemp eventually arranged for her husband’s transfer to a Veterans Affairs facility near Dayton, where he now resides. 

An outraged Kemp soon filed a complaint with the Ohio Department of Health, of which she provided a copy. The complaint sparked an unannounced inspection of the facility. 

The state officials substantiated Kemp’s allegations, citing the facility for failing to ensure the safe discharge of Woodyard. 

Moreover, they found a spread of other problems in the facility. Several of the residents’ rooms there measured between 54 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Your complaint was completed in conjunction with additional surveys,” Angela Fox, a survey administrator, wrote to Kemp earlier this year in response to her complaint.

“Our investigation revealed Arbors at Delaware does not meet the requirements of the [Medicaid] program and was cited for violations of federal and/or state regulations where appropriate.”

What is the Arbors at Ohio?

The corporate structure of the chain of facilities makes it difficult to unspool the question of who’s responsible when something goes wrong. 

Several Arbors facilities declined to comment about CMS findings but referred inquiries to “corporate” – a reference to Prestige Healthcare, a Louisville company, which declined comment.  

Company paperwork points to a mazelike structure. For instance, Arbors at Delaware LLC lists as its agent the Delaware Opco LLC, whose business filings include the address of Prestige Healthcare. 

In 2023, the nursing home’s land was purchased by a property holding company. This structure is true of several Arbors facilities reviewed by Signal Statewide. 

CMS data, analyzed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica, list as major investors in the Arbors chain the B&Y Healthcare S Corp, B&Y Trust, Cody Healthcare S Corp and Craig Flashner 2007 Trust. And according to the same database, Craig Flashner and B&Y Trust are affiliated with Medilodge, another chain of 50 nursing homes around Michigan. 

The legal architecture has a purpose, according to Hill, a lawyer who has sued the company. Every entity is either there to limit tax liability or insulate the owners from the financial risks of a lawsuit, he said. 

Arbors, he said, probably isn’t much better or worse than other major nursing home chains. He noted his several pending cases against an industry rival in central Ohio, claiming the facility’s understaffing and neglect led to a man’s death. 

“I think what you’re seeing is a representation of chains across Ohio, and really, across the country,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything particularly abnormal, unfortunately, about the Arbors.”

Signal Ohio is a nonprofit news organization covering government, education, health, economy and public safety.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump had been scheduled to sign the bill, which passed the Senate Monday and House Tuesday with wide margins, during a Capitol ceremony.

But in a pair of social media posts prior to the event, he derided the overhaul aimed at lowering housing costs as “minor” before refusing to sign it entirely.

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

The controversial SAVE America Act, a top priority for Trump, addresses the extremely rare phenomenon of noncitizen voting. Republican senators have told Trump there are not enough votes in the chamber for it to pass.

The housing bill’s Senate sponsors, Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and ranking Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sought to lower the costs of housing construction by removing regulatory barriers, expanding the uses of federal housing grants and banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes.

Scott, a South Carolina Republican, lauded the bill Tuesday as not only bipartisan, but nonpartisan, addressing universal needs.

Republican leaders framed the measure as addressing affordability, which is expected to be a key issue in November’s midterm elections amid stubborn inflation.

The measure, which combined elements of proposals in each chamber, appeared on a fast track to becoming law after the Senate approved it 85-5 Monday and the House voted 358-32 Tuesday. The White House had said Trump supported the bill.

The House opponents were virtually all from a group of conservatives, led by Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, who said she would oppose all legislation from the Senate, and even some House rules resolutions, until the Senate passed Trump’s elections security measure.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during a Wednesday morning press conference that he spoke with the president earlier in the day and that he is going to delay signing the housing bill until Congress approves a grant program for elections through the complex budget reconciliation process. That’s the same procedure the GOP used to enact its “big, beautiful” law and $70 billion for immigration enforcement.

“You have to put it on a reconciliation bill,” he said. “We believe that if you create a grant program that ties it to reconciling the budget and you allow blue states, if they come to their senses and they want to avail themselves of election integrity proposals and ideas and policies, they can draw down from a federal fund and use those funds. We’re willing to invest heavily in that.”

Johnson said he told Trump that Republicans in Congress can enact that policy if they “stand together.”

“As you know he has a window of time before he has to sign a bill and he’s going to use a bit more of that window of time,” Johnson said. “And we’re going to go through this together.”

Johnson said he expects Trump to sign the housing bill within the 10-day window.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Senate approval marked the first time both chambers have agreed in a rebuke of Trump over his war in Iran.

The concurrent resolution, which passed 50-48, does not require the president’s signature and its enforceability has been a perennial topic of debate. 

The Senate’s approval occurred against the backdrop of the administration’s peace deal negotiations with Iran, which have been criticized from both sides of the aisle.

Four Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the measure: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; Rand Paul of Kentucky; Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, who recently lost his primary race after Trump endorsed an opponent; and Susan Collins, who’s fighting a tough reelection campaign in Maine. 

Democrat John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted no. Paul and Fetterman have broken ranks with their parties on several previous Iran War Powers Resolution votes.

Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was recently hospitalized, and Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania did not vote. McCormick was with Trump on a trip to Pennsylvania.

Debate over impact

Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that War Powers Resolutions are not constitutional. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1983 ruled against the validity of congressional measures that do not require a president’s signature.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Congress “stood up to Donald Trump and voted to end his costly, unnecessary, and devastating war with Iran.”

“Let me be clear: for the first time, this resolution has passed both chambers of Congress and does not require the President’s signature. The message from the only branch of government with the power to declare war is unmistakable: the Trump administration must withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities in Iran. The pressure on Republicans mounts,” Schumer said in a statement following the vote.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., who sponsored the original resolution that passed the House on June 3, said the measure is binding and the president “must cease all hostilities against Iran.”

“Regardless of what President Trump says, this measure is binding under the War Powers Resolution, and I will explore all legal avenues to ensure the Executive complies with the will of Congress. Congress never authorized this failed war, and the president certainly has no authority to continue it indefinitely without our consent as the Constitution demands,” Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said in a statement.

The White House declined to comment on the vote.

Negotiations continue

Administration officials, who maintain hostilities ended in early April, are on a 60-day clock to hammer out a final agreement with Iran. 

As part of a temporary memorandum of understanding in effect during talks, the administration lifted its naval blockade of Iranian ports and economic sanctions on Iranian oil, allowing the Islamic Republic to now sell on the global market. 

The interim deal also charges Iran with demining the Strait of Hormuz and allowing tankers and cargo ships to travel unimpeded while Iran and Oman create a scheme for passage through the narrow shipping route where one-fifth of the world’s petroleum traveled prior to the war.

Trump issued social media threats to Iran over the weekend as Iran’s new Persian Gulf Strait Authority continued to impose certain requirements for ships to pass.

Thirteen American service members died in the war launched by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28, and over 400 have been injured, according to the Pentagon. Thousands of civilians across Iran and the Gulf region were killed during the fighting.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The House passed the bill, 358-32, sending it to President Donald Trump’s desk a day after the Senate’s 85-5 vote. The White House has said the administration supports the measure and Trump’s aides would advise he sign it.

The bill would reduce some regulatory hurdles, including environmental reviews, to home construction and expand the possible uses of federal housing funds. It includes a high-profile provision to ban private equity firms from buying single-family homes.

The bill would allow money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program to be used for construction of new affordable housing. It would also tie the amount some cities and states receive from the $3.3 billion grant program to their rates of affordable housing construction.

Increasing worries over cost of living

The action from Congress this week reflects a bipartisan focus on affordability, as both parties have sought to address voters’ increasing concerns with the cost of living that has been consistently rising since the start of the decade.

Margaret Spellings, the president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said at a housing policy conference hosted by the Washington, D.C., think tank that the rising cost of housing was due to a lack of supply.

“During the past two decades, the U.S. has simply not built enough housing to meet demand,” she said. “This supply-demand imbalance has led to soaring prices and rents in communities across the nation, with millions of households struggling to make their payments and unable to achieve the American dream of home ownership.”

She added that the issue had animated policymakers at the national, state and local levels.

“Housing is now a top-tier issue here in Washington and in state capitols and city halls all across our country,” she said.

Broad consensus

The measure includes provisions from earlier proposals in both chambers, reflecting a consensus not only between the two major parties but between the two chambers of Congress that often cannot agree on how to approach even broadly supported legislation.

Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, lauded the measure’s broad appeal in a pre-recorded message to the BPC conference.

The bill was nonpartisan, reflecting “advocacy on behalf of common sense,” he said.

“But it does take a bipartisan coalition who puts America first,” he said. “Your work encouraging all of us to put the country first, to put first-time homebuyers first, has resulted in legislation passed through the Senate yet again, and this time is on a path straight to the president’s desk.”

The committee’s ranking Democrat, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, called it a “BIG WIN to build more housing” in a post to social media Tuesday.

“I’ve worked on this bill for over a year,” she wrote. “It’s still possible to find bipartisan, common ground on legislation that actually helps the American people.”

Conservatives revolt

Despite the bill’s broad appeal, a bloc of House conservatives frustrated with the Senate’s inability to pass a Trump-supported bill to require photo ID at polling places and other measures they say are important to secure elections, mounted a last-minute objection to the housing bill.

Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna was the most vocal member of the opposition Tuesday, pledging to vote against other bills and House rules resolutions until the Senate passed the elections security measure, titled the SAVE America Act, whose proponents have noted would restrict noncitizen voting, which is already illegal and extremely rare.

“I will be voting no and oppose other bills AND rules until we fight for SAVE America Act,” Luna wrote on social media Tuesday afternoon, well after the bill had been scheduled for a floor vote. “That means if House GOP leadership chooses today to move the SENATE HOUSING BILL under suspension (getting rid of our house rules) I will vote to shut the floor down. I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The campaign’s credit card spending has jumped dramatically in recent months. Just since April, Ramasawamy’s campaign has put $280,892 on an American Express card.

Ohio campaign finance reports require campaigns to disclose each individual transaction — not just how much they spent but who they paid and what they purchased with the money. Ramaswamy’s campaign is only reporting its monthly credit card bill.  

State law requires verification like a receipt or cancelled check for any expenditure of $25 or more. Ohio’s campaign finance handbook directs treasurers to attach a credit card statement or some other documentation to verify an expense’s legitimacy. It’s not clear that Ramaswamy’s campaign has provided that documentation.

To some observers, like the former leader of the Ohio Elections Commission Phil Richter, Ramaswamy’s reporting isn’t that big of a deal so long as the campaign eventually provides information to back up its spending.

“If it’s provided in a timely manner, there’s a little bit of a delay, but it’s not that out of the ordinary,” he said.

Others, though, see a troubling lack of transparency.

“How you spent the campaign cash should not be an obstacle to reporting what you spent it on,” Catherine Turcer from Common Cause Ohio said.

Brendan Glavin from OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan money in politics research group, warned that the campaign’s reporting could have negative ripple effects.

“Campaigns are their own economy,” he said, with workers often supporting multiple candidates and specializing in specific parts of the process.

“So, this sort of thing, if people can do less and get away with it, then that’s going to get around very quickly,” he said.

How we got here

Because state law requires campaigns to provide supporting documentation for credit card reimbursements, Ohio Capital Journal requested that information from Ramaswamy’s campaign and the Ohio Secretary of State in April.

That month, the campaign filed its pre-primary campaign finance report, which included more than $162,000 in credit card reimbursements.

The campaign did not respond to an email, and although the secretary’s office acknowledged receipt of the public records request, it has yet to provide any documents.

In the meantime, Ohio held its primary election and Ramaswamy won the Republican Party nomination for governor.

Ramaswamy’s post-primary campaign finance report included two additional months of $90,000-plus unitemized credit card reimbursements.

The Ohio Capital Journal again reached out to the secretary of state and the campaign by email and over the phone.

The secretary’s office still has not supplied supporting documentation. The office also didn’t respond to questions about whether such documents exist.

A phone call to the Ohio Elections Integrity Commission, which handles campaign finance oversight after that duty was rolled under the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office by Republican lawmakers beginning in January of this year, was routed back to the Secretary of State’s press office.

The Ramaswamy campaign again failed to answer an email. After a follow-up call, Ramaswamy’s press secretary promised to look into the issue, but did not provide documentation by Ohio Capital Journal’s deadline.

Even if every penny spent was a legitimate campaign expenditure — which it may well have been — reporting transactions under a single credit card reimbursement obscures how the campaign is spending money. It also leaves room for doubt about whether those transactions are legitimate.

Ramaswamy’s spending in context

The $509,473 Ramaswamy’s campaign has put on a credit card so far represents less than 2% of its overall expenditures. That’s due, at least in part, to the rapid pace of Ramaswamy’s spending.

The race is on track to be the most expensive governor’s race in state history. Ramaswamy has spent $28.3 million since announcing his campaign last year, and there’s four full months to go. 

During the entire 2018 campaign cycle — from his announcement in June of 2017 to his post-general report in 2018 — Gov. Mike DeWine spent $27.8 million. His 2022 reelection bid cost just shy of $17 million.

Although many campaigns use credit cards, Ramaswamy is an outlier in terms of dollar amount and reporting. 

If credit card reimbursements show up on an expenditure report at all, the amounts are usually small and the purpose is mundane.

It often looks like former Democratic state Rep. Richard Dell’Aquila spending $467 on catering for a campaign event in 2022, or Republican state Rep. Jim Thomas spending $52 last year on a ticket for the Canton City School District Hall of Fame Induction.

Since 2022, the only example of a candidate reporting a credit card payment like Ramaswamy was Republican state House candidate Lilli Vitale. In 2022, her expenditure report was a single $23,382 line item listed as “campaign expenses on personal credit card.” It’s not clear whether the Ohio Elections Commission formally investigated Vitale’s campaign. There is no case file listed for her in its archives.

Still, Vitale’s total is dwarfed by individual months of the Ramaswamy campaign’s credit card spending.

Ramaswamy’s campaign treasurer isn’t new to campaign finance reporting. Kevin Broghamer’s website says his company was founded in 2009 and lists several high profile clients including Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted and the Ohio Republican Party.

Also, Ramaswamy has experience reporting itemized credit card transactions. During his 2024 presidential run, Ramaswamy’s campaign finance reports included each individual expenditure separately. In October 2023, for instance, he spent $57,411 on food, lodging and event rentals throughout New Hampshire. He even paid $1,250 to get the Piscataqua Rangers Junior Fife and Drum Corps for a campaign event.

But in Ohio, Ramaswmay’s campaign has reported only a monthly lump sum reimbursement — effectively building a wall around those transactions. Getting any information about the campaign’s credit card use requires filing public records requests. That takes time, but the campaign calendar isn’t waiting.

“Which means that really accurate information could be lost during an election,” Turcer said.

The cop on the beat

Last year, state lawmakers eliminated the Ohio Elections Commission, the politically independent body charged with investigating campaign finance violations.

At the time, lawmakers argued that the commission was too slow and ineffectual. Secretary of State Frank LaRose, for instance, called it “increasingly toothless” in a letter to lawmakers, and noted almost $100 million in fines had gone uncollected.

“There is no reason to have campaign finance laws in Ohio if we cannot meaningfully enforce them,” he said, adding that “wrongdoing might actually be deterred if fines were treated as more than a suggestion.”

In the commission’s place, lawmakers created the similarly named Ohio Election Integrity Commission, which is housed in LaRose’s office.

From the outset, critics worried about putting campaign finance under the purview of a partisan officer.

After the proposal passed the Ohio House, the League of Women Voters urged Ohioans to call state senators and tell them to “protect independent campaign oversight.”

The group warned that, “Allowing elected officials and their allies to oversee violations of the rules that govern their own campaigns sets up a system ripe for favoritism and selective enforcement.”

LaRose, who is a Republican, has endorsed Ramaswamy. LaRose is also currently running for state auditor.

“Not that out of the ordinary”

Phil Richter has decades of experience in Ohio campaign finance law as the former executive director and staff attorney for the Ohio Elections Commission. He retired after lawmakers disbanded the commission.

Richter isn’t overly worried about the way Ramaswamy’s campaign is reporting expenses. He acknowledged that it’s insufficient, but said it’s the kind of problem campaign finance auditors deal with on a regular basis.

If the campaign doesn’t submit receipts or other documentation informally, Richter said, auditors will send out an official request.

“To assure that they’re not personal expenses that are being improperly refunded,” he said. “I think it’s fair to assume that they’re not, but that would be the process.”

Richter added that Ohio statutes give the campaign 21 days to respond, and it’s common to grant extensions if a campaign requests one.

If a campaign still doesn’t comply, he said, it’s up to the Ohio Election Integrity Commission to determine how to proceed, whether that’s hearings, sanctions, or some other course.

The Ohio Capital Journal asked LaRose’s office whether the Ohio Election Integrity Commission has made requests for additional information or begun any other kind of investigation. The secretary did not respond.

To Richter, the disclosure aspect of campaign finance reporting is more important than the timeline. He explained campaigns make mistakes or submit insufficient information on a regular basis.

“It isn’t quite as noticed as it might be here when you’re talking about almost $100,000,” he allowed, “but as long as the information is provided, that’s the critical thing that Ohio’s campaign finance laws want to assure.”

A more critical view

Other observers are far less forgiving. 

“I’m shocked. I mean, it’s certainly not the spirit of the law, if it’s not outright illegal,” Ohio state Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus said.

Outside of serving in the state Senate, DeMora has spent years working as a campaign treasurer for other candidates and public officials.

As an example of how reporting is supposed to work, he described going to the Democratic National Convention. To get reimbursed by his campaign, DeMora had to provide receipts for his hotel, airfare, and everything else.

“If he’s not doing that, he’s violating the law,” DeMora said. “I don’t know why the Secretary hasn’t done something, because certainly when we have campaign finance reporting laws, it is for knowing where the money is being spent.”

DeMora added that if the shoe were on the other foot, and Democratic nominee for governor Amy Acton had racked up big credit card bills, he believes the Secretary would pursue it aggressively.

Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Turcer agreed that campaigns shouldn’t be able to obscure transactions behind a monthly credit card reimbursement.

Even for legitimate expenses, that arrangement requires the public to file records requests to see the underlying transactions, she said.

“It’s just silly that the way that the campaign pays their bill would get in the way of voters having easy access to information,” Turcer said. “And this is just basic campaign finance information that we should have — there’s no reason for there to be any hoops.”

The Ohio Capital Journal’s request for documents related to the Ramaswamy campaign’s pre-primary report has gone unanswered for eight weeks: enough time for the campaign to hit another campaign finance reporting deadline, with yet more $90,000-plus monthly credit card reimbursements.

Expenditure reports are an important tool, Turcer said, for donors to see how judiciously a campaign is spending its money. Putting transactions behind a wall, even temporarily, takes that tool away, she said.

In addition to the time it takes to produce public records, Turcer said “it’s not atypical” for the Secretary of State’s office to be a year behind when it comes to reviewing campaign finance reports for compliance with state law.

“If the campaign doesn’t share the documents that are required by law,” Turcer added, “And the Secretary of State doesn’t share the documents, which is also required by law, we have to be left wondering what happened.”

Outside observers

Glavin, from OpenSecrets, said Ohio’s campaign finance rules really don’t leave room for interpretation.

“It’s unambiguous that you’re supposed to itemize each transaction,” he said. “So, on that front there doesn’t appear to be any question of how this should be done.”

Like Turcer, Glavin said nondisclosure has consequences.

“That is a lot of money, right? Even for a gubernatorial race,” he said. “But in any kind of state race, that’s a lot of money that’s being spent by a candidate that essentially has eliminated real disclosure.”

The Campaign Legal Center’s Director of Strategic Investigations Brendan Fischer agreed that Ohio’s rules include an expectation that underlying transactions get itemized.

“You can’t avoid disclosure by putting campaign expenses on the credit card,” he said. “And in poking around a little bit and looking at the way that other campaigns and committees have reported credit card payments, it does appear that Ramaswamy is an outlier.”

“It’s entirely possible,” Fischer said, that this is just a mistake, but at the same time, “it’s not the kind of thing that should just be ignored.”

“When a leading candidate reports more than six figures in payments to a credit card company without disclosing the underlying transactions,” Fischer said, “voters lose the ability to evaluate whether campaign funds are being spent on legitimate campaign expenses or personal indulgences.”

“Voters and a candidate’s donors have a right to know how that candidate is spending their money,” he said.

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The increase is $12 million a year in Ohio and $1.1 billion nationally — and that doesn’t even count the money that gets stolen or the cost to investigate and prosecute corruption, the report released earlier this month by Rebuild Local News says.

Those costs represent increased interest on municipal bonds as lenders worry that without a reporter on the beat, local officials w±ill misappropriate funds.

“Local journalism performs a core fiscal function: continuous, external oversight of public institutions,” the report said. “When that oversight erodes, governments face less scrutiny over spending and procurement decisions, increasing the likelihood of wasteful spending and corruption.”

It added, “For these reasons, bond markets perceive greater risk of lending to unmonitored local governments and thus demand a higher interest rate as compensation for bearing the additional credit risk. The higher borrowing costs for local governments are ultimately borne by local taxpayers in the form of increased taxes and reduced spending on public services and infrastructure upkeep.”

Rebuild Local News is a nonprofit organization that advocates ways to make local journalism sustainable.

That sustainability has been under dramatic assault over the past decade.

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University last year reported that 50 million Americans had limited or no access to local news — an all-time high. It said Ohio had lost 54.4% of its newspapers since 2005, the seventh-most of any state.

In Ohio, 1.04 million, or 8.7%  of residents, live in 21 news desert counties, the Rebuild Local News report said. Those counties have $1.3 billion in bond debt, and the fact that they’re news deserts makes it $12 million more expensive each year to service it, the report said. 

The Rebuild Local News report was written by the group’s research director Matthew Baker and Dermot Murphy, an associate professor of finance at the University of Illinois Chicago. It builds on a 2020 study by Murphy and two other academics that found that newspaper closures are associated with higher municipal borrowing costs.

“Following a newspaper closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points, costing the municipality an additional $650,000 per issue,” that study said. “This effect is causal and not driven by underlying economic conditions.”

Baker and Murphy defined a news desert as a county with no local newspaper, and used census data to determine how many people live in them. They also looked at total issuance and the mix of municipal bonds.

Using the 0.86% news-desert premium estimated in the 2020 study, they determined how much more people in news deserts are paying, assuming that those counties were borrowing in the same proportion as non-news deserts.

The researchers said the higher costs aren’t just a matter of coincidence. 

“Critically, this estimate is causal rather than correlational: neighboring counties with similar economic conditions but still-robust news coverage do not experience an increase in borrowing costs,” it said.

In addition to higher interest rates come other costs, the report said.

“The stakes of this watchdog function are not abstract,” it said. “The Youngstown Vindicator, a 150-year-old daily that closed in 2019, had spent decades exposing organized crime and public corruption, contributing to dozens of convictions. Its absence removed a check that no internal control replaced.”

It just makes sense that without a reporter sitting in public meetings, making open-records requests and roaming government halls, an unscrupulous public official would be more likely to try something sketchy.

The report gave an example.

“In Bell, California, a low-income, predominantly Latino community of approximately 36,000 people in Los Angeles County, city officials spent years raising their own pay with almost no public scrutiny,” it said. “By the late 2000s, the city manager was earning $787,637 a year, the police chief $457,000, and city council members nearly $100,000 for what was officially part-time work. All of these raises were approved at public municipal meetings that lacked robust newspaper coverage.”

The Los Angeles Times later learned of the situation and reported it out.

Ruben Vives, one of the reporters who broke the story, said it was too late in the game.

“Someone would have got wind of this earlier had there been a reporter there,” the report quoted him as saying. “This is just a prime example of when you turn away, and you let something like this just kind of grow and grow, and it becomes sort of a cesspool of corruption.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called on lawmakers to abolish the state’s death penalty last week, he wouldn’t tell reporters if he would spare any of the more than 100 people on death row.

Three weeks earlier, however, DeWine quietly did just that for Gregory Lott, a man with intellectual disabilities. Lott, now 64, will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole for the death of an 82-year-old East Cleveland man he set on fire during a home burglary in 1986.

The death row commutation is the first DeWine has issued in his eight years as governor and, together with his call to do away with capital punishment, represents the final steps in his five-decade evolution from death penalty proponent to skeptic.

The decision offered a glimpse into how he might use his power of mercy in the waning days of his final term in office. DeWine signed the order to commute Lott’s sentence on May 27, listing the reasons for sparing his life: the victim’s family had said their faith would not condone killing, the parole board had recommended leniency in 2020 and prosecutors dropped their objections.

Lott’s incarceration has spanned four decades of waning public support for executions and a steady decline in prosecutors seeking the death penalty in Ohio.

DeWine talked this month about how lengthy legal appeals and delays create uncertainty that death sentences would ever be carried out. Prisoners like Lott have been brought to the brink of death again and again, only to have their executions postponed — at least four times in Lott’s case.

“It was a very convoluted path, and I genuinely feel for guys like Greg (Lott), who had real execution dates they were really facing,” said Stephen Ferrell, a federal public defender who was representing Lott.

Twice during DeWine’s tenure as governor, Lott’s execution was delayed. The first reprieve came in 2002, Ferrell explained, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that executing people with intellectual disabilities is an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

Six days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, Lott’s attorneys filed for relief. The Ohio Supreme Court denied that claim and, in doing so, established what became known as “Lott’s test” for intellectual disability, which allowed prosecutors to refute claims of intellectual disability for people with IQ scores higher than 70. Lott had scored between 77 and 97 on such tests.

He was, again, scheduled for execution only to be saved by a horrific mishap. In 2014, the state botched the execution of Dennis McGuire. He gasped for 10 minutes after being injected with a new drug cocktail. In response, then Gov. John Kasich paused all pending executions.

“Otherwise, Greg Lott would have been executed a month later,” said Ferrell. “To me, that epitomizes the arbitrariness of this system.”

Meanwhile, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office continued to fight Lott’s claim of disability until its own expert found him intellectually impaired, according to court records.

Between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned plans to execute intellectually disabled men in Florida and Texas, which also used arbitrary and outdated medical standards like those applied in Ohio. The rulings prompted the Ohio Supreme Court to revise Lott’s test in a 2019 decision by eliminating IQ scores as a sole reason for rejecting intellectual disability claims.

DeWine granted Lott a reprieve from execution in early 2020, citing a lack of available drugs to ensure a humane execution by lethal injection. A couple weeks later, Ferrell said an email arrived from the Ohio parole board, which hears requests for mercy and makes recommendations to the governor.

“Despite the reprieve, they wanted to go ahead with the clemency proceeding, which I thought was very odd and made me very optimistic,” said Ferrell.

Ferrell presented Lott’s request for mercy to the parole board. “It seemed different than past proceedings where I presented,” he said. “The board was very receptive compared to very hostile, as they had been in the past.”

Most importantly, the victim’s family did not want Lott dead.

John “Jack” McGrath, the man Lott was convicted of dousing in heating lamp oil and setting on fire, died after 10 days in the intensive care unit at a Cleveland hospital. McGrath’s Catholic pastor, Luigi Miola, said no one knew that McGrath, a garage door repairman, had any family until a son arrived from Boston shortly after the murder and knocked on the door of the parish where his father attended daily mass.

“They were contrary to the death penalty,” Miola said of the family’s Catholic pro-life position, which he conveyed to the parole board on behalf of the family.

The parole board voted 6-2 in favor of clemency. Ferrell checked periodically with the governor’s office but heard nothing. In 2022, prosecutors in Cuyahoga County withdrew their opposition to Lott’s claim for mercy. The case continued to move through the state courts, and DeWine intervened at the end of May with a quiet commutation that effectively ended a nearly quarter century legal battle.

A former county prosecutor, DeWine has a long history with the death penalty, both in Ohio and in Washington. He co-sponsored the bipartisan state bill that reinstated Ohio’s death penalty in 1981. In Congress, he voted to expand federal crimes punishable by death and to speed up executions. As the state’s attorney general, he defended Ohio’s death penalty statute in court and secured capital indictments in many murder cases.

Yet this month, after more than 300 death sentences and 56 executions over the past half-century, DeWine positioned himself a skeptic, noting delays that undermine deterrence and the pain and anguish felt by victims’ families in the 21 years it takes, on average, from the time of sentencing to actual executions.

In an interview with NPR, DeWine was asked if he could live with the decision of leaving office without commuting the death sentences he now opposes. “I’m just not going to get into that today,” he said, with a laugh, about how he usually doesn’t dodge questions.

Lott, who did not respond to a request for comment, had “a hard time expressing himself” at each twist and turn in his case, Ferrell said. “I could see visibly what was going on, that he was either really hurting and anxious, or when we got good news, just how relieved he was.”

“To torture someone like that year after year is unfathomable to me,” he said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

All is not well in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Why isn’t it?

The leaders whom we have entrusted with her care — her very lifeline — are not doing what it takes to keep her healthy and strong. To promote her general welfare. In the meantime, we the people are asleep at the switch.

America’s health, like our body’s, is dependent on the function and well-being of all of its parts.

First, what actions define a healthy America? The Constitution and its amendments provide the answer: “… to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

When we examine the parts — state governments, the federal government and we the people — that shoulder the primary responsibility of keeping America healthy and performing at its best, what do we find?

The legislative actions in Missouri, and in many states, are promoting some conditions that should cause alarm.

The persistent efforts over the last several years to make the basic right of citizens to cast a vote more difficult than convenient, thereby denying many Americans the opportunity to participate in the direction and policy decisions of their government.

Even when the majority of the state’s citizenry, through the amendment petition process, make their wishes known, some state lawmakers go to exhaustive extremes — deceptive or misleading ballot language, appeals to the judiciary — to undo, evade, ignore or subvert the will of the people.

This is a pattern in Missouri. We saw it with Medicaid expansion and workers’ right to family leave time. Even though the majority of Missourians voted in favor of abortion rights, they will be forced to vote again.

The most pernicious of all are efforts to undermine the petition initiative process — citizens’ direct participation in the democratic process — by instituting insurmountable hurdles, thereby undoing the current requirement of a simple majority of Missourians.

Nationally, are our leaders’ actions consistent with trying to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote justice and the general welfare for current citizens and future generations?

Our national leadership has dictated, set the pace and given permission for what we see occurring in the states.

We are so eager to celebrate the 250th birthday of the nation in traditional and nontraditional ways, while we ignore, denigrate and dismiss some of the key tenets of the great document that made the day possible, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

While the Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that has not been the practice in everyday life.

While America was on the path to try to correct that through ensuring voting rights, instituting DEI and affirmative action programs, equal opportunity and access in many areas of American life, the current administration has made it its top priority to undo them.

Even worse, there are concerted efforts to destroy and revise factual American history — the good and the bad — when it comes to how immigrants built this country, the role of the institution of slavery, the practice of entrenched inequality on many fronts and so much more.

Are the actions of the current government leadership that we the people have installed consistent with these basic tenets?

The current presidential administration has basically governed by edict, executive orders — ignoring the rule of law, neutering, denying or unduly influencing the congressional and judicial branches of government that were established to provide checks and balances.

With what is happening in many states and in Washington, are you clear about who America is today, what it currently stands for and the reasons to celebrate?

The third and most important part in determining the health and well-being of America is the actions of we the people.

The Declaration of Independence is crystal clear about the rights and responsibilities of the people: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Whether at the local, state or national level, the people are not to sit idly by and allow the health of the nation to deteriorate.

We are in the midst of primary elections, readying ourselves to cast defining votes in the midterm elections in November.

Let each of us, as we commemorate the 250th birthday of our nation, take time to truly assess what we are celebrating and why.

More importantly, are the actions of those we have entrusted to provide leadership doing what is necessary to keep America and its values — its laws, principles and rights — safe and strong for another 50, 100 or 250 years for future generations?

If not, what are we willing to do about it?

This story was originally produced by Missouri Independent, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

On June 24, 2022, about one month after McNeill discovered she was pregnant, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs ruling, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion and empowering states to outlaw it. Missouri was the first state to enact a ban; at that time, McNeill was living in Joplin, Missouri.

In August 2022, McNeill miscarried. It was the beginning of a health crisis that plagues her to this day and that she blames, at least in part, on hospitals’ reluctance to provide miscarriage management care that might run afoul of state abortion bans.

Missouri’s law prohibited nearly all abortions, but it allowed abortion providers who were charged or sued under the law to escape punishment by arguing that they acted in a “medical emergency” to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to avert “a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

Missouri’s ban is no longer in effect — it was overturned by voters in 2024 — but such language is typical: All 13 states that currently have abortion bans allow the procedure to protect the life of the pregnant woman. Some, but not all, of the bans also have exceptions to protect the health of the woman.

But patients and providers have argued in lawsuits challenging the bans that such exceptions are too ill defined to give doctors and hospitals enough confidence to provide timely care. McNeill believes that her persistent health problems are the result of delayed care.

In early August 2022, less than two months after Missouri’s ban took effect, McNeill’s water broke at about 18 weeks. She says her OB-GYN told her the pregnancy was no longer viable, and she sought an abortion and miscarriage management procedure known as dilation and curettage, or D&C, in hospitals in both Missouri and Kansas (where abortion was legal). However, doctors declined to provide miscarriage care while they were able to detect fetal cardiac activity.

After three days of bleeding and aching, McNeill finally received treatment at a hospital in Illinois. When she had a subsequent tubal ligation to prevent future pregnancies, McNeill said medical staff told her she had scar tissue resulting from an infection she developed after her water broke.

“While they were in there, they saw what happened,” McNeill said. “The infection went outside of my uterus. It went to my liver, and my liver is permanently attached in multiple places. It’s attached to my uterus; it’s attached to my stomach lining.”

McNeill says the lingering effects of that infection include severe bouts of vomiting and significant financial hardship as she has struggled to pay for care without steady health care coverage.

“I literally break all the blood vessels in my skin. … This kind of pain is — there’s no word for it,” said McNeill, who shared with Stateline pictures of her face covered in red splotches, her nose magenta. “The delay is what really upset me, because women have died with less time than I had, and that delay and the infection that I did get from this by waiting three days, it destroyed my life.”

Last year, states including Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee enacted laws designed to provide additional clarity on medical exceptions to their bans, but confusion persists in those states and others. Stories of denied miscarriage care continue to emerge, including in a brand-new lawsuit in Texas**,** and several deaths have been attributed in part to abortion restrictions, including in Georgia and Texas. Research has linked abortion restrictions to higher rates of maternal death and injury.

“The four years since the Dobbs (v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) decision have unfortunately proven what OB-GYNs already knew: abortion care is inextricable from reproductive health care,” Molly Meegan, chief legal officer and general counsel for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote in a statement.

“Bans and restrictions on abortion care have resulted in patients across the country being denied care, even in instances of pregnancy loss and miscarriage.”

A new study published last month by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that since the Dobbs decision, in states where abortion bans took effect, miscarriage management has shifted away from medical intervention toward more of a “wait-and-see” approach.

But anti-abortion groups blame doctors and abortion-rights advocates for creating confusion around the medical exceptions in abortion bans, insisting it is clear what is a medically indicated abortion and what is purely elective.

“As architects of the majority of the nation’s pro-life laws, Americans United for Life has been very clear that none prevent women from receiving life-saving miscarriage care. Efforts to suggest otherwise are made in bad faith” said Gavin Oxley, a spokesperson for the group.

“Doctors who delay or altogether deny medical treatment must be held accountable for the harm they inflict upon women. If doctors are not clear on this four years after Dobbs, they clearly have not been listening.”

Dr. Susan Bane, an OB-GYN in Greenville, North Carolina, who is on the board of directors for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Stateline that doctors — especially the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — have unfairly blamed abortion bans for the denial of medical care to pregnant or miscarrying women.

“There’s nothing, I mean zero, about any of these laws that say you have to have her dying or septic,” Bane said. “I’ve done this hundreds of times in the last 30 years, where the baby was alive, and I sat at the bedside and had an excruciating conversation with a woman to say, ‘I am so sorry, but if we don’t move towards delivery, I’m worried both of you will die.’”

She said her organization supports state laws, like one signed in South Dakota earlier this year, that redefine “abortion” as the intentional ending of the life of the “unborn child.” Supporters say such laws will allow doctors to manage miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other pregnancy-related emergencies.

“It’s sad that more clarification isn’t happening, but the blame really started right in my profession.” Bane said.

But Meegan said attempts to legislate health exceptions fall short of protecting all patients.

“There is no law or exception that can account for the immense variety of medical situations that can present in pregnancy,” she wrote. “And there is no additional legislation that can undo the harm created by abortion bans short of repealing the bans themselves.”

McNeill said that following her miscarriage, she lost her job and the health insurance that came with it. She sued and then reached a settlement with the Missouri hospital that she believes denied her prompt care. But she continues to search for relief from her health problems, and says she has racked up substantial medical debt.

She and her husband moved to Arkansas and then Kansas in search of the financial stability that has eluded them since her miscarriage almost four years ago.

“My debt is in the millions with all of this illness without coverage for long periods,” McNeill said. “Now that my credit is destroyed, I’ll never be able to buy a house again while in this health.”

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Greenwater Services, also registered as Green Water Solutions LLC and based in Brookfield in Trumbull County, received a $1,740,255 contract from the U.S. Department of the Interior to install a “nano bubble” water-purification system at the pool, according to federal contracting records. The award, which took effect April 13, was made without competitive bidding; the National Park Service cited “unusual and compelling urgency” tied to the nation’s 250th-anniversary celebrations.

Those records list the firm as an entity of the John J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by John J. “J.J.” Cafaro of Liberty, the former executive vice president of the Youngstown-based Cafaro Company, the mall-development firm his father founded. CBS News reported that Cafaro is identified as the trust’s president and CEO on Federal Election Commission filings.

A landmark gone green

Trump ordered the roughly $14.7 million overhaul this spring, repeatedly demanding the century-old pool be drained, resealed and painted what he called “American flag blue” ahead of July 4. He declared the project complete on June 6. Within roughly a day, the water turned green with algae, and the new coating soon began flaking off and floating to the surface.

National Park Service crews have since poured hydrogen peroxide into the basin, vacuumed algae from the bottom and run the ozone-bubble equipment in an effort to clear the water. The pool is now set to be drained again so the coating can be repaired. In a statement to CBS News, the coating contractor said the affected spots are “a very small part of the massive 7 acre project, and do not indicate a failure of the liner,” and that the work would be completed under warranty once the pool is drained.

Greenwater’s water-treatment deal is separate from the project’s main contract. A second no-bid award — worth $14,652,521 under federal records — went to Atlantic Industrial Coatings LLC of New Canton, Virginia, to reseal the pool’s joints and apply the blue coating. The Virginia firm painted the floor; the Ohio firm was hired to keep the water clear.

Two felonies and a presidential friendship

Cafaro’s legal history is extensive. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bribe then-U.S. Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, and testified against him; he was fined $150,000 and placed on probation. In 2010 he pleaded guilty again, this time to a felony count of making a materially false statement to the government by concealing a $10,000 loan to a campaign manager for the 2004 congressional bid of his daughter, Capri Cafaro. That case brought a $250,000 fine and three years of probation, as the Tribune Chronicle reported.

Cafaro has been a substantial financial supporter of the president. He gave $250,000 to the Trump Victory committee in 2020 and $100,000 in 2024, according to FEC records, and owns a Palm Beach home near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. The New York Times, which first tied Greenwater to Cafaro, reported that Trump has described him as a “fantastic man.”

Cafaro, in turn, dismissed the controversy. He told the Tribune Chronicle that the green water was evidence his technology had done its job: “The system is working. We weren’t hired to clean the pool, but to sell them permanent equipment to clean it forever. It turned green because the technology worked. It killed the algae in the pipes.” He said the scrutiny was “people who don’t seem to like Trump,” and insisted the president had no role in the award: “He is my friend and he doesn’t know a thing about it. I would never talk to him about it. I’d never put him in that position.”

Asked about his stake in the company, Cafaro told the paper: “I’m nothing officially in the company. They all work for me, but it has its own CEO and COO. I have so many different entities that I can’t keep track of them. That’s what the attorneys and the accountants are for.”

How the work was awarded

The New York Times reported that David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, helped recruit Greenwater and was in contact with the firm in January. Federal records show the company had held only one prior government contract before the Reflecting Pool job, and state filings show Greenwater registered in Ohio in October 2024 and obtained trade-name recognition in May 2025.

The coating contract raises its own questions. Trump publicly estimated the project would cost about $1.8 million; the initial contract value was already $6,886,519, and the total climbed to $13.1 million by early May before reaching $14.65 million in federal records. Atlantic Industrial Coatings had never previously held a federal contract, and its website describes its specialty as waterproofing highway culverts, pipes, roofs and storage tanks — not pools. Trump initially said he chose the firm because it had worked on swimming pools at his Virginia golf club, a claim the Times reported it could not confirm; he later said he had no relationship with the company.

Congressional and legal scrutiny

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to Atlantic Industrial Coatings chief executive Curtis Wood in mid-May seeking records on how the firm won the work. The award and the cost growth, Blumenthal wrote, “raise troubling questions about whether excess taxpayer dollars are (yet again) being diverted to President Trump’s manifestly unqualified friends and associates.”

The no-bid awards have drawn wider oversight. As Scripps News reported, the D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation sued in May to halt the renovation, arguing the administration sidestepped federal laws requiring public notice and review before work on a historic site. The administration completed the coating before any ruling on the merits.

The White House has denied involvement in choosing the contractors. “This contract was awarded by the Department of Interior,” spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Scripps News, calling reporting on potential conflicts of interest “irresponsible.” An Interior Department spokeswoman has said the agency was unaware of Cafaro’s political affiliation and selected Greenwater because it had the expertise and materials to finish on time.

Trump, for his part, has blamed the pool’s condition on vandalism without offering evidence, warning of a 10-year prison sentence for anyone caught damaging the site. He has said multiple people were arrested; one, three-time Olympic canoeist David Carter Hearn, has denied wrongdoing and said he was only examining the peeling paint.

The episode returns an Ohio name to a national stage it has occupied before. The Cafaro family’s mall empire has shaped the Mahoning Valley for generations, and J.J. Cafaro’s daughter, Capri Cafaro, represented the area in the Ohio Senate as a Democrat from 2007 to 2016. Now the family’s name is attached to a federal contract that, by its owner’s own account, turned the country’s most famous reflecting pool green.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The new report from The Rooster comes after Ramaswamy had appeared to slow down his luxurious travel. The Rooster says the Republican’s Cessna Citation X plane has been grounded at the Quad City Airport in Moline, Ill. since May 4. However, an anonymous source told The Rooster that Ramaswamy has been using a new Bombardier Global 5500 plane out of the Ohio State University airport.

Last Friday, The Rooster published flight records for Ramaswamy’s new private jet, which he has used 54 times so far this year. Ramaswamy’s post-primary election campaign expenditures show that the candidate has racked up an estimated $200,000 in private jet-related costs in 2026.

In February, Heartland Signal reported on Ramaswamy’s campaign expenditures, which showed he spent $780,000 on private jet travel in 2025. The campaign told Heartland Signal that Ramaswamy covered the costs with his own money. Earlier this year, Ramaswamy donated $25 million of his own money to his campaign.

Democrats call Ramaswamy ‘out of touch’

Democratic nominee Amy Acton and her running mate David Pepper have used Ramaswamy’s wealth and private travel to label him “out of touch” with Ohio voters. Last week, Pepper said the billionaire’s lifestyle reflects policies that will not address the high cost of living in the state.

“He’s literally flying around the state and country in this fancy corporate jet,” Pepper told Fox 5 Zanesville last week. “And I think what happens when you do that is people feel like you’re not really on the ground. You don’t understand their issues.”

While Vivek Ramaswamy flies around the country in his jet, Ohioans in communities like Zanesville have felt the pain of rising costs for far too long. @amyactonoh will turn things around on day one. pic.twitter.com/YS1FSdnmkI

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) June 18, 2026

Ramaswamy’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.

Ramaswamy and Acton are vying for the governor’s mansion in an open race this year. Incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine (R) cannot seek a third term. Acton has raised $11.5 million compared to Ramaswamy’s $9.6 million since January 1. However, Ramaswamy continues to hold a cash-on-hand advantage thanks in part to his personal loans. Ramaswamy reported $26.7 million on hand as of June 12, while Acton had $8.1 million.

A recent poll released by Fox News on June 1 showed Acton ahead of Ramaswamy by one point.

This story was originally published by Heartland Signal.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Tiffin appearance is one stop on a summer tour the campaign announced Tuesday, beginning June 29 in Cuyahoga Falls and running through early August. The campaign said the tour will lay out Kulewicz’s agenda for the office ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.

“Ohioans are working hard, but no one listens to them anymore. I hear you loud and clear,” Kulewicz said in the announcement, adding that he visited all 88 of Ohio’s counties before launching his campaign.

Kulewicz, a Columbus attorney, said the office should center on consumer protection and rooting out public corruption. “It’s time to get back to the basic issues that Ohioans care about,” he said. “That means taking on corrupt politicians and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. It means taking on price-fixing monopolies, scam artists and robocallers, Medicaid providers and nursing home fraudsters, and anyone else trying to rip us off.”

“I’m a lawyer, not a politician,” Kulewicz said. “I have the experience to get the job done. And I know who my client is: Ohioans and their Constitution, not politicians and Statehouse insiders.”

Kulewicz won the Democratic primary on May 5, defeating former state Rep. Elliot Forhan. In November he faces Republican Keith Faber, Ohio’s current state auditor and a former president of the Ohio Senate. The seat is open: term-limited Republican Dave Yost left office early in 2026 to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, and Andy Wilson was appointed to serve the remainder of the term.

The campaign’s announcement said the tour comes “fresh off recent polling that shows the Ohio Attorney General’s race tied.” That characterization is based on an internal poll the Kulewicz campaign commissioned. The survey, by Tulchin Research, a firm that polls for Democrats, questioned 600 likely Ohio voters June 2–4 and carried a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It found Kulewicz and Faber each at 34%, with 32% of respondents undecided, NBC4 (WCMH) reported. The same survey found neither candidate was widely known, putting name recognition at 21% for Kulewicz and 27% for Faber. A spokesperson for Faber disputed the poll’s findings, NBC4 reported.

Kulewicz spent 44 years at the Columbus law firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP and has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and in courts throughout Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in American history from Ohio State University and a law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He has served on the Upper Arlington City Council since 2020. More information is available on his campaign website.

Transparency Tour schedule

• Mon., June 29, 6 p.m. — Cuyahoga Falls: Cuyahoga Falls Library, 2015 3rd St.

• Wed., July 1, 6 p.m. — Sunbury: Community Library, 44 Burrer Dr.

• Thu., July 2, 6 p.m. — Steubenville: IBEW Local 246, 626 4th St.

• Mon., July 6, 6 p.m. — Marysville: 106 S Main St.

• Wed., July 8, 6 p.m. — Newark: GMP Local 244, 350 Hudson Ave.

• Thu., July 9, 6:30 p.m. — Warren: USW Local 1375, 684 N Park Ave.

• Sun., July 12, 1 p.m. — Vermilion: German’s Villa, 3330 Liberty Ave.

• Sun., July 12, 4 p.m. — Tiffin: Tiffin Historic Trust, 172 Jefferson St.

• Tue., July 14, 7 p.m. — Milford: Union Twp. Civic Center, 4350 Aicholtz Rd.

• Sat., July 18, 10 a.m. — Rossford: CWA Local 4319, 705 Lime City Rd.

• Sat., July 18, 4 p.m. — Jefferson: venue TBD.

• Sun., July 19, 12:30 p.m. — Marietta: IBEW Local 972, 50 Sandhill Rd., Reno.

• Thu., July 23, 6 p.m. — Ripley: Snappers Saloon, 1 Main St.

• Sat., July 25, 10 a.m. — Lima: venue TBD.

• Sat., July 25, 1 p.m. — Van Wert: American Legion Post 178, 631 W Main St.

• Sat., Aug. 1, 10 a.m. — Massillon: Fraternal Order of Eagles 190, 303 Weirich Blvd.

• Sun., Aug. 2, 1 p.m. — Liberty Twp.: Butler Tech, 5140 Princeton Glendale Rd.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Milla Nye, who graduated with a 4.15 GPA, will begin her studies at Miami University in Oxford this fall. The award includes a $500 scholarship recognizing academic achievement and supporting students who are blind or visually impaired.

The Toledo-based nonprofit created the fund in 2014 to honor Fatima Shousher, an educator and advocate for visually impaired students in Northwest Ohio. Shousher was born with a vision impairment and was later diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa. She spent her career working to help students with visual impairments reach their potential.

The Sight Center of Northwest Ohio was founded in 1923 as the Toledo Society for the Blind. The organization now serves an 18-county region across Northwest Ohio, along with parts of Southeast Michigan and Central Ohio, providing programs and services for people of all ages living with permanent vision loss.

More information is available at sightcentertoledo.org or by calling (419) 720-3937.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

As of Tuesday evening, Ethan Mercado is being held on a felony charge of improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, a violation of Ohio Revised Code 2923.16, according to Seneca County Jail booking staff.

The incident began shortly after midnight, when a vehicle repeatedly passed the residence on North Township Road 63 while shots were fired toward it, according to Seneca County Sheriff’s Office dispatch logs. The vehicle left the area and was later stopped by Fostoria police within city limits.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/ethan-mercado-arrested-shots-fired-fostoria-mobile-home/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Meanwhile, the FBI hasn’t given any public hint of its reasons for the action or shown that they were justified.

“We’ve done nothing wrong,” Rev. Michael Harrison Sr., chairman of the collaborative’s board, said in an interview on MS Now. “In the midst of having done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to find, and there are no charges to be filed.”

The collaborative says it has registered more than 600,000 Ohioans to vote. It focuses particularly on traditionally disempowered groups. Its leader said the FBI effort didn’t come as a complete surprise.

“Whenever you’re doing the right thing, there will always be pushback,” he said during the MS Now interview. “Whenever you’re providing opportunity for the marginalized or left out, there will always be some level of pushback.” 

He added, “We were actually kind of prepared for it because we understood clearly that whenever you decide you’re going to register people that others don’t want to be registered and you’re getting people involved in the process of equality… Yeah, something had to happen.”

During the interview, host Jacob Soboroff repeatedly said more than 100 agents were involved in the statewide sweep. And in a public statement, the organizing collaborative said “swarms” of agents acted that day.

The FBI’s Cleveland office on Tuesday declined comment on the case.

Numerous outside groups have decried the action as an attempt by a politicized FBI to intimidate marginalized communities and organizations that are helping them register in an election year.

In its first public statement about the matter, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said much the same thing.

“The targeting of (the collaborative) is the latest effort from those in power to silence individuals and organizations they disagree with,” it said. “Even for groups that have done nothing wrong, the intrusive investigative process is the punishment. They want to scare people from volunteering, donating, and participating in our democracy. We won’t let them win.”

It added that the federal action was, in essence, a continuation of efforts in Ohio in recent years that have made it progressively harder to vote. 

The state’s Republican leadership has justified the new rules by saying they fight widespread voter fraud. But data show that such fraud is vanishingly rare in Ohio. 

“For years, certain politicians in Ohio have tried to make it harder for people to vote,” the statement by the collaborative said. “As part of that effort, they targeted voter registration programs, including (the organizing collaborative) and its partners. Time and again, our programs stood up to scrutiny. Now, in a broader campaign to undermine our democracy, the federal government is attempting to interfere with Ohio’s elections by manufacturing conspiracy theories.”

In his MS Now interview, Harrison said that far from intimidating the organizing collaborative, the FBI’s actions have motivated it to work even harder.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

There were 12,196 people experiencing homelessness in Ohio last year, according to HUD’s annual Homelessness Assessment Report. 

Overall homelessness in the U.S. decreased 3% with 745,652 people experiencing homelessness. 

“We know that housing is what helps solve homelessness, and it really is just how we as a state and as a system can fine tune our approaches so that we can reach everyone in Ohio who might face homelessness,” said Amy Riegel, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

HUD’s Point-in-Time count are one-night estimates of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that took place in January 2025. 

About 20% of those experiencing homelessness in Ohio were unsheltered, according to the report. 

“(Unsheltered) is a type of homelessness that people tend to see more because it is out in the open, whereas for individuals who might be experiencing homelessness and who are staying in a shelter — which is very common with family homelessness — you don’t see that as much, Riegel said. 

The report estimates there are 1,452 chronically homeless people, 946 unaccompanied homeless youth, and 668 homeless veterans in Ohio. 

“We know that these increases in chronic homelessness are directly tied to the lack of housing that we have in our communities,” Riegel said. “Building more deeply affordable housing is incredibly important,” 

Ohio also has a shortage of 266,000 affordable and available rental units, according to the 2026 Gap Report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and COHHIO. 

“Housing is not improving on the affordability side, especially for those who are the most vulnerable and who have the lowest income within our communities, so with that situation, we know it’s becoming more difficult for individuals to stay housed and to find that housing that they really can remain in for a long period of time,” Riegel said. 

Another way to reduce homelessness is having protections for the renter. 

“(When a landlord) realizes that they could start renting their unit for twice as much as they’re charging today, where they just kick the renter out, knowing that the renter will probably not be able to defend themselves in court if they try to challenge it,” she said.

“We see all kinds of other ways that landlords are trying to undercut individuals who are currently in their housing for the promise of somebody else who might be able to pay more or who might be able to stay longer within the unit, so being able to protect individuals and their units is really important.”

The number of homeless people in Ohio has increased 8.3% since 2007, according to the report. 

Franklin County’s annual Point-in-Time Count identified 2,587 people experiencing homelessness in January — a 1.2% increase from 2025. 

Franklin County, the state’s most populous county, is projected to see a 68% increase in unsheltered homelessness by 2028. 

Ohioans need to be making at least $22.51 an hour working a full-time job to be able to afford a “modest” two-bedroom apartment, according to an annual report released last year. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The headline about the event was concise, specific and, in the end, alarming: FBI Raids Ohio Voting Rights Organization. 

With so many crises facing the nation now, do we have to read that six-word headline again to fully understand what we have come to as a republic celebrating its 250th birthday? 

For me, reading about the FBI raiding a voting rights organization here in Ohio brought back a vivid memory about the career of my late brother, an FBI agent. Let me explain.

Six decades ago, the headlines back then also involved the FBI and voting rights, though the setting was not Ohio, but in Mississippi.   

There was one huge difference with the Ohio FBI raid: The Bureau was not involved more than a half-century ago in raiding organizations supporting voting rights, whether in Mississippi or Ohio. 

Quite the opposite.

In June 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi by local members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner died at the hands of the Klan because they were helping people register to vote. 

Since the three men initially were listed as missing, the FBI was able to assume jurisdiction because the initial thinking had the three treated as being kidnapped, allowing federal agents to use federal abduction law to work around the local authorities, who were thought to be also involved in the disappearance of the trio.

That proved to be correct, as Lawrence Rainey, the Neshoba County sheriff and his deputy, Cecil Price, were indicted as part of a conspiracy that led to the murders of the activists. Rainey was acquitted but Price was convicted of civil rights violations and served most of a six-year prison sentence.

In 1988, Mississippi Burning, a film starring Gene Hackman, chronicled the epic events surrounding the murders of the civil rights workers.

The film name came from MIBURN, the case file named for the charred vehicle used by the men that was found after their disappearance as well as referring to the burned African American churches that were set ablaze during the summer of 1964. 

As the scope of the case widened and weeks passed with no sign of the three men, more FBI agents from other field offices were put on temporary assignment to the case and traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Neshoba County seat.

One of those on temporary assignment in Mississippi was FBI Special Agent Edward C. Smith Jr., who was also from Philadelphia — the one in Pennsylvania. He was my brother.

As a career FBI agent, my brother was the utmost model of professionalism. He did not discuss his work, and during this era of civil and voting rights activism, particularly in the South, his family had no idea where he might be at any given moment.

That changed when my sharp-eyed mother was watching the Today Show at her home in Philadelphia one morning during that momentous summer of 1964.

As she was ironing, her attention was drawn to the TV screen by a report about the ongoing investigation in Mississippi.

When she heard the words Philadelphia, Mississippi, she dropped her weekly laundry routine to fixate on the story coming from the Neshoba County Courthouse.

To her great surprise she saw her son Ed on the TV screen standing among some other FBI agents on the courthouse steps.

Now our family knew the scope of work our brother was involved with and why he had not contacted us recently.

This personal detail about my brother is provided to inform as well as remind readers that once upon a time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation — however reluctant it might have been during the tenure of long-time director J. Edgar Hoover — nevertheless worked diligently to protect individuals involved in civil and voting rights activity.

It is no coincidence that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a consequence of the upheaval during the summer of 1964.

Upon his retirement, my brother did provide some details about his experience during the Mississippi Burning era, when some of the locals referred to his agency as the Federal Bureau of Integration.

But such epithets proved to be confirmation of the effectiveness of the FBI to enforce the newly enacted Voting Rights Act as well as ensuring that the Fifteenth Amendment and the right to vote extended to every eligible citizen.

It is therefore understandable that those who lived during the bad times of the 1960s, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a mission to enforce federal law and ensure that Americans had access to the ballot box, are uneasy about a raid by the same FBI on an organization that works to promote voting rights.

Again, we are not talking about Mississippi but Ohio. In addition to the headline, the lead played out that feeling of uneasiness.

“FBI agents on Thursday raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy organization that helps register voters in that state…” the story read.

My brother would be very upset if he knew his beloved FBI conducted a raid in Ohio on an organization whose mission is to ensure that people are registered to vote.

Yes, we are witness to an FBI raid on a voting rights organization in Ohio, not Mississippi. Edward C. Smith Jr., may you rest in peace. If you were still with us, you would realize better than the rest of us how far we as a nation have marched. Backwards.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Some of these changes include allowing low-rise apartment buildings to have just one stairway, reducing how often building codes are updated and rolling back specific electrical or fire safety standards.

But critics have raised safety concerns, noting that existing rules were shaped by past tragedies and aim to prevent future harm.

For example, having only one staircase could allow a developer to add another unit or expand the size of units, said Nicolle Aube, principal and founder of Civex, a planning and civil engineering consulting firm, and an American Planning Association board member.

“But then there’s this flip side, that by removing these codes and protections, it carries this additional risk for the developer and the occupants of the building if the worst-case scenario happens,” she said.

Many states are considering single-stairway apartment laws.

They generally take one of four approaches, said Alex Horowitz, housing policy director at The Pew Charitable Trusts: begin with a study, allow single-stairway buildings statewide, update the state building code while letting local governments opt out, or give localities authority to allow them. Pew has lobbied for and testified in favor of the changes.

Two national developments could make it easier for more states and cities to allow single-stairway buildings, Horowitz said.

The first are proposed updates by the International Code Council, the organization that develops the model codes many states use as the basis for their building rules. An update to its multifamily code, for example, would allow single-stairway buildings to add a fourth story.

Second, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act moving through Congress would direct the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop model guidelines for residential buildings with a single stairway not exceeding six stories.

According to Pew, 19 states and Washington, D.C., introduced bills between 2022 and 2025 to study or allow single-stairway apartment buildings, and seven states passed them in 2025 alone.

This year, Idaho enacted a new law that allows local governments to permit certain apartment buildings to use one stairway — generally up to six stories without an occupiable roof, or five stories with one, along with limits on units per floor, sprinklers, stair width, and smoke and fire detection.

Colorado’s law enacted last year requires certain municipalities to modify their building codes by Dec. 1, 2027, to allow five-story multifamily residential buildings to be served by a single exit. Texas’ 2025 law lets municipalities authorize single-stairway apartment buildings up to six stories.

Colorado state Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, a Democrat who sponsored the new law, came to this issue because the state needed to find a way to make smaller multifamily projects more feasible. He said the policy can help on infill lots where a traditional two-stairway apartment building may not fit.

“Single stairway or smart stairway buildings are not only a very safe way to build multi-family housing, they also bring a product to market that’s just not being offered,” Boesenecker said.

Colorado is one 16 states without a statewide building code, making local implementation a major focus. Boesenecker said lawmakers had to look at “ways that you can make it feasible through local governments to adopt this standard into their building code.”

He said the work to get the support of those skeptical of single-staircase legislation happened a year prior to the bill’s passage, when lawmakers worked with fire chiefs, fire marshals and firefighters’ unions for about a year to get them to a “neutral position” on the bill.

In Texas, Democratic state Sen. Nate Johnson said the law he sponsored will allow for architectural innovation as well as maximizing multi-family housing on odd-shaped and smaller lots.

Johnson said modernizing building codes does not come at the risk of safety.

“Who knows what policies once served well and now, after decades of technological advances and changes in land use, impede good design?” Johnson said. “We have regulations for a reason, and I’m not for throwing out what protects the public. Markets tend to easily meet the challenges of sound regulatory protections.”

Lawmakers in Illinois, New York and Rhode Island considered single-stairway bills this year, but none passed before the legislatures adjourned for the year.

But moving in the opposite direction, Connecticut lawmakers this year repealed the single-stairway law they had passed in 2024, after objections from fire safety officials.

Beyond staircases, Horowitz, of Pew, said this year saw the first legislative sessions in which states have taken a look at elevators to reduce building costs. Washington state enacted a new elevator law this year that directs the state’s Building Code Council to allow smaller apartment buildings, with at most six stories and 24 units, to use smaller and less expensive passenger elevators.

Maine removed some elevator-related requirements, including for certain smoke and draft equipment and for two-way emergency video communication systems inside elevators.

Research by the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit research group that co-authored Pew’s single-stairway report, found that installing elevators in the United States and Canada is at least three times as expensive as in Western Europe or East Asia. U.S. and Canadian installations start around $150,000, compared with roughly $50,000 in several high-income countries, the group found.

Is it safe?

Pew researchers found that modern four- to six-story single-stairway apartment buildings can be as safe as other residential buildings when they include fire-safety features such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, code-compliant drywall, self-closing doors and protected stairways.

Horowitz said Pew researchers counted every fire death in New York City and Seattle — two cities that have long allowed single-stairway apartment buildings — over 12 years.

In New York City, Pew identified 4,440 modern single-stairway buildings and found their fire-death rate was the same as other residential buildings — about five deaths per million occupant-years. Pew also found that the deaths it identified in modern single-stair buildings appeared to occur in the unit where the fire started, not because smoke or fire penetrated the single stairway.

“Modern apartment buildings are much, much, much safer than other housing. It is not even close,” Horowitz said. “The data is clear and policymakers are following the data in this instance.”

But Sean DeCrane, the director of fire fighter health and safety operational services for the International Association of Fire Fighters, said single-stairway proposals often fail to account for residents’ potential slowness to evacuate during a fire, and how firefighters use the same stairwell to reach trapped occupants.

The IAFF cites as one example a Manhattan apartment fire on May 4 that killed three people and injured 14. The fire that trapped residents in a smoke-filled stairwell serving as the building’s only means of escape. IAFF says the fire appeared to start on the first floor and spread upward through the stairwell.

“When we take over the stairwell, occupant egress effectively stops,” DeCrane told Stateline. “So now you’re requiring firefighters to physically remove occupants out of a burning building.”

During a fire, residents may not leave when an alarm first sounds, he said, especially in apartment buildings where false alarms or smoke alarms from a kitchen mishap are common. Some residents do not try to evacuate until they smell smoke or believe they are in danger.

“Just because they hear an alarm doesn’t necessarily signify risk to them.”

Aube, of the American Planning Association, said state lawmakers should learn from California’s approach — which in 2023 directed the state fire marshal to study single-stair buildings — before lawmakers make building codes changes.

“There is a lot of technical information that lawmakers and the public need to learn before considering removing a code,” she said.

The California Office of the State Fire Marshal released that report early this year. It said safeguards such as sprinkler and smoke detectors “do not fully substitute” for having two stairwells and notes that fire departments in the state nearly unanimously oppose single stairways. But it suggested a variety of measures that should be implemented if single-stairway buildings are allowed.

Electrical codes

In recent years, some states have changed parts of their fire and electrical codes, seeking to make a dent in the total cost of a project. Arizona last year barred counties from requiring fire sprinklers in accessory dwelling units.

Indiana this year barred state and local governments from requiring arc fault circuit interrupters, or AFCIs, in certain residential buildings and emergency responder communication systems in some larger structures. AFCIs prevent electrical fires by detecting arcing in damaged or loose wiring before it builds heat inside a wall.

The Indiana bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Doug Miller, said the state needed to “put a stake in the ground” to meet its need of roughly 50,000 homes, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. The Indiana Builders Association said local rules accounted for 24% of the cost for a new home.

This year, Iowa changed parts of the state electrical code, including AFCI and GFCI requirements. Ground fault circuit interrupters, or GFCIs, are designed to protect people from electric shock by shutting off power when they detect a fault in the current. Supporters said these changes can help keep electrical costs low for builders and consumers.

Iowa Democratic state Rep. Jeff Cooling, who is also an electrician, said the late-session legislation takes away some kitchen GFCI requirements, removes AFCI requirements and allows cheaper ceiling boxes in places where future homeowners may install heavy fixtures or ceiling fans. He opposed the bill.

Cooling said lawmakers often talk about code changes as a way to shave costs from new housing. But as an electrician, he said many of those requirements were adopted for a reason and usually after high-profile injuries, fires or deaths prompted necessary review and updates.

“None of these codes change just to change them,” Cooling said. “They’ve changed because people have been seriously injured or killed.”

Cooling said fellow electricians he spoke with estimated the Iowa changes would save about $850 on an average new house. “That’s a rounding error,” he said.

And for Cooling, that amount of savings is too small to justify removing protections at the sake of human lives.

“It’s not the world that we want to live in where we try to balance safety and what turns out to be low-cost savings,” he said.

Waiting on new building codes

Building codes are usually updated every three years through a public process, while states and local governments retain authority to amend and enforce them.

A new law passed in Connecticut will stretch what is normally a three-year state building code update schedule into a six-year gap, pausing updates between 2024 and 2030 cycles. The state is expected to produce a report due by Jan. 1, 2029, that will evaluate the effects of a six-year cycle for building code revisions.

Housing industry groups say Connecticut is not alone in extending or pausing the time between adopting building code changes. Last year, California froze most residential code changes through June 2031. North Carolina moved its residential code to a six-year review cycle in 2023.

The Connecticut proposal drew opposition from code officials and the International Code Council. Building officials and code organizations have warned that slowing adoption of new codes can also delay updates meant to respond to new risks.

Aube, the urban planner, said that code changes are not a silver bullet in the affordability puzzle.

“There’s not one answer,” she said. “It’s like making a cake, right? There’s a whole bunch of different ingredients that go in.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The ruling struck at the core of President Donald Trump’s project to assert authority over state-run elections ahead of the November midterms. Under Trump’s control, the executive branch has spent the past year attempting to obtain state voter rolls to feed into the computer program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., condemned the Trump administration’s behavior over 75 pages and vacated a series of notices Homeland Security had published to implement the computer program.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan’s decision, if upheld, could hamper the administration’s ability to implement an executive order aimed at restricting voting by mail. The order requires Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state using information from SAVE, along with other federal databases.

Homeland Security has long operated SAVE, but prior to the second Trump administration it was primarily a tool to check whether individual immigrants were eligible for various government benefits. Last year, the agency reconfigured SAVE to allow for simultaneous searches of millions of names and allowed states to upload their voter rolls for the purpose of identifying possible noncitizens.

While some Republican-led states took Homeland Security up on the offer, most states have resisted demands to turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. In turn, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states for unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department has been unsuccessful in forcing states to provide the information. DOJ attorneys have indicated that any data would be shared with Homeland Security for analysis by SAVE.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival wrote on social media.

If Homeland Security appeals the decision, federal officials face a shrinking window to restore their ability to use SAVE before the midterms. Federal law prohibits sweeping purges of voters less than 90 days before federal elections — in this case early August ahead of November.

Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a group that advocates for the “responsible use of technology in elections,” acknowledged election officials are in a moment of uncertainty.

“The closer we get to the midterms, it raises your blood pressure,” Smith said in an interview. “But I think most people are (saying), ‘well, we just have to wait and see.’”

Concerns from Dems, voting groups

Democrats and voting rights groups have warned about the dangers of SAVE, saying it makes errors and has wrongly flagged citizens. They hailed Monday’s decision as a victory for voters.

“Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters, said in a statement.

Sooknanan came to a similar conclusion in her decision, writing that federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The judge pointed to sworn declarations by four naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data contained in the SAVE system. At least three citizens had their registrations revoked for at least some time.

The Trump administration didn’t dispute the sworn testimony, Sooknanan noted. The administration also didn’t contest, she wrote, the findings of an independent investigation that found that 25% of possible noncitizens identified by SAVE in Travis County, Texas, which includes Austin, were people who had already proven their U.S. citizenship.

The judge’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed against Homeland Security and other federal agencies last September by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center that challenged the repurposed SAVE system. 

“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

Democracy Forward Foundation, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Fair Elections Center, represented the groups challenging the directive.

Three violations

The SAVE system violated federal law in three primary ways, Sooknanan wrote. 

First, it breached a ban on the Social Security Administration against disclosing Social Security numbers and related records. Second, it violated the federal Privacy Act, which restricts how the federal government shares information. And third, it violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies set policy.

The record in the lawsuit “shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections,” the judge wrote.

Decision preempted expansion 

Before Monday’s decision, the agency was planning to expand the use of SAVE. 

CNN reported hours earlier that the agency later this summer planned to require states to run their voter rolls through SAVE as a condition of receiving full homeland security grant funding.

Under the planned changes, states could also lose at least some funding if they don’t offer plans to move voting toward hand-marked paper ballots. Those changes could affect all voters in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Nevada and South Carolina, nearly all voters in Arkansas and Indiana, and roughly two-thirds of voters in Tennessee, according to data from Verified Voting.

Homeland Security didn’t dispute the report when asked about it by States Newsroom. In a statement, the department emphasized Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s focus on election security.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS and FEMA are committed to ensuring homeland security grant funding advances core national security priorities, to include the security and integrity of our nation’s election infrastructure,” the statement says, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an agency within Homeland Security. 

“Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The returns, which Ramaswamy made public when he ran for the GOP presidential nomination, report $37 million in capital gains in 2015 and $174.5 million in 2020. Together, the two years total about $211.6 million. Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, writing in Fortune in 2023, reviewed the same filings and reported essentially the same figures, noting the 2020 windfall was tied to the sale of stakes in his holding company, Roivant, to Japan’s Sumitomo.

Ramaswamy has been explicit about where ending the capital gains tax fits in his agenda. “That’s part of the first step to eventually get to zero income taxation,” he told News 5 Cleveland in a June 2025 interview. “The beauty of getting rid of capital gains taxation in Ohio is the fact that actually we don’t even as a state derive that much revenue from it and yet it is a great point to draw other entrepreneurs and capital owners to the state.”

Ohio does not levy a separate capital gains tax. It treats capital gains as ordinary income, taxed since the start of 2026 at a flat 2.75% on income above $26,050 under the budget bill that consolidated the state’s former graduated brackets. The idea Ramaswamy has promoted – fully exempting capital gains from state and municipal income tax – has been introduced in the legislature as House Bill 617, the Capital Gains Tax Repeal Act, sponsored by Rep. Tom Young of Washington Township. The measure remains in committee and has not become law.

The Legislative Service Commission, the legislature’s nonpartisan research arm, estimated in its fiscal analysis of House Bill 617 that repeal would cost the state between $615 million and $645.6 million in tax year 2027, growing to between $647.8 million and $679.8 million the following year. Capital gains revenue feeds Ohio’s General Revenue Fund, which supports public schools, Medicaid and other core services.

A separate LSC memo obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau found the benefit would be concentrated at the top: 81.6% of it would go to Ohioans earning more than $200,000 a year, while those making under $100,000 – the large majority of the state – would receive 7.3%.

Against that distribution, Ramaswamy’s own filings place him among the Ohioans who would gain the most. Applying the current 2.75% rate to the capital gains reported on his two released returns yields roughly $5.8 million – about $1 million on the 2015 gains and $4.8 million on the 2020 gains. The figure is illustrative: Ohio’s rates were higher in 2015 and 2020, so the actual state tax he paid on those gains at the time was larger. It is offered as a measure of the scale of capital gains income the repeal would shield from state tax going forward.

That income stream has continued. Ramaswamy’s financial disclosure filed April 6 with the Ohio Ethics Commission reported more than $1.1 million in dividends and capital gains in 2025, including $768,968 from a single sale of BlackBerry stock – again, the category of income his proposal would exempt.

Supporters of the repeal argue the lost revenue would be recovered through growth. Young, the bill’s sponsor, has said the static cost estimates rely on what he called a “stagnant approach” and that cutting the tax would draw investment to the state, pointing to past income-tax reductions. “We cut the income tax. What did we see? Increase in revenue,” he told reporters. Ramaswamy has framed the move as a way to keep entrepreneurs and capital in Ohio. Policy Matters Ohio, a progressive research group, counters that income-tax cuts since 2005 have cost the state billions a year without the promised economic gains, and it has called the capital gains exemption a costly benefit weighted toward the wealthiest residents.

Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Chanler Norville, 19, of New Riegel, and Will T. Kurtz, 20, of Tiffin, were each charged by complaint on Monday, June 15, the records show. Each faces one count of aggravated burglary, a first-degree felony, and one count of complicity to felonious assault, a second-degree felony. The charges stem from a reported early-morning break-in on Saturday, June 13, at the apartment complex at 1730 W. Market St.

Aggravated burglary, under Ohio Revised Code 2911.11, is a first-degree felony. Felonious assault, under R.C. 2903.11, is a second-degree felony. Under R.C. 2923.03, a person convicted of complicity is punished as if they had committed the underlying offense.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/norville-kurtz-charged-market-street-flats-assault-500k-bond/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That’s the effect that cuts to Medicaid and food assistance under a massive 2025 spending law will have when they’re fully phased in. It’s also the consequence of Republicans allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of the last year, according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis which was published last week.

Those losses come despite $200 million in rural health money Ohio will get from a fund that Republicans built into the spending bill. The measure was meant to quell concerns that Medicaid cuts could close rural hospitals, the analysis said. 

“While the infusion of $10 billion into state economies for rural health contributes to some economic growth, it is overshadowed by the $31 billion in federal funding cuts to ACA marketplaces,” the analysis said.

That’s a reference to pandemic-era subsidies to buy insurance in Affordable Care Act Marketplaces. 

When Congress allowed them to expire, most of the 600,000 Ohioans who bought insurance on the exchanges saw premiums for their plans double. That prompted many to drop down to cheaper, lower-quality plans and many more to leave the marketplace altogether. KFF reports that Ohio enrollment was down 20% this year.

Even bigger losses to the state loom when the provisions of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” take full effect, the Commonwealth Fund report said.

The legislation cut more than $900 billion over 10 years from Medicaid. It also cut $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps or EBT.

Along with deep cuts to the safety net, Trump’s signature law gave huge tax cuts to the richest Americans. The Commonwealth Fund analysis said it amounted to yet another upward redistribution of wealth.

“Under (the Trump spending law), cuts to health and nutrition programs largely harm Americans with lower incomes, while tax cuts primarily benefit those with higher incomes,” it said.

“The (Congressional Budget Office) estimates that Americans in with lowest 10% of incomes will lose about $1,200 per year (3.1% of their incomes), while those with the top 10% of incomes will gain $13,600 per year (2.7% of their incomes). Other analyses reached similar conclusions.”

The cuts won’t just harm low-income Americans, the analysis said, they’ll damage entire state economies. It’s a consequence of taking away huge streams of funding for healthcare and food.

“In 2029, federal Medicaid funding will drop by $90.9 billion, causing state GDPs to fall by $118.5 billion,” it said.

“Medicaid cuts also mean 996,000 fewer jobs nationwide in 2029, half of which will be health-related, including in hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, or nursing homes. States with the largest job losses include California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, and Michigan, which lose between 150,200 and 36,600 jobs.”

It projected that Ohio will lose the eighth-most jobs — 51,200.

It also said the state will lose $4.4 billion in federal funding, thereby reducing state GDP by $5.4 billion and state and local revenue collection by $368 million.

The largest single measure to produce Medicaid savings in the Trump spending law is a broader, stricter work requirement.

But the Commonwealth Fund report predicted that it will end up making it even harder for recipients to find jobs.

“Proponents of the law explained that the budget cuts were intended to exclude ‘undeserving’ populations from accessing benefits, such as able-bodied people who choose to not work, claiming these changes would ultimately help them gain jobs and incomes,” it said.

“But evidence indicates that work requirement programs do little to increase employment because they fail to address underlying reasons for unemployment. Moreover, by reducing the number of jobs in low-income communities, the new law could make it even harder for people to find jobs.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio Equal Rights recently announced they will not try to get two amendments on this year’s ballot, but will instead sight their sights on the 2027 election. 

Their other proposed amendment would add language to the state’s constitution protecting citizens from discrimination based on race, color, creed or religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression regardless of sex assigned at birth, pregnancy status, genetic information, disease status, age, disability, recovery status, familial status, ancestry, national origin, or military and veteran status.  

“We made the strategic decision with the attacks on voting, the high cost of marketing, and the everything that is going on this year — as well as wanting to stay in line with Ohio Coalition to End Qualified Immunity and the data center ban — we would rather be on the same ballot and in lockstep with folks who are values and mission aligned, and in an ecosystem that is a little bit less chaotic than what we’re seeing right now,” said Ohio Equal Rights Executive Co-Chair Lis Regula.

To get on the November ballot, Ohio Equal Rights would have needed to collect about 413,487 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1 for each amendment.

Ohio Equal Rights would not say how many signatures they have collected so far, but those signatures remain valid since they did not submit them to the Ohio Secretary of State. 

Ohio’s constitution includes a ban on same-sex marriage after 61.7% of Ohio voters approved an amendment in 2004 that says marriage is only between one man and one woman. The United States Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015 through the Obergefell case originating out of Ohio. 

However, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called on the justices to revisit Obergefell after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

LGBTQ bills

At the Ohio Statehouse, Ohio Republican lawmakers are advancing bills to pass anti-LGBTQ legislation while bills that would support LGBTQ Ohioans have seen virtually no movement. 

“We’re in Pride Month right now, we have over a half a million LGBTQ+ Ohioans, so it’s very much a community that we should be serving,” said Josh Meek, statewide advocacy manager with Equality Ohio. 

The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills nationwide and 10 bills in Ohio.

Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams, R-Sylvania Twp., has introduced many of Ohio’s anti-LGBTQ bills. He recently lost in the Ohio 9th District Republican Primary to Derek Merrin, so Williams won’t be returning to the Ohio Statehouse next year. The Ohio Capital Journal reached out to Williams for an interview, but he was unavailable. 

Ohio House Bill 249 would ban drag performers from performing anywhere that is not a designated adult entertainment facility. 

The bill passed the Ohio House in March, but has yet to have any hearings so far in the Ohio Senate. This type of law has been blocked in other states for violating freedom of speech.

“The language they use is so legally vague and broad that this could target theatrical performances that we might not consider obscene or harmful to juveniles,” Meek said. 

Williams and state Rep. Angie King, R-Celina, introduced the bill. 

Ohio House Bill 693 would prevent parents from being charged with abuse and neglect if they do not recognize their child’s trans identity. 

Williams and state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, introduced the bill, which has had two hearings so far in the Ohio House Judiciary Committee. 

Williams introduced these bills earlier this year, which have had no hearings so far.  

• Ohio House Bill 700 would ban using state funds to provide gender transition for minors. 

• Ohio House Bill 796 would make sure Ohio inmates and prisoners are housed by their biological sex. 

• Ohio House Bill 798 would restrict transgender Ohioans access to using public bathrooms and prohibit changing sex markers on birth and death certificates. 

• Ohio House Bill 838 would prohibit state and local municipalities from covering gender reassignment surgery.

Ohio House Bill 172  would ban children 14 and older from receiving mental health services without parental consent. State Rep. Johnathan Newman, R-Troy, introduced this bill, which has had a few hearings so far in the Ohio House Health Committee. 

Ohio House Bill 262 would designate the weeks from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day as Natural Family Month. Williams and state Rep. Beth Lear, R-Galena, introduced the bill, which has had four hearings so far.  

“So many of our LGBTQ+ Ohioans, especially the youth and the youth that are in rural Ohio, they don’t have anybody they might know that was part of the community, or they might not see others like them, so I think passing this kind of bill just reaffirms the narrative that Ohio is not really a welcoming place right now for LGBTQ+ Ohioans,” Meek said. 

Ohio House Bill 190 would require parental permission for schools to use different pronouns or different names for students that don’t match up with the biological sex or birth name. Williams and Newman introduced the bill, which had sponsor testimony last year. 

Ohio House Bill 196 would require political candidates to list their former names on candidacy petitions. This, however, would not apply to names that have been changed due to marriage. 

King and state Rep. Rodney Creech, R-West Alexandria, introduced the bill, which had sponsor testimony last year. 

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio —  the only openly gay lawmaker in the Ohio General Assembly — has introduced a few bills that would help LGBTQ people, but none of these bills have had any hearings so far this General Assembly.

• Ohio Senate Bill 70 would expand anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity. House Bill 136 is a companion bill. 

• Ohio Senate Bill 71 would ban any licensed health professionals from doing conversion therapy when providing mental health treatment to minors. Antonio and state Sen. Beth Liston, D-Dublin, introduced the bill. House Bill 300 is a companion bill. 

• Ohio Senate Bill 211 would designate the first full week of June as “Love Makes a Family Week.”

Antonio has introduced the Ohio Fairness Act in every General Assembly since she was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 2011 and this is the first time since 2018 the bill has no Republican support. 

Any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Letting students decide how they learn is almost as important a goal of Mayfield High School near Cleveland as learning itself.

The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn praise from national education advocates, including the XQ Institute and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including Indiana, Vermont and Virginia, while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to greater Chicago.

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program.

• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work.

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.”

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year.

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation.

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility…to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing…this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home.

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to The 74. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“These parks belong to all of us, and they offer every Ohioan a chance to connect with nature, spend meaningful time outdoors, and appreciate the landscapes that make our state special,” DeWine said. 

These would be wonderful words — if Ohio wasn’t the only state to frack its own state parks, thanks to Ohio House Bill 507, which DeWine signed in 2023. 

Since then, Ohio’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission has approved fracking parts of Salt Fork State Park, as well as parts or all of six wildlife areas: Valley Run, Zepernick, Keen, Leesville, Jockey Hollow, and Egypt Valley. All told, almost 24,000 acres of Ohio state parks and wildlife areas have been approved or nominated for fracking.

Ohio Senate Bill 219, now sitting on DeWine’s desk, would make this problem much worse. DeWine vetoed many of these provisions when they were slipped into the state budget bill last year. Now they are back, and he faces a choice between signing the bill or vetoing these provisions again.   

47 pages of favors for the oil and gas industry

Sponsored by Sen. Al Landis, R-Dover, with a long list of Republican co-sponsors, Ohio Senate Bill 219 is framed as an overhaul of the law governing oil and gas wells. 

In reality, it is 47 pages of favors for the oil and gas industry — starting with speeding up fracking of Ohio’s parks and wildlife areas. 

If passed, S.B. 219 would:

• Give the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission only 90 days to decide on a nomination to frack public lands; currently they have 180 days. 

• Require the commission to put approved nominations out for bid immediately; currently they do that next calendar quarter.

• Require the commission to select the “highest and best bid” within 60 days; currently there is no deadline. 

• Require the state agency that manages the land to execute a lease within 30 days; currently there is no time limit. These leases are more complex than a standard lease due to safeguards needed to protect our public lands 

S.B. 219 favors oil and gas companies that frack public land even further, such as by:

• Giving an oil and gas company the option to extend a lease to frack public land for five additional years instead of three years under existing law.

• Giving an oil and gas company that has a lease to frack public lands up to 60 days to pay any advance royalties or bonuses, instead of 10 days under existing law.

• Suspending royalty payments and time limits on leases to frack public land if the land has to go through a federal approval process. This applies to Zepernick and Leesville wildlife areas. 

• Suspending royalty payments and time limits on leases to frack public land if litigation of any kind is filed, until a final nonappealable court order has been issued. Conceivably a litigant would have to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to obtain a final nonappealable order – yet the oil and gas company would be allowed to continue drilling operations with payments suspended throughout this process. 

As if all that is not enough, Senate Bill 219 would also cut into the Ohio Department of Natural Resource’s ability to regulate fracking operations by:

• Requiring ODNR to write its own administrative rules for oil and gas operations, instead of relying on the state Administrative Procedures Act, which could weaken regulations and make enforcement more difficult. 

• Curtailing ODNR’s authority to deny requests for expedited review of permit applications. If an oil and gas company requests expedited review, the department would have to grant that for up to 10 permits per year.

• Prohibiting ODNR from charging an oil and gas company more than the costs specifically outlined in the lease. Potentially the state could not fine companies that do not follow the rules or make companies pay to clean up after a spill, leak, or accident.

• Allowing an oil and gas company to negotiate “surface use” of state land — meaning they could frack IN our state parks and public lands. DeWine ordered “no surface use,” meaning frack wells must be located outside state parks and wildlife areas, but that could easily change under a new administration.

What will DeWine do?

Gov. DeWine is right: Ohio’s state parks and public lands belong to all of us. Ohio is one of only a handful of states that do not charge admission to their state parks – which were recently named the best state park system in the nation. 

S.B. 219 puts all of this at risk. DeWine previously vetoed many of S.B. 219’s provisions from the budget bill — but at that time he had line-item veto authority because it was an appropriations bill. 

Now his choices are different: he can sign the bill; he can do nothing and let it become law in 10 days; or he can veto the bill and send it back to the legislature, which could try to override. 

As he makes this crucial decision, we hope DeWine takes into account the need to protect Ohio’s state parks and public lands, the wishes of its citizens, and our duty to preserve the environment for future generations. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Without explicitly tying their efforts to a replacement of Pride Month — which celebrates the LGBTQ+ community — GOP governors in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, Tennessee and Utah have labeled June with conservative-friendly monikers that celebrate one type of family unit: a man and woman who are married with children.

The proclamations don’t carry the weight of law, but they are public statements about the kind of families that leadership in those states want to promote.

In Tennessee, GOP state lawmakers passed a resolution signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee designating June as “Nuclear Family Month.” The resolution labels a ‘nuclear family’ as “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted or fostered children” and calls it “God’s design for familial structure.”

Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Braun also declared June “nuclear family month” in a proclamation with wording similar to Tennessee’s. Braun told reporters the proclamation wasn’t intended to send a message to other types of families, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey declared June as “Strong Families Month.” Her official announcement of the designation highlighted the role of fathers as “head of the household.”

In Nebraska, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen designated June as “Marriage and Family Month,” with a proclamation saying “God’s design” for marriage is a family with one husband, one wife and children.

Pillen called it “the most important proclamation I’ve ever had the privilege to sign.”

The Republican governors of Arkansas and Utah declared June “Fidelity Month,” defining fidelity as dedication to faith, family and country. The proclamations don’t explicitly describe the composition of those families. The idea of a “Fidelity Month” was first proposed and promoted a few years ago by a conservative Christian legal scholar.

Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted about her declaration on X by sharing a link to an article calling such efforts “counter-programming” to Pride Month.

But the rebranding of June marks a departure for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who declared June as Pride Month during his first three years in office and has previously expressed remorse for his attitude about gay people.

Pride Month celebrates LGBTQ+ history and culture, and serves as a platform to increase visibility for queer communities that continue to fight for civil rights and equality. It’s marked by celebratory parades, concerts and festivals in every state.

LGBTQ+ advocates have called the rebranding efforts “disappointing” and a deliberate attempt to erase communities that are already vulnerable.

“Pride month is a celebration that uplifts marginalized folks and gives them resources to survive and spaces where they can thrive,” the Utah-based organization Project Rainbow posted in a statement about Cox’s choice to designate June as Fidelity Month.

Advocates say the month is not only about celebration, but also provides important opportunities to support queer people. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 3 in 5 LGBTQ+ high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the previous year. One in 5 LGBTQ+ participants in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey said they had attempted suicide.

While Republican governors have mostly shied away from directly mentioning Pride Month or tying their month-naming efforts to its erasure, some elected officials have been more explicit.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican, posted from his official X account, “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month” on June 1 but later deleted it.

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican, shared an illustrated version of the proclamation on social media, titled “Take back the Rainbow!” and depicting a heterosexual white couple with children.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

To a former public-pension official, that combination carries an unsettling echo of Ohio’s past. The last time the state moved public money into an unconventional, hard-to-value asset steered by a politically connected insider, it produced Coingate — one of the worst investment scandals in Ohio history.

Chris Tobe, a financial analyst and former pension trustee in Kentucky, told the Center for Media and Democracy that an Ohio governor holds “great influence” over state funds and warned that Ramaswamy’s crypto ties through his firm Strive could “take the corruption to the next level” — a remark he tied to Ohio’s history of public-money scandals. The American Prospect, reporting in partnership with the group, drew the line directly to Coingate.

The conflict at the center of that warning is established. Ramaswamy holds Bitcoin and Ethereum and retains about a 10% stake in Strive, a firm that has committed most of its treasury to Bitcoin; in January 2025 he praised House Bill 18, then titled the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, as a “thoughtful & powerful bill”; and the crypto industry has poured millions into his candidacy. TiffinOhio.net has detailed his personal holdings and the bill and the crypto money behind his campaign in earlier reporting.

What Coingate was

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation expanded beyond traditional stocks and bonds into alternative investments. One was a $50 million fund to buy and sell rare coins and collectibles, run by Tom Noe, a Toledo coin dealer and prominent Republican fundraiser who chaired the Northwest Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign and had sharply increased his political giving before winning the work, according to Toledo Blade reporting and court records.

About $13.7 million ultimately went missing. Noe was convicted in 2006 of theft, money laundering, forgery and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. The broader scandal produced 19 convictions and a guilty plea from then-Gov. Bob Taft on an ethics charge for failing to disclose gifts. In the years after, the bureau moved to reduce its exposure to high-risk, exotic investments.

The lesson critics draw is structural: Ohio has been badly burned before when public funds flowed into a volatile asset class connected to political insiders. The crypto proposal, they argue, recreates that incentive structure. Ramaswamy and the company he co-founded hold Bitcoin, his largest outside campaign backers are crypto investors, and large institutional buying by a state tends to push the asset’s price up — meaning the people positioned to benefit overlap with the people funding his rise.

Where the comparison breaks down

The parallel has clear limits, and they matter. Ramaswamy has not been charged with or accused of any crime, and House Bill 18 is lawful proposed legislation. Coingate centered on outright theft by a manager who controlled the money directly; the concern raised about the crypto plan is conflict of interest and market exposure, not embezzlement. Bitcoin is also a publicly priced, openly traded asset, unlike the illiquid collectibles whose opacity helped conceal the Coingate losses for years. The comparison is to risk and incentive, not to conduct.

A bill that has stalled — and divided Republicans

House Bill 18 has not advanced. Sponsored by Rep. Steve Demetriou, R-Bainbridge Township, it remains in the House Technology and Innovation Committee, where it has drawn multiple hearings but no committee vote, according to the legislature’s official record. Committee amendments reported by the Ohio Capital Journal broadened the fund to allow more traditional investments such as bonds, added liability protection for the officials overseeing it, and dropped “cryptocurrency” from the fund’s name. As written, the measure is discretionary — it would permit, not require, the treasurer to invest — and limits eligible digital assets to those with a market capitalization of at least $750 billion, a threshold only Bitcoin meets today.

Not all Republicans are convinced. State Treasurer Robert Sprague, who would carry out any such investment, has said there are “issues that we’re trying to work through” on the bill and pointed to the volatility of digital assets. House Speaker Matt Huffman has been blunter, telling reporters, “I’m still scratching my head over cryptocurrency.” Demetriou has defended the idea as a way to “hedge against inflation” and keep Ohio competitive in digital finance.

Ramaswamy has said he wants to be the nation’s strongest pro-Bitcoin governor and has framed digital-asset investment as a way to diversify state holdings. Innovation Ohio, a progressive policy group that has tracked his holdings, counters that steering public and pension money toward Bitcoin would benefit Ramaswamy and his firm while shifting the risk onto Ohio’s teachers, public employees and retirees.

Ramaswamy faces Democratic nominee Amy Acton, a physician and former state health director, in the general election on Tuesday, November 3. House Bill 18 remains in committee.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Breeden succeeds interim president Dr. Cory Stine, who is stepping down July 19 after less than two months in the role. Stine, who has worked at Terra State for more than 20 years, is leaving after accepting a position at another college, board Chair Mircea Handru told WTOL. Breeden takes over the next day.

The college said Breeden brings experience in higher education leadership, governance and strategic planning. He currently serves as vice president of operations for the United States Naval Community College, the federal community college for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. He is a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel with more than three decades of leadership experience and holds a doctorate in community college leadership from Ferris State University. The college said he has also served as a university trustee.

“The Board of Trustees is excited to welcome Dr. Breeden to Terra State Community College,” Handru said in the announcement. “His commitment to financial stewardship, enrollment growth, academic excellence, and community engagement aligns strongly with Terra State’s mission.”

Breeden inherits a college working to climb out of fiscal watch. The Ohio Department of Higher Education placed Terra State under the designation on March 23, 2026, following a March 17 recommendation from the Ohio Auditor of State. State officials cited missing annual audits for the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, late payments to vendors and flaws in the college’s payment processing, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

Dr. Ronald Schumacher, who had led the college since 2018, resigned effective April 2 — the same day trustees appointed Stine to lead it. The college has up to three years to resolve the problems and end fiscal watch, and is required to submit a financial recovery plan to the state, consult with the auditor on its accounting systems and adopt a mandatory monthly review of its finances.

The college said a campus-wide welcome event and community forum will be held so students, employees and community members can meet Breeden and hear his plans for the college. Additional details are to be announced.

Terra State, located in Fremont, is Sandusky County’s only community college and serves students across the region. It enrolled 1,240 students in fall 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The crash happened just before 5:30 p.m. on June 20 on County Road 62 near County Road 80 in Jackson Township, according to the Patrol’s Fremont Post.

A preliminary investigation found that a Jeep Commander driven by Doyle B. Durst was traveling east on County Road 62 when it went off the right side of the road. Durst overcorrected, and the vehicle traveled off the left side of the roadway, struck an embankment and overturned, the Patrol said.

Durst was ejected from the vehicle and died at the scene.

The Fremont Post was assisted by the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, Helena Fire Department, Sandusky County EMS, the Sandusky County Coroner’s Office, Mercy Health Life Flight and John’s Welding and Towing.

The crash remains under investigation.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Seneca County Common Pleas Court granted the board’s motion to dismiss counts two through four of WIN Waste’s complaint, which alleged the board violated Ohio’s Open Meetings Act, according to a June 15 news release from the Seneca County General Health District. The court found the company failed to state a claim that the board broke the law as alleged in those counts.

A remaining count was not part of the board’s motion and will be decided later, the district said.

The court’s journal entry noted that the case is one of seven filed by or involving WIN Waste over the board’s decisions on the landfill’s license.

“We’re gratified that our local court followed the law and granted the motion to dismiss,” Board of Health President Clay Wolph said in the release. “The landfill is forcing the Board to spend taxpayer funds to fight in court. Still, we have and will continue to keep the health and safety of our communities at the forefront when making decisions.”

WIN Waste pushed back in a statement, rejecting the board’s framing of the litigation’s cost to taxpayers. While the company said it sued to ensure government transparency, the court observed that it waited two years after the first alleged violation to file and initially sought a civil penalty of $500 for each of 88 separate alleged Open Meetings Act violations.

“We find it ironic that the Seneca County General Health District has suddenly discovered a concern for taxpayer dollars. We pay millions in fees that are specifically designed to fund legitimate regulatory oversight,” the company said. “Instead of working collaboratively with the Ohio EPA and a facility that has operated in compliance for years, the SCGHD has repeatedly attacked both WIN and the Ohio EPA, manufacturing violations that do not exist.”

WIN Waste operates the landfill, formerly known as Sunny Farms, at 12500 W. County Road 18 south of Fostoria. The health district licenses and inspects the site and earlier this year installed two ambient air monitoring stations near the landfill. The two sides have clashed for years over conditions attached to the landfill’s annual operating license, and the county has cited the facility for violations the company contests.

The open-meetings complaint is one front in a wider legal battle that has produced rulings for both sides. In separate proceedings, the state Environmental Review Appeals Commission has found a number of the district’s license conditions unlawful or unreasonable, and the Ohio Supreme Court in 2024 dismissed an earlier WIN Waste challenge as moot. The board, in turn, has voted to appeal the Ohio EPA’s approval of the landfill’s expansion.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But they still need nearly everything to break their way against a map that put them at a starting disadvantage, analysts and campaign officials say.

At the outset of this election cycle, Republicans appeared highly likely to hold their majority. Democrats would need to flip four seats, and competitive races this year are in states that are more Republican than average. 

But as election watchers increasingly expect a blue tint to the November midterms, the question is now whether it will be blue enough to put Democrats back in the Senate majority, where they are now at a 53-47 disadvantage.

Democrats are mounting competitive campaigns in Republican-run states typically seen as stretches, including Texas and Iowa. But analysts say scandals surrounding the party’s nominee in Maine, Graham Platner, have exposed how dependent Democrats are on a rising tide of voter anger with Trump and Republicans to lift their candidates to victory. 

“Is 2026 gonna be a mildly blue lean year, like 2018, or a kind of tsunami blue year, like 2006 or 2008?” J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a University of Virginia-based election forecaster, said. “I think the answer to that question is still kind of, we’ll see.”

Strong candidates, high prices

Thirty-five Senate seats will be on the ballot during the November midterm elections. 

Of the nine deemed most competitive — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — that will likely decide control of the chamber, Trump won all but Maine and New Hampshire in 2024. Democrats would have to retain their current seats and flip others in some combination of seven of those Senate races to take over control of the chamber. 

But Democrats have also offset their geographic disadvantage by fielding strong candidates in a few of the most important races, making pink-to-red states such as Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina ultra-competitive.

Democrats’ optimism comes as Trump has made a series of moves they believe could prove toxic for Republicans. Potentially most damaging, the war with Iran sent gas prices soaring and inflation rising, calling into question his handling of the economy as voters continue to rate affordability as a top issue.Trump has signed a ceasefire agreement and gas prices are dropping, but the question is whether there’s enough time left to erase the damage. 

The president’s approval rating was near 50% when he won the 2024 election, Coleman said, but has since sunk as the cost of living keeps rising. 

Trump continues to turn off voters, with elections now less than five months away. A New York Times daily average of polling placed the president’s approval rating at 39% as of June 17.

A switch in Senate control would have major implications for the remainder of Trump’s term. 

Democratic senators, assuming they vote together, would have the power to block any U.S. Supreme Court nominees put forward by Trump in the final two years of his term, as well as executive branch nominees and federal judges, and to shut down major party-line legislation enacted by Republicans twice already in the past year through the budget reconciliation process.

The combination of an unpopular president and a strong crop of candidates gives Democrats a fighting chance to win the majority, even if they still face long odds, Coleman said.

“If you asked me a year ago if Democrats had a path to the Senate, I would have said the chances aren’t zero, but they’re very hard,” Coleman said. “Now, I think there are several paths that the Democrats have to take the Senate, but I think the Republicans just have an easier path holding it.”

Moderates put red states in play

Alvin Tillery, a Democratic pollster and consultant who is also a professor in Northwestern University’s political science department, said strong candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska give his party the edge in those states

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola are “moderates who have won statewide,” Tillery said.

Though the Democratic candidates in those states are establishment-friendly, Tillery said Democrats generally should look to motivate younger voters and voters of color by leaning in to issues that the No Kings protests have elevated, as well as keeping affordability in focus.

But, despite the apparent quality of Democratic candidates, those states are still purple at best. Trump has won each state in each of his three White House runs.

The president’s drooping approval may not be as big a factor as Democrats need, a national Republican campaign operative said.

“Yes, approval ratings, obviously, have gone down,” the operative, who declined to be identified by name, said. “However, when it comes to the Republican base, they are still showing up for Trump, and he will make sure to turn them out … At the end of the day, we have an advantage when it comes to the state-specific electorates that we’re looking at.”

Control of the Senate may come down to the Democratic candidates’ strength against the overall partisan lean of the states in play.

“They’ve by and large done a good job of recruiting the candidates they need to to put those states in play,” Coleman said of Democrats. “It’s just a question of: Are those states too red?”

Democrats are also defending open seats in Michigan and New Hampshire, while Sen. Jon Ossoff is seeking reelection in Georgia. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Michigan race as a toss-up and the contests in New Hampshire and Georgia, where Ossoff will face Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins after his win in the June 16 GOP primary, as leaning toward Democrats.

A Maine street fight

On paper, Maine could be seen as the bluest state on the map this year because of its state’s record in presidential elections.

But its Senate race also may be the most immune from the national environment, with a battle-tested Republican incumbent running in a lightly populated state where retail politics can still swing an election.

The matchup, which may be the single most competitive in the country, pits a controversial newcomer in Platner against Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate and powerful Republican with proven electoral appeal who has occasionally criticized the president during the Trump era but also voted for conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Democrats are betting that Maine voters want more full-throated opposition to Trump. Primary voters formally made Platner the nominee in June after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, seen as a more establishment candidate, suspended her campaign. 

Platner, a gruff-looking oyster farmer and Marine veteran, has connected with voters with a populist, outsider message. But he has faced an array of flaps, including over a tattoo with Nazi associations and that Platner had sexted several women while married. The New York Times also reported on women who said they were disturbed by Platner’s behavior while dating him.

He faces a difficult matchup with Collins, who has won other races in the face of significant national headwinds. In 2020, even as Trump lost the presidential election nationwide and in Maine, Collins won reelection while outperforming Trump by 18 points.

Senate math

The president’s party typically does poorly in midterm elections. Republicans are seen as likely to lose the House, though gerrymandering may make the fight for control of that chamber tighter than before. Republicans losing the Senate, too, would be seen as a stinging rebuke of Trump and GOP lawmakers.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is seeking election after he was appointed to the Senate last year to replace JD Vance, who resigned to become vice president. Brown is running against Husted after losing reelection in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno. 

Brown, who promotes a populist message, hearkens back to an earlier era of Ohio politics, when Democrats were more popular. President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012 but Republicans have since become ascendant, with Trump winning the state all three times he’s run for president.

While Husted hasn’t won a Senate race, he’s won statewide races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. 

In North Carolina, Cooper is now favored in a contest with Republican Michael Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report have said the race leans Democratic, though another forecaster, Inside Elections, rates it as a tossup.

They are battling to flip the seat and succeed Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who chose not to run for reelection after repeatedly clashing with Trump. He has publicly said Trump is harming Republican chances in November.

“We need Republicans to do well in November, but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!” Tillis wrote on social media in late May.

Alaska’s Senate race pits two well-known politicians in the state against each other. Incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing Peltola, who was the state’s lone U.S. House member for more than two years.

Peltola represents a hope by Democrats that a familiar face will resonate with voters in a state where the party has struggled. She was the first Democrat to win statewide in Alaska since 2008. Peltola, who was first elected to Congress in a 2022 special election, lost her race for reelection in 2024.

Sullivan’s campaign got a boost after Alaska election officials disqualified a different Dan Sullivan from appearing on the ballot. Alaska Elections Division Director Carol Beecher wrote that the other Sullivan had filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead” voters.

In Iowa, Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek, a state representative, are running for an open seat created after Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican, declined to run for reelection.

Iowa was once a major swing state and home of long-serving Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, and helped power President Barack Obama’s rise in 2008. It has since become solidly Republican, but anger over Trump’s tariffs and concerns that the war in Iran will send fertilizer prices rising have potentially created an opening for Democrats.

Lone Star longing

After Maine, no race has perhaps attracted as much attention as Texas.

Republicans are emerging from a bruising primary battle between Sen. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued and previously indicted state attorney general. Paxton won and will face Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminary student who speaks openly about his faith, a progressive form of Christianity.

A Democratic victory would represent a political earthquake. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s and haven’t won a statewide election since the 1990s.

Trump won 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024. A Talarico victory — a statewide Democratic victory — would open up the possibility that the party might one day again compete at the presidential level in Texas, the state that sent President Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington. Texas has 40 Electoral College votes, the second-biggest prize after California’s 54.

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The agreement is “a win-win situation” for the U.S., Vance said.

“If they change their behavior, big things are going to happen for Iran and for the world,” Vance said. “If they don’t, no skin off our backs” because Iran’s nuclear program and military are “still destroyed.”

The agreement immediately stops hostilities that began Feb. 28. The war claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members, thousands of civilians in Iran, Lebanon and across the Gulf region, and disrupted the global economy. 

Vance said the “Israelis, just like everybody else, have to respect this process,” highlighting that the agreement binds Israel to ceasing its bombing campaign in Lebanon against Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters.

Without specifying a date, Vance said he expects to brief Congress but is “quite confident” the administration does not need congressional approval on terms of the deal that will lift sanctions on Iran, despite the claims of some U.S. senators.

‘Just signed it’

Vance was slated to finalize the 14-point memorandum of understanding in Switzerland Friday, but President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced early Thursday morning that he had signed the deal while attending a state dinner hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles after the G7 summit among the world’s wealthiest nations concluded.

“Just signed it,” Trump told journalists after hugging and saying goodbye to France’s president and first lady Brigitte Macron just after 1 a.m. local time, according to the traveling press.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian posted images on social media early Thursday of the signed agreement in English and Farsi. 

“This text is the reflection of the voice of a nation that did not trade its dignity and independence for any threat or pressure. What was recorded today was the result of national resilience, political rationality, and responsible diplomacy,” he wrote, according to a translation on X.

Trump posted a series of messages about the signed memorandum on his own social media site, Truth Social, Thursday morning, including a link to a news article about Pope Leo commending the deal. The Trump administration engaged in a public war of words with Leo in April.

“These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT” the president posted online early Thursday.

Hours later, in all caps, he wrote: “OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE!), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY!). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ‘YOU’RE WELCOME!’ President DJT”

‘Foreign policy blunder’

Several, including some from the president’s own party, have been critical of the agreement.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who recently lost his primary after Trump endorsed an opponent, said in a statement on social media the deal “is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.

“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped.”

Sen. John Kennedy, also a Louisiana Republican, said on the Senate floor Thursday morning “We ought to give peace a chance. It’s only 60 days and we’re going to just have to trust the president on this one.”

Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.

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Fears of troops or other federal agents at voting sites have long loomed over the approaching midterm elections in November. Democrats and voting rights advocates have grown alarmed in recent months as Trump has publicly entertained the possibility. Other administration officials have mocked or sidestepped questions about possible deployments.

The legislation, the Protect Our Polls Act, would require Congress to pass a resolution approving any deployment beforehand. Federal law prohibits troops and other armed federal personnel from polling places, but contains an exception to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — fueling speculation that Trump could invoke this exception to bypass the ban.

“He is trying to nationalize the elections and he is telling us in his own words what he is trying to do,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “On top of that, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet positions have come up here and refused to rule out uniformed military or federal law enforcement being sent to the polls on Election Day.”

White House justification

The bill would require the White House, 48 hours before any deployment, to provide Congress with intelligence, legal justifications, deployment plans and evidence that state and local officials are unable to address the threat themselves. 

It also prohibits military personnel from using federal funds to access election records, a provision designed to block troops from seizing ballots.

Slotkin is offering the bill alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Alex Padilla of California, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I served to protect the Constitution of the United States and our democracy,” said Gallego, a Marine veteran. “I swore that oath, and the last thing any Marine, sailor, Army, Coastie, Air Force, spacemen — whatever they call them nowadays — wants to do is to undermine that. We’re here to protect democracy, we’re not here to undermine democracy.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that if Democrats “really cared about securing our elections,” the party would pass the SAVE America Act. 

The legislation would require voters to provide documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship. The measure has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

In May, Trump told reporters that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to questions about sending National Guard personnel or federal immigration agents to voting locations in November.

Amendments blocked

At a Senate hearing in April, Slotkin pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on sending troops to the polls. He called the questions “another gotcha hypothetical.”

The Democratic legislation comes a week after Slotkin said Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked two amendments to ban troops at the polls during work on the National Defense Authorization Act. The committee typically works on the defense spending bill behind closed doors.

The Protect Our Polls Act has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. Still, its introduction underscores the level of concern among Democrats as Trump’s efforts to influence the midterm elections come into focus.

The Department of Justice has spent a year demanding states turn over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data on voters. DOJ officials have said in court that the department wants to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. 

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data, but no judge has so far ruled in the administration’s favor.

Investigations

The Department of Justice is also engaged in several election-related investigations over past elections. 

The FBI raided a Georgia elections warehouse in January and seized ballots from the 2020 election. Election officials have been subpoenaed in Minneapolis and the FBI last week searched the office of an Ohio voting rights group.

And Trump signed an executive order that restricts voting by mail. It would require states to provide lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service before using the mail to send ballots and directs Homeland Security to share lists of voting-age citizens with every state. The order remains in effect for now, despite a series of lawsuits challenging it.

“There’s a common theme here,” Padilla said at a Democratic forum on election security on Tuesday. “All of these things are illegal and many unconstitutional.”

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Yet at least one state — New Hampshire — offers insight into how civic groups can work around a lack of registration opportunities to ensure young people can register, as well as the challenges that remain.

Since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, nearly all states must allow residents to register to vote at motor vehicle offices. But fewer teens are obtaining driver’s licenses today, translating into fewer trips to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and more missed chances to register.

More than 7.5 million people ages 16 to 18 don’t have a driver’s license, according to data compiled by The Civics Center, a nonpartisan group focused on boosting youth voter registration. Three million of those youth will be old enough to vote this year and all will be eligible by 2028, the organization said in a June research report on how declines in teen driving, spurred in part by the rising cost of obtaining a license, could affect voting.

Young people represent a large pool of potential voters for candidates ahead of the midterm elections this November and the presidential election in 2028. Still, voting advocates worry barriers to registration will keep many of them from the polls.

“Our goal is to help people debunk these myths that it’s somehow young people’s fault that these systems aren’t working well for them,” said Laura Brill, founder and CEO of The Civics Center.

Low registration rates

In recent years about 60% of 18-year-olds have held driver’s licenses, according to the Federal Highway Administration. By contrast, in 1994, the year after the National Voter Registration Act was passed, about 74% had licenses.

Even without declining visits to the DMV, registration rates among the youngest voters are low. During midterm election years, the percentage of 18-year-olds registered to vote typically remains under 30%, according to The Civics Center, compared to about 75% of Americans 45 and older. 

Some civic groups are pushing for more in-person voter registration drives, including in high schools, which may help offset the effects of fewer trips to the DMV. Without significant action, they fear registration rates will dip even lower. 

The League of Women Voters announced a partnership with The Civics Center in April to promote high school voter registration. The groups are offering state-specific training and toolkits to help members of the League, which has hundreds of chapters across the country, help students, teachers and school administrators hold registration drives.

They also want states to provide teens more time to register before they can vote. About half of teens currently live in states that allow voter pre-registration at 16 or earlier, according to The Civics Center. 

These states include California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

“Young people have a very short window of opportunity,” said Jeanette Senecal, chief of civic learning and impact at the League of Women Voters. “So when we increase that window of opportunity to allow for preregistration at 16 and 17, there’s a much longer kind of runway in order for us to get them registered to vote for that first election.”

The focus on voter registration drives reflects, in part, an acknowledgement that online voter registration isn’t a panacea for fewer in-person DMV visits. Thirty-six states either offer no online voter registration option or allow voter registration only with a driver’s license or state-issued identification, according to information compiled by The Civics Center.

“Paper forms, typically you only need a Social Security number and not a driver’s license. That’s one of the reasons that in-person efforts can be so effective,” Brill said.

SAVE America Act

Voter registration drives are under threat, however. President Donald Trump’s signature election legislation, the SAVE America Act, would effectively prohibit drives held by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters because it would require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican senators. Trump is still urging lawmakers to pass the measure and posted on social media recently that he opposes unrelated foreign surveillance legislation unless it also includes the SAVE America Act.

As of late 2024, 24 states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on third-party voter registration drives, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

What worked in New Hampshire

Because of its voter laws in the early 1990s, New Hampshire is one of six states exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, along with Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The exemption means New Hampshire isn’t required to offer voter registration at motor vehicle offices.

In New Hampshire, everyone — teens and older adults alike — registers in person with election officials and can also register at the polls on Election Day.

Open Democracy, a New Hampshire voting rights group, has spent several years working to improve the registration rate among 18-year-olds. 

The organization hired an employee focused on high school voter registration and held 41 high school voter registration drives in 2024, said Olivia Zink, the group’s executive director. To hold the drives, it had to assure election officials were present to accept paperwork.

In December 2023, an election off year, just 9% of New Hampshire 18-year-olds were registered. After the November 2024 election, nearly 64% of 18-year-olds were registered, according to data compiled by The Civics Center. Zink acknowledged that the presidential election was a major motivator, but she emphasized the importance of registering students every year. 

State laws can play a major role. Registrations plummeted last year, Zink said, after state lawmakers removed the ability of residents to sign an affidavit as proof of citizenship. She attributed the drop to students not regularly carrying their birth certificates or other documents proving citizenship with them.

“Even with education and posters that are hung up at school and announcements and letters home to parents — we still saw so many fewer students register to vote in 2025 due to that law,” Zink said.

In May, a federal judge blocked the New Hampshire law after a coalition of voting rights groups, including Open Democracy, challenged the measure. 

As part of her decision, Judge Samantha Elliott, a Biden appointee, found that Open Democracy registered fewer students in 2025 compared to 2023, even though the organization at that time didn’t have a full-time staff member dedicated to high school registration.

 Zink said that even in the first few weeks since the judge’s decision, she had heard of high school students once again registering by signing affidavits. 

Despite persistent barriers, Senecal cast the work of registering young people as critical. Each time someone votes, they’re more likely to vote again, she said.

“So the earlier we can engage those people, we really help create these lifetime habits of voting,” Senecal said.

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Borrowers who enroll in auto pay — the optional feature that allows a borrower to have their monthly loan payment automatically deducted from their checking or savings account — will see a reduction in their interest rate by one full percentage point from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2028. 

The change means a 6% interest rate would drop to 5%, for instance. 

Federal student loan borrowers currently enrolled in auto pay already receive an interest rate reduction of 0.25 percentage points from their servicer. Those borrowers do not need to take any additional action and will automatically receive an extra interest rate reduction of 0.75 percentage points, the department said. 

“This temporary incentive is designed to help borrowers pay down their balances more quickly, take full advantage of new repayment benefits, remain on track toward loan discharge opportunities and to strengthen the overall health of the federal student loan portfolio,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said during a Thursday call with reporters. 

Kent said the benefit is estimated to cost the agency $6 billion.   

Changes coming

The announcement came ahead of major changes for the federal student loan system — with many provisions slated to also begin July 1 — stemming from congressional Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed last year.

The overhaul includes new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system that gives new borrowers only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.

Meanwhile, millions of borrowers under the now defunct Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan will receive notices from their federal loan servicers starting July 1 that instruct them to enter into a legal repayment plan within 90 days. 

Auto pay enrollment halved

The federal student loan portfolio stands at a “staggering $1.7 trillion,” with about 37% of borrowers currently in repayment, according to Kent.

The under secretary noted that at the end of 2019, nearly 83% of borrowers were enrolled in auto pay but that the figure stood at just 40% by the end of 2025.

There are also 9.16 million borrowers in default as of April, per the latest available department data.  

Borrowers have until Sept. 30, 2026, to opt in to auto pay to be eligible for the two-year benefit. 

The benefit is open to borrowers whose federal student loans originated after July 1, 2012, the department said. 

Kent encouraged borrowers to “take advantage of this opportunity and enroll in auto debit as soon as possible.” 

Borrowers can enroll by logging in to their loan servicer account and selecting “auto pay” from a navigation bar, he said.

The department clarified that borrowers will need to stay in auto pay to continue receiving the reduced interest rate.

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Juneteenth recognizes the final emancipation of enslaved African Americans on June 19, 1865, at the end of the Civil War. Former President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.

Ohio Legislative Black Caucus President and state Rep. Terrence Upchurch, D-Cleveland, said Juneteenth is a reminder that progress does not happen on its own.

“A right on paper means little if people cannot reach it in real life,” he said.

Caucus members linked the holiday to current trends in Ohio regarding voter access. A constitutional amendment that would require photo ID to vote will be on the ballot in November after Republican state lawmakers passed a ballot resolution last week.

State law already requires citizens to provide photo ID before voting. But putting the requirement in the state constitution would make it more difficult for future legislatures to change the requirements without passing another constitutional amendment, state Rep. Meredith Lawson Rowe, D-Reynoldsburg, said.

Some scholarly research indicates that voter ID laws disproportionately prevent otherwise eligible minority communities from voting, but other research has found that the data is inconclusive. The caucus supports expanding early voting and mail-in ballot access, as well as increased voter education, in an effort to protect “every lawful ballot,” she said.

“The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus believes elections can be secure and accessible at the same time,” Rowe added. “We can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time in Ohio.”

Caucus members also used the occasion to express support for the Ohio Organizing Commission after reports that the voting-rights organization’s Cleveland offices were searched by FBI agents on Thursday. 

Upchurch called the reports “troubling,” adding that they came at a time when voting rights, civic engagement and community organization are “under attack.”

State Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, said the reports reminded him of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black voting rights activist during the Civil Rights Movement who faced retaliation from white Southerners for trying to vote in Mississippi. Despite the attacks, Jarrells said Hamer continued to organize to increase Black voter turnout.

“We must protect the right to vote,” he said. “We must refuse to let fear decide who belongs in democracy and who does not.”

State Rep. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, said Juneteenth also celebrates Black freedom from the economic system of slavery. Brewer argued for a push for “economic freedom” to make everyday costs like healthcare, childcare and education more affordable.

State Rep. Latyna M. Humphrey, D-Columbus, criticized leadership in the state legislature for advancing legislation like the constitutional amendment requiring photo ID to vote instead of lowering costs.

“Ohioans have every right to ask why this legislature is moving faster to limit participation than it is to address the challenges everyday families face,” Humphrey said.

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Conserve Ohio, the grassroots organization behind the proposed constitutional amendment, said they are now hoping to make the 2027 ballot. The amendment would prohibit building data centers with a peak load of more than 25 megawatts per month, which would prevent most modern data centers. 

“We want to make it clear: we will not be stopping,” Conserve Ohio said in a statement. “Construction won’t be stopping, so signature gathering and community action will not be stopping.”

Conserve Ohio originally was trying to make this year’s ballot after the Ohio Ballot Board gave petitioners the green light to start collecting signatures in April, but they were up against a tight deadline. 

“The July 1st deadline was our best case scenario for the quickest possible action,” Conserve Ohio said in a statement. “Internally, we set that as our ideal target and it just didn’t pan out. We are not going to be submitting this year.”

The amendment would have needed more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1 to get on this year’s ballot. The signatures they have collected so far remain valid since they did not submit them to the Ohio Secretary of State. 

Conserve Ohio has collected more than 70,000 signatures as of June 18, according to their campaign. The counties with the most signatures are Lucas County (6,482), Stark County (6,329), and Butler County (4,030).

“We can’t change when we began, but we can determine how it ends,” Conserve Ohio said. “All is not lost. The end goal has not changed. Our resolve has not changed.” 

Conserve Ohio is only using volunteers to collect signatures, and they have more than 1,000 volunteers. 

Ohio has more than 200 data centers, the sixth-highest state in the country, according to Pew Research Center. Most of the data centers are in central Ohio. Cincinnati has 26 and Cleveland has 22, according to the Data Center Map. 

More than a dozen Ohio cities have enacted temporary moratoriums on data centers.

Ohio lawmakers have yet to pass any data center legislation. 

Ohio House Bill 646 would, among other things, limit the size of new sales tax breaks from 100% down to 50%. But this would not apply to any of the companies with existing contracts, like Meta, Google and Amazon.

The state provided almost $1.57 billion in sales-tax exemptions on purchases of data center equipment and construction materials last year, according to the Ohio Department of Taxation. 

A large data center can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the Office of Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.

Data centers used 4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023 and that is expected to grow to 9% by 2030, according to the counsel. 

A large data center can use up to five million gallons of water per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. 

Lawmakers in at least 14 states — Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin — have introduced legislation that would temporarily ban data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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