Speaking in a June 25 interview on “The Guy Benson Show,” Husted said he shared the goal of shoring up Social Security but rejected the mechanism Moreno laid out with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

“We need to secure Social Security, need to protect it, we need to make it stronger,” Husted said, adding that any fix “will require a bipartisan solution.”

He drew the line at the tax change at the heart of the proposal. “But I’m not on board with the approach that they’ve outlined in terms of the process that they’re outlining with the tax increase, the targeted tax increase that they have,” Husted said. He called Moreno a friend and colleague, then added: “This rifle approach with the giant tax increases, not the way that I would, not the way I’d go about it.”

Moreno and Warren outlined their plan in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, June 23. The two say they are drafting legislation to remove the cap on wages subject to the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax. For 2026, that tax applies only to the first $184,500 of a worker’s earnings; income above that threshold is not taxed for Social Security. Workers and employers each pay 6.2%, while self-employed workers pay the full 12.4%.

“Instead of cutting benefits for the retirees who count on Social Security, we need to take bipartisan action to protect those benefits, reward work and restore fairness,” the senators wrote. “That starts with a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.” They argued the current structure is unfair, asking why a middle-class nurse should pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer. TiffinOhio.net has previously reported on the proposal.

The debate carries direct stakes for Ohio. Federal trustees this month projected the trust fund that pays retirement benefits will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, at which point scheduled benefits would drop to about 78% without congressional action. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that would cost the average Ohio beneficiary about $487 a month.

Independent analysts have said lifting the cap would meaningfully improve solvency but would not close the gap on its own. Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the Moreno-Warren idea a reasonable one that could erase roughly half the shortfall and delay insolvency by about 22 years, while cautioning it is not a complete fix. The conservative Tax Foundation, meanwhile, has argued that removing the cap would amount to one of the largest tax increases in decades and warned it would carry economic costs.

Husted’s opposition puts him at odds with Moreno at a moment when Social Security has become a flashpoint in Ohio politics. It also follows Husted’s own push, late last year, for a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget — a proposal that budget analysts warned could force deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as TiffinOhio.net previously reported.

Husted is running in the November 3 special election to keep the Senate seat he was appointed to after JD Vance became vice president. His opponent, former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, has made protecting Social Security a centerpiece of his campaign; Brown sponsored the 2024 Social Security Fairness Act, which restored full benefits for many public retirees. Moreno defeated Brown in the 2024 Senate race.

Moreno and Warren say their legislation is still being written and that details have not been released. Any change to Social Security would require approval by Congress.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Spencer Linke, 30, of the 100 block of West Madison Street, entered the pleas to 10 second-degree felonies before Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge Jon M. Ickes on Wednesday, June 24, according to court records. The court accepted the pleas, entered a finding of guilt and continued Linke’s bond.

The counts to which Linke pleaded guilty include charges of pandering obscenity involving a minor or impaired person and pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor or impaired person. He pleaded guilty to the 10 counts in exchange for the dismissal of 15 additional felony charges, according to court records.

Ickes scheduled sentencing for Monday, Aug. 17, at 1:30 p.m.

A Sandusky County grand jury indicted Linke on March 20 on 25 second-degree felonies — 14 counts of pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor or impaired person and 11 counts of pandering obscenity involving a minor or impaired person, court records show. The indictment alleged that between December 2024 and April 2025, Linke possessed or downloaded multiple videos depicting minors engaged in sexual activity, as TiffinOhio.net reported in April.

Linke pleaded not guilty on March 27 and was released on a $75,000 surety bond with no 10 percent option, posted through a bail bond company. A jury trial had been scheduled for June 30 before he changed his plea. He is represented by attorney Samuel Gold of Northwood.

Each second-degree felony count carries a maximum of 12 years in prison, according to court records. Under Ohio’s indefinite sentencing law, a judge selects a minimum term from a range of two to eight years, with a maximum equal to the minimum plus 50 percent; an eight-year minimum yields the 12-year maximum. When a defendant is sentenced on more than one felony, the counts may run concurrently or consecutively at the judge’s discretion.

A conviction under either statute also classifies Linke as a Tier II sex offender, requiring him to verify his home and work addresses every six months for 25 years, court records state.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That earlier funding, he said, is intended to help the agency keep track of fraud throughout the federal government and to oversee a substantial increase to the annual defense budget should Congress agree to provide the $1.5 trillion requested. 

“That would be one of those portfolios that we feel like we have nowhere near the number of (full-time employees) to be able to provide accountability for,” Vought said of the proposed defense budget. “And we are trying to invest in tools that would allow us to use technology to do OMB’s work better.”

The Office of Management and Budget, the agency’s official title, would then use the increase in its annual funding level to update a computer system, provide security and pay rent in two locations while it moves office space.

OMB asked Congress to approve $146.1 million in its annual spending bill, which is supposed to become law before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1. That would represent a 13.3% increase compared to its current funding level if both chambers agree to match the request. 

The $100 million that Republicans provided OMB in their “big, beautiful” law last year is in addition to the agency’s annual budget. 

Vought testified during a hearing before the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee the agency hopes to increase the number of full-time employees from about 500 to 675.

Whether other agencies will be able to bolster their funding levels and staffing will be up to their directors, Vought said. 

Proposed cuts across departments

The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request asked Congress to cut domestic spending by 10% and increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion, a $445 billion increase.

The proposal envisions cuts to spending across several departments, including Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor and State. 

Lawmakers from both political parties pressed Vought about staff reductions and funding cuts throughout the federal government, some of which were carried out by the U.S. Doge Service. 

New York Republican Rep. Nick LaLota asked why OMB allowed staffing at the World Trade Center Health Program to drop from 93 to 84 employees, despite it being approved for 120 people. 

“There were delays reported in claims of processing, treatment authorizations and enrollment appeals,” LaLota said. “For a program serving 9/11 first responders and survivors, what should have OMB’s early warning indications have been that those staffing levels were dropping to dangerously low levels that would impede their ability to deliver on this important mission?”

Vought testified OMB was unaware of the issues at the program. 

“OMB does not have this all-encompassing view of what is happening across the entire federal government,” he said. “We are a nerve center, I would agree with that, but we do not have the ability to know everything that is happening in the agencies.”

Screwworm and foreign aid

Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop asked Vought a series of questions about whether cuts to staff at the USDA had an impact on the New World screwworm, which had resurfaced in the United States after six decades without a case.  

“We don’t believe that this issue is under-resourced,” Vought said. “We believe that USDA has everything it needs to both create a long-term capability here and also find as many shots on goal to be able to deal with this in real time for farmers.”

Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan pressed Vought repeatedly during a tense exchange about whether cuts to foreign aid programs, including those at the U.S. Agency for International Development, led to deaths.

Vought said “there is nothing about those studies that has caused us to think differently about” the Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid spending.  

Pocan asked Vought whether he believes it’s morally or ethically wrong “to facilitate the death of children.”

Vought responded he doesn’t believe the Trump administration’s actions have led to that and that the United States provides “adequate foreign aid.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But on Tuesday, just days before the nation’s 250th anniversary, one thing was, for the most part, notably absent. The crowds. 

Early in the afternoon, few of the exhibits representing every state had lines to enter. Most were small rooms with a few tables showcasing artwork or cultural items, with a trickle of guests politely making their way through. Concessions areas were plenty and unfilled. 

Some attendees said the heat might have hurt attendance. The Washington, D.C. area saw temperatures in the high 80s to low 90s most of the day Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. 

It’s only going to get hotter. Temperatures through the rest of the week are expected to reach highs of up to 105 degrees, with a heat index of more than 110 degrees. 

‘Every state has something to contribute’

Pamela Lathrop, 56, of Florida, said more people will likely attend as it gets closer to the Fourth of July. 

“It’s getting busier as the day lets on, and so I hope everybody comes today, because I hear tomorrow’s gonna be really hot,” she said. “But I don’t really pay attention to crowd size. I’m just here enjoying myself, and I’m glad that D.C. put this on, and I think it’s a good thing to celebrate our 250 years.” 

Lathrop, who traveled from The Sunshine State for the 250th, added that she’s staying through the weekend to attend Independence Day celebrations and President Donald Trump’s speech on Saturday. What’s billed as an extraordinary fireworks display is scheduled to finish out the Fourth in the nation’s capital.

Despite the rising temperatures, more guests continued to arrive throughout the day, and the state exhibits started to fill up. 

Doug Woody, 66, of Fairfax, said the event felt different from a classic state fair, but that it was well put together. 

“I think this is really more to promote the U.S.A. and give the individual states a chance to show what they bring to the table,” he said. “Every state has something to contribute, you know? Maybe some states have put a little bit more time and energy into it than others, but overall, I mean, they’re here, so they’re representing, so that’s good.” 

Trump’s Freedom250

The Great American State Fair is part of Freedom250, the Trump administration’s marquee celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial. It is separate from America 250, the nonpartisan commission created by Congress tasked with organizing its own celebration of the anniversary. 

Not all states are staffing booths at the fair. A spokesperson for Washington state’s lieutenant governor’s office told States Newsroom the administration declined to join because of “the costs to the state associated with participating.”

According to news reports, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont did not contribute exhibits, though many are still represented by flags outside the individual booths. 

Pennsylvania did not initially take part but on June 27, Pennsylvania’s two U.S. senators, Dave McCormick and John Fetterman, announced that a coalition of Pennsylvania organizations would represent the state in its booth. 

Oregon resident Michael Lowe Mackenzie said he was surprised there weren’t more people in attendance Tuesday. He added that the celebration should not be partisan toward any one side or political figure, but rather “disconnected from all of that.” 

“I want to celebrate our nation’s history, warts and all, unobfuscated,” he said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nearly 13,000 of those acres are in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in Belmont and Guernsey counties. The commission is required to pick the “highest and best bid” per Ohio law. 

There was no discussion for most of the bids or nominations. Commission Chair Theresa White did not take questions from the media after the meeting. 

These bids in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area were approved for fracking during Monday’s meeting: 

• Oklahoma-based Gulfport Appalachia, LLC had the winning bid for 4,360 acres for $76,306,755 ($17,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Oklahoma-based Ascent Resources – Utica, LLC had the winning bid for 366.495 acres for $4,583,752.97 ($12,507/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 5.5% of production. 

• Texas-based Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 3846.934 acres for $61,577,872.54 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 2792.67745 acres for $44,702,387.94 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 849.881 acres for $13,604,045.17 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 746.85 acres for $11,954,827.95 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production.

Fracking is the process of injecting liquid into the ground at a high pressure to extract oil or gas.

There were approximately 2,000 incidents associated with oil and gas wells in Ohio from 2015-2023, according to FracTracker Alliance — a nonprofit that collects data on fracking pipelines. 

There’s evidence that shows increased exposure to fracking impacts health, in particular children’s health, including low birth weight, preterm births, congenital anomalies, and asthma, according to Yale School of Medicine. 

Bids for about 1,840 acres in Jockey Hollow Wildlife Area in Harrison County were approved for fracking during Monday’s meeting: 

• Gulfport Appalachia, LLC had the winning bid for 382.810 acres for $6,699,175 ($17,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Ascent Resources had the winning bid for 1,460.559 acres for  $18,267,211.41 ($12,507/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 5.5% of production.

West Virginia-based Infinity Natural Resources was awarded the bid to frack 513 acres in Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County for $3,848,325 ($7,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

Texas-based EOG Resources Incorporated was awarded the bid to frack 6.8 acres at Noble Correctional Institution in Noble County. 

Gulfport Appalachia, LLC was approved to frack four bids, EOG Resources was approved to frack seven bids, Ascent Resources was approved to frack four bids, and Grenadier Energy III was approved to frack four bids. 

Each lease agreement includes a 12.5% royalty paid to the state based on production of oil and gas at that site, per state law, with an additional financial incentive paid by the winning bidder to the state, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. 

The lease bonuses for this round of nominations totals more than $241.2 million, according to ODNR. 

All but one bid was approved during Monday’s meeting. About six acres in Tuscarawas County along State Route 800 was the only bid that was not approved because the nominator withdrew the bid, so no valid bids were submitted, according to ODNR. 

The bidders now go through the regulatory and permitting process through the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, as required by law. 

Four different bid selections totaling more than 8,360 acres of land in Egypt Valley were denied to be frack — 5,439 acres, 1,285 acres, 777 acres, and 863 acres. 

“Those nominations included parcels that have already been bid out,” said ODNR spokesperson Andy Chow.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law last week that would speed up the process to frack Ohio state parks and public lands. 

Ohio Senate Bill 219 was introduced by Ohio state Sen. Al Landis, R-Dover and it will give the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission 90 days to decide on a nomination to frack public land — half the amount of time they previously had.  

It will also require the commission to pick the “highest and best bid” within 60 days; currently there is no deadline. 

Advocates for protecting Ohio’s public lands from fracking booed and shouted their disapproval during the meeting: 

“No fracking our parks.” 

“Sounds like a rubber-stamping broken record to me.” 

“Hands off our land.” 

About a dozen people gathered outside the Ohio Department of Public Safety building before Monday’s meeting to protest fracking Ohio’s land. 

“Wake up, commissioners. We cannot give any more of our land to gas and oil,” said Judy Smucker, with Third Act Ohio.

“We care for the future of our children, and we will not give up. We have to follow the science, and unless someone like you, all of us cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” 

Randi Pokladnik lives about 20 minutes from Jockey Hollow and had a well pad less than a mile from her home during the fracking phase. 

“It was like living on an airport runway,” she said. “We couldn’t even talk to ourselves. My husband and I had to yell in the driveway when we were outside.” 

Terri Sabo lives outside the Salt Fork State Park. 

“Our lands are being destroyed by the oil and gas industry,” she said. “Our parks are being sold off to out-of-state companies from Texas, Oklahoma or West Virginia for the ‘best and highest bid,’ even if there is only one bid.” 

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.

Until Thursday, Temporary Protected Status gave about 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians nationwide  a shield from deportation and access to work permits.

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 statuses.

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

The TPS program was created in 1990 to help people fleeing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other conditions that make it too dangerous to return to their home countries, with regular reviews meant to ensure those conditions still exist.

Haitians had been covered by the program since 2011 after the earthquake there, and Syrians had been since 2012.

But in a 6-3 ruling last week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that federal courts can not judge whether the Department of Homeland Security followed the correct legal process to end a country’s TPS designation, unless it violated the Constitution. It also allowed TPS terminations to take effect for Haiti and Syria.

Gov. Mike DeWine said in a statement following the ruling that changing Haitians’ immigration status “is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio.”

Haitian TPS holders in Ohio contribute $160 million to the economy and $39 million in taxes every year.

Community leaders and immigration lawyers also warn that rampant violence makes returning to Haiti extremely dangerous.

Armed gangs control an estimated 90% of Haiti’s capital city and drive violence, displacement, and hunger across the country, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization.

“All they’re trying to do is build a better life for their family and their children,” said Marc Fequière, founder of the Columbus-based Haitian Community Network.

“If you take these people, that many thousands, and you send them back, it’s a suicide mission.”

Work authorization and Ohio driver’s licenses for TPS holders are set to expire Wednesday, July 1.

Immigration lawyers who work with companies advise employers to address the ruling, including finding potential employment-based pathways to legal status, before workers lose their permits.

Here is what immigrant advocates in central Ohio advise for TPS holders and concerned community members after the ruling:

For TPS holders: Find reliable legal aid, prepare an exit plan, and know your rights

Attorneys who are licensed to practice law and regularly practice immigration law can help TPS holders explore other paths to legal status, said Stephanie Corcoran, the managing attorney for Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio’s immigration team, in a statement.

She emphasized that TPS holders should avoid people who simply fill out immigration paperwork.

TPS holders in Ohio can consult low-cost legal aid organizations like LASCO, nonprofit law firms like northwest Ohio-based Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, or community organizations like Columbus-based Community Refugee and Immigration Services for legal aid.

Community Refugee and Immigration Services does not provide legal assistance for court cases, but it can refer people to trusted immigration attorneys, staff attorney Jesse Vogel said.

TPS holders can also find licensed immigration lawyers in their area through the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s website.

Even when consulting a licensed immigration attorney, Vogel added that TPS holders should ask questions to clearly understand their options.

“I just encourage folks to understand the terms of the service so that they don’t get into something that is not what they’re after,” he said.

Fequière said TPS holders should create an exit plan in case they need to leave the country.

TPS holders should identify trusted community members who can manage any property they hold in the U.S., he said.

People who are deported in violation of immigration law do not automatically lose their property in the U.S., Fequière added.

Haitian Community Network is connecting TPS holders to financial advisers to help them manage their property, he said.

TPS holders should also plan for their children’s future if they cannot leave with them, he said.

Fifty thousand U.S. citizen children have at least one parent who is a Haitian TPS holder; many of them have never been to Haiti and do not speak Haitian Creole, Fequière said.

Advocates nationwide also urge people to know their rights during encounters with immigration enforcement officers, regardless of immigration status.

The American Civil Liberties Union provides printable “Know Your Rights” cards in English, French, Creole, Arabic, and several other languages.

For community members: Support local aid organizations and other political avenues for restoring TPS

Fequière advised TPS holders to take every precaution necessary to avoid breaking any laws.

When their driver’s licenses and work permits expire, that effort will become significantly more difficult, he said.

That’s why Fequière and other central Ohio organizations are preparing to help migrants with their daily errands, whether that’s driving to childcare or the grocery store.

He is also coordinating with community organizations to deliver basic necessities such as food and baby products.

Central Ohio organizations that serve the local Haitian community include religious groups like the African & Haitian Ministry of the Diocese of Columbus and Jewish Family Services, as well as housing advocacy groups like Rentful 614. Springfield-area organizations include Haitian Support Center, Haitian Community Alliance, and G92.

A bill that would extend Haiti’s TPS designation through 2029 passed the U.S. House and now sits in the U.S. Senate. The White House said President Donald Trump would veto the bill, though, meaning that it would likely need support from two-thirds of the House and Senate to pass.

Fequière encourages people to call their representatives and senators in support of the bill. The help from people around Ohio and across the country gives him hope, he added.

“Even in the harshest situations, we always find a way to come out of it … and we know that the community is not alone,” he said.

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

Pou li nouvèl sa a an kreyòl Ayisyen klike la a.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Urban Institute released data from the 2024-2025 Reproductive Health Experiences and Access survey, a study looking to determine the impact of the overturning of nationwide abortion legalization on reproductive healthcare.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade with the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning the decision of abortion legality to individual states.

“Understanding whether and how people are facing challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare in the context of these changes will be key to mitigating health inequities and ensuring people get the care they want and need,” researchers Dulce Gonzalez and Emily M. Johnson wrote.

In 2023, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion and other reproductive care with 57% approval.

Researchers found that, despite the constitutional amendment, 30% of Ohio residents participating in the survey “reported needing but not getting one or more types of care” between 2024 and 2025.

Reproductive healthcare noted in the study were services like pelvic exams, cervical cancer screenings, care for irregular or painful periods, birth control, fertility assistance, gender-affirming care, and menopause care.

“Factors like cost, insurance barriers, and difficulty securing an appointment can prevent people from accessing the care they want and need,” according to the institute analysis.

Of those Ohioans reporting a lack of needed care, 16% said they didn’t receive “preventive gynecologic care,” and 11% did not receive care for irregular or painful periods.

Another of the issues survey participants said they had trouble with was access to birth control, with 6% telling researchers they “delayed or had trouble getting the birth control method they wanted in the past year.”

The data from Ohio aligned with the Urban Institute’s national data, showing 16% of participants across the country lacking needed preventive gynecologic care, and 10% reporting a lack of menstrual period care.

Nationwide, 7% of survey-takers reported delays or struggles with access to birth control.

“Barriers to reproductive healthcare were not spread evenly across the population,” Gonzalez and Johnson wrote. “Young people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+ were more likely to report challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare.”

Individuals age 18 to 24 represented the biggest Ohio group to have delays or struggle obtaining birth control between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 9% of all Ohioans reporting access issues.

Members of the LGBTQIA+ community made up 12% of those having trouble getting birth control, according to researchers.

U.S. Census data showed that as of 2023, 2.4 million women were “of reproductive age” in Ohio.

Of those, 13.1% were low income, 27.2% were in minority groups, and 7.6% were uninsured, researchers noted.

While the study acknowledged Medicaid expansions in Ohio that provided health coverage to adults up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and pregnant women up to 205% of the level, it also pointed out a lack of expansion in state Medicaid coverage for family planning services.

Medicaid funding in Ohio can’t be used for abortion care.

Also mentioned as part of the research were ongoing court cases related to reproductive rights in Ohio.

Open cases in Ohio challenge the 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, telehealth regulations on medication abortion, and transfer agreements between hospitals and clinics who provide abortions.

Courts have put temporary blocks on enforcement of the 24-hour waiting period and telehealth abortion bans as lawsuits continue.

Ohio lawmakers are also trying to enact a second measure with a 24-hour waiting period for abortion in the current General Assembly.

With the legislature on break until after the November election, it’s unclear whether the measure will make it out before the term ends in December.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In the short term, that means electricity is more expensive, and those costs eventually show up on residential power bills, it shows.

Perhaps more important, though, the report says, policies that keep aging plants running blunt the economic signals meant to drive investment toward newer, more efficient power plants.

“Without change,” Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Bullock said, “we are operating the market with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake. Consumers should not be forced to subsidize inefficiency.”

Downward spiral

The report complicates coal’s reputation as a as a reliable backstop when energy demand is high. Instead, it depicts coal as power source from an earlier era caught in a vicious cycle.

As old plants age out, there’s less demand for coal. With that demand declining, mining operations lose the economies of scale that allowed them to produce and deliver coal cheaply. Remaining coal plants face higher input costs, and the cost of maintenance increases as they get older as well.

Meanwhile, the grid has modernized, and favors power sources that can respond rapidly to changing conditions. The report states, “decades-old coal units, which were designed for steady, inflexible operation, are poorly suited to these conditions.” Repeated cycling to meet that demand only “accelerates mechanical wear, raises maintenance costs, and reduces efficiency.”

Ohio has seven coal power plants, according to the utility tracker Cleanview. The youngest began operation in 1990. The oldest started running 1955.

The report points to three cost recovery tools that keep “uneconomic” plants running when there might be cheaper alternatives.

The first is controlled at the state level, providing financial support through fees and riders on customers’ bills.

This was the arrangement under Ohio House Bill 6 that subsidized the Ohio Valley Electric Cooperative coal plants. Lawmakers eliminated those riders with Ohio House Bill 15 last year.

The other tools are controlled by the 13-state grid operator PJM Interconnection. The first, known as an uplift payment, covers the gap if the current market price is less than what it costs to run a power plant. The second, is a reliability must run contract, which keeps a plant headed for retirement running until other power sources can come online to replace it.

Why it matters

While the report stressed there are legitimate reasons to use any one of those tools in the short term, over time, they distort the market.

Paying power plants to run when they otherwise wouldn’t be profitable keeps the market price for energy artificially low. But because those payments eventually land with consumers, it’s not like they’re seeing a benefit from that lower price point.

Instead, the report argues, they could be missing out on the longer-term benefit of the actual, higher price point attracting power plant operators to invest in new facilities.

Bullock drew an allusion to the steroid era in major league baseball.

“The old players are being allowed to juice their performance. And what that does is it displaces the younger players that might come in on the roster and rejuvenate the team,” he said.

Bullock said Ohio “got its affairs in order” by eliminating OVEC subsidies through H.B. 15, “but it belongs to a league with 12 other teams, and the commissioner of the league, in this case is PJM.”

Reactions and recommendations

For its part, PJM defended its use of uplift payments and reliability must run contracts. In a statement, spokesman Jeffrey Sheilds stressed “PJM needs to operate the fleet of resources that is currently available.”

“At times,” he went on, “that means that uplift occurs when resources are needed for reliability; we work to minimize the amount of uplift while accounting for the uncertainties we must manage to maintain reliability. “

Shields added that reliability must run agreements “are necessary to preserve system reliability for those local consumers until transmission can be built to safely retire those resources,” and that federal regulators have oversight on those agreements.

The grid operator isn’t favoring or disfavoring any source of power, Shields said, “when we need every megawatt of power generated to manage our supply/demand imbalance being driven by data center growth.”

The Citizens Utility Board report made several recommendations. There should be greater transparency about cost recovery, they said, including the amount paid, the reasons it was necessary, and the beneficiaries.

The group called for “clearer cost allocation principles” to determine who pays when economic support is needed, as well as greater scrutiny for prolonged use of those tools “to distinguish more clearly between temporary reliability interventions and sustained support for aging, under-performing assets.”

The group also reiterated a longstanding complaint about how long it takes to get new power plants up and running.

“Improving the speed and predictability of these processes would reduce the perceived need for short-term reliability support and enable more cost-effective solutions to emerge,” the report stated.

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.

Independence Day is more than a celebration, it is a way to remember what was declared in Philadelphia in 1776: that our government should not rest on the will of a king, a faction, or a distant power, but on the consent of the governed.

That idea was revolutionary then. It remains our responsibility now.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth reflecting not only on what the Founders rejected, but on what they tried to build.

They objected to arbitrary power, to laws imposed without meaningful representation, and to courts dependent on political authority rather than justice.

In the Declaration, they accused King George III of undermining colonial legislatures and making judges dependent on his will alone.

Those grievances were not historical footnotes. They were warnings.

The Founders understood that liberty requires more than inspiring words. It requires institutions, laws, checks and balances, and citizens willing to defend them.

Building all of those into our constitution is what the Founders did to protect our future against the past abuses they soundly rejected. 

Our system has never been perfect. The promise of equality and self-government announced in 1776 was denied to many Americans for far too long.

But the genius of the American experiment is that each generation has been called upon to make the country more faithful to its founding principles. In large measure, we as a nation have heeded those calls. 

That work continues today.

Here in Ohio, the institutions of self-government are not abstractions. They are made up of people in our own communities: local officials who administer elections, judges who apply the law, clerks who maintain public records, lawyers who help resolve disputes, jurors who weigh evidence, and citizens who participate in civic life.

From county boards of elections to local courthouses, from jurors to public servants, these institutions may not always make headlines, but they are the backbone of our republic.

Our republic depends on trust — not blind trust, but earned trust.

Citizens have every right to ask questions, demand transparency, challenge decisions through lawful means, and expect accountability from those who serve the public. But our republic cannot endure if every institution is presumed illegitimate simply because it produces an outcome we dislike.

As a former federal judge who served on both the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, I have seen this up close.

During my years on the bench, I saw firsthand how much our constitutional system depends on the steady, often quiet work of people who serve their communities.

Our republic is sustained not only by founding ideals or public speeches, but by citizens and public servants who take their responsibilities seriously: following the law, respecting established procedures, weighing evidence, correcting mistakes when they occur, and accepting lawful outcomes even when they are disappointing or politically inconvenient.

The rule of law is what separates self-government from raw power.

Courts do not exist to favor one party, one candidate, or one public official. Judges do not serve a political cause.

Election administrators do not serve a political cause. Public servants, judges, and local officials swear oaths not to personalities, but to constitutions, laws, and the people they serve.

They and the work they do deserve thanks and respect, not derision. 

This is especially important in moments of political tension. When our preferred candidate wins, it is easy to praise the system.

The real test comes when our side loses. Peaceful transitions of power, respect for lawful outcomes, and reliance on evidence rather than rumor are not partisan values. They are American values.

This is also why civic education matters and why I am a member of Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition.

The Coalition brings together a bipartisan group of retired federal district and circuit court judges appointed by presidents from both parties.

This bipartisan coalition is committed to the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the importance of an independent judiciary.

Through this work, Keep Our Republic helps citizens better understand the systems that protect self-government: how courts review evidence, how disputes are resolved, how elections are administered, and how constitutional safeguards preserve peaceful transitions of power.

It is our civic duty to help citizens understand how the process works, who runs it, and where lawful remedies exist when disputes arise.

In a healthy republic, disagreement is expected. But disagreement must be channeled through evidence, law, courts, elections, and constitutional order — not threats, rumors, or contempt for every institution that stands in the way of our preferred result.

On our nation’s 250th Independence Day, let us recommit ourselves to that work — here in Ohio, in our communities, and across the republic we have inherited and must keep.

Judge Kathleen M. O’Malley is formerly of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She is a member of Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lawmakers in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia passed laws between January and May of this year restricting access to voting, according to an analysis of publicly available data by the Brennan Center and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Champions of such laws say they protect election integrity and ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in elections.

“Safeguarding the electoral process to improve oversight and prevent unlawful influence has been a top priority for my administration since my first days in office,” said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis  in an April statement announcing his signature on a sweeping new elections bill.

“This legislation strengthens the security, transparency and reliability of Florida’s election system.”

But the new laws have alarmed voting rights advocates, who say they will disenfranchise eligible voters and add extra burdens for older people, people with disabilities and those, such as married women, whose last names don’t match their birth certificates due to a name change.

“In Mississippi, rural voters may have to drive hours roundtrip to reach the office where they can obtain official records,” said Sonya Williams Barnes, Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a March statement condemning a new state law  that beefs up citizen verification requirements for voters.

“For people living on fixed incomes, cost matters.”

Even some Republicans have noted that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. A yearlong review of Utah’s voter rolls completed in May found just 27 confirmed noncitizens out of more than 2 million registered voters.

“This demonstrates that there is not a widespread problem (with noncitizens voting), and that states and our county clerks, for the most part, do a very good job of making sure that our voter rolls are clean, and that only eligible voters are registering,” Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said at a news conference in May announcing the results, as reported by the Utah News Dispatch.

The new raft of laws only applies to state and local elections; voters who don’t provide proof of citizenship as outlined in the state laws are still able to vote in federal races. Federal law doesn’t require proof of citizenship to vote, though only U.S. citizens can legally cast a ballot.

Many of the new laws focus on the identification documents required to be able to vote. Florida, Mississippi,  South Dakota and Utah now require proof of citizenship before a person can register to vote in state and local elections. Some, such as Florida, New Hampshire and Utah, have narrowed the types of identifying documents that will be accepted.

Florida’s sweeping new elections law has been dubbed the Florida SAVE Act. It won’t go into effect until next year, but it’s similar to the federal SAVE Act backed by President Donald Trump. He’s currently trying to push Congress to approve it by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

Florida’s new law requires proof of U.S. citizenship for anyone registering to vote, and requires the state to cross-check registration applications against government databases. Much like the proposed federal SAVE America Act, Florida’s version stipulates that if someone’s name on their citizenship document is different from the name on their current ID, they must provide proof of a legal name change. Experts believe this will particularly burden married women and others who have changed their surnames.

Other states have granted federal authorities the right to check voter lists for people they  believe aren’t citizens.

Kentucky’s omnibus elections law, passed in April, includes a provision granting federal authorities the right to check voter lists for people they believe aren’t citizens. Mississippi’s law requires the state to check prospective voters against a federal citizenship database.

And some new laws that aren’t explicitly about election integrity have the potential to impact who votes in the midterms.

In Kansas, a new law that requires Kansans to use the bathroom of their biological sex at birth in government buildings also says Kansans must use the gender of their biological sex at birth on their driver’s licenses. This could invalidate one major type of accepted identification that Kansas voters must show to be able to cast a vote in person. It particularly affects transgender voters because it invalidates documents such as  birth certificates and drivers licenses that were previously issued to them.

Many of the states that have passed new voting laws, such as Kentucky and Utah, are being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for not providing voter registration data to the feds.

Republican officials in these states have resisted sharing state voter rolls, which include personal information like birth dates and Social Security numbers, without court order.

“Neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding American citizens,” Henderson, the Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, said in a post on X in February.

Many state Democratic leaders also have criticized the laws.

“We already have a system in place to verify people’s citizenship and it is working,” South Dakota Democratic Party Chair Shane Merrill said in a statement after the state’s new proof of citizenship law passed in March. “There have been no instances of noncitizens voting in our elections. Instead, this law creates a two-tiered system in our state, telling some South Dakotans that they aren’t good enough to vote.”

Some state voting laws are now facing legal challenges. In Florida, voting rights advocates filed a lawsuit in federal court against the state’s SAVE Act, hoping to block it before it goes into effect in 2027. The plaintiffs claim the new law throws up barriers to voting and will disenfranchise people who are otherwise eligible to vote.

In New Hampshire, a federal judge struck down a 2024 Republican-backed law that required hard proof of citizenship to register to vote; the state has just appealed the ruling with a few months to go before the September state primary.

Some states are still considering new voting restrictions. Next week, the North Carolina House is expected to vote on an election bill that passed from committee without unanimous Republican support. The legislation would require voter identification from military and overseas voters, among other restrictions.

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.

At issue is a “medically frail” designation that the states say is too narrow and will make it too difficult for ill and disabled people to remain on Medicaid.

They’re challenging the administration’s guidance on who can be exempt from the work requirements included in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed a year ago.

Medicaid is the publicly-funded health insurance for people with low incomes. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility to more adults under the Affordable Care Act — 40 states plus the District of Columbia — must require those adults to prove they’re working, going to school or serving their communities for at least 80 hours a month to receive Medicaid. Georgia, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, which have used federal waivers to expand their Medicaid programs, are also subject to the new work rules.

The new lawsuit specifically targets new federal guidance that narrows the definition of who can qualify as “medically frail,” a key exemption used to excuse Medicaid recipients from work requirements if they have serious disabilities or illnesses. The guidance came in the form of an interim final rule published this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The Democratic attorneys general and governors who are plaintiffs in the suit claim the feds surprised them with this new rule months after they’d already been working with CMS on how to implement the work requirements.

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, in a statement.

“Further, this Administration is once again attempting to sidestep Congress by unlawfully reinterpreting the law, and coercing the states to rush to implement their last-minute changes or face penalties,” he said.

To qualify as “medically frail” and therefore exempt from work requirements, the new guidance says, a Medicaid recipient must have a significant health condition and be significantly impaired in their ability to work. It’s a distinction the states say Congress did not make in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The states also claim the new guidance violates federal law by ignoring evidence that work requirements cause people to lose coverage due to red tape.

For example, Arkansas tried instituting work requirements for Medicaid recipients in 2018, during Trump’s first term. A federal judge halted the policy less than a year later, after 18,000 adults had lost coverage. Studies later found that Arkansas’ work requirements didn’t increase employment. A recent analysis from the Urban Institute projects that 3-7 million people could lose coverage because of the new work requirements.

Supporters of the new work rules say they are sufficiently flexible and that the category of who qualifies as “medically frail” remains broad.

“This rule helps Americans build skills and independence through work, education, job training, or community service, creating new opportunities for themselves and their families,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, director for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in a statement earlier this month announcing the new guidance.

The lawsuit says states have already invested significant resources into implementing the new work requirements based on the original law’s language and prior federal guidance. They’re staring down an August 31, 2026, deadline for notifying Medicaid recipients about changes to the “medically frail” designation, a timeline the states say is not workable. They face financial penalties for not meeting the deadline.

States are expected to put the new work requirements into place by January 1, 2027, though the feds could choose to grant them temporary extensions through 2028.

The lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

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.

Cases like that of Pacheco, who has applied for legal status through three U.S. citizen children, are what the Supreme Court has to consider when it rules next year on the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. 

Justices are expected to hear the case as soon as October after the U.S. solicitor general requested the court to resolve conflicting rulings on the matter from appeals courts. 

The Trump administration’s policy requires detention without bond for anyone who crossed a border illegally, and has been used to pressure immigrants into voluntary departure to escape sometimes squalid conditions.

For now, plenty of U.S. district judges are questioning the idea that immigrants should be incarcerated indefinitely at the whim of the executive branch. 

Stateline reviewed every immigrant habeas petition case decided in a single day — June 16 — across the country, in order to sample judicial opinion. A habeas case is a request from an immigration prisoner for a judge to review the legality of his imprisonment and order a bond hearing or release. 

Of the cases that were decided that day, judges released detainees immediately or ordered bond hearings 142 times, and denied them only 36 times. Many of the judges, even Republican appointees, argued that unlimited detention was unconstitutional.

One of those judges was U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison, who heard Pacheco’s case.

After being picked up in California, Pacheco was held in Houston, and filed a habeas case in Texas.  Ellison ruled that it was a violation of Pacheco’s civil rights to detain him for months. He ordered Pacheco to be freed immediately.

“Given the severity of this ongoing unconstitutional deprivation of liberty, the Court concludes that immediate release from custody is required,” Ellison wrote. 

He wrote that he recognized that the Trump policy applied to Pacheco, and that it was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs Texas, but said that he was releasing the man anyway. 

“The Due Process clause does not permit the government to ‘detain any noncitizen, no matter how long they have actually lived in the United States, for any length of time, without any individualized justification [merely because] that person initially entered the country without lawful admission,’” Ellison wrote, partially quoting a 2003 Supreme Court ruling. 

Ellison is a Democratic appointee from the Bill Clinton administration, but judges from both parties, including Trump nominees, ordered bond hearings for immigrants and found the Trump policy unconstitutional. They included judges in states where appeals courts had already upheld the policy. 

Many judges are going beyond bond hearings and ordering release directly, as Ellison did. In some situations the judges are holding the legal cases open to make sure releases are made or bond hearings are fair. 

Few immigrants get bond hearings because of the policy, making court challenges their only recourse, said Xin Tian, an attorney representing an immigrant who was released June 16 in a California case. His client’s case was among those reviewed by Stateline.

“The individual’s only recourse for release is to seek a writ of habeas corpus,” Tian wrote in an email to Stateline. “Fortunately, federal judges uphold the Constitution and will grant such a writ, leading to direct release. Aside from this, there are virtually no other ways to obtain release.”

A Trump appointee in Texas, U.S. District Judge Jason K. Pulliam, ordered five releases in one day, calling the detentions “unlawful” and ordering immediate release during court proceedings. In each case, he wrote that the detainee “has no known criminal history, had been complying with the terms of a prior release, and there is no indication of flight risk or danger to the community.”  

He acknowledged in court papers that he made the rulings despite the fact that an appeals court ruling for the Fifth Circuit — affecting Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — had concluded mandatory detention was legal in those cases.

A President Joe Biden appointee in Utah, U.S. District Judge Ann Marie McIff Allen, was one of the rare judges to agree with the Trump administration’s policy, according to Stateline’s review. 

McIff Allen denied a petition for a bond hearing by a man from Venezuela who had arrived in Texas in 2024 to seek asylum. He had scheduled an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through an official mobile app, then settled in Florida. 

His immigration case was still pending when the Trump administration revoked his parole and arrested him in May. The man was “not entitled to immediate release or a bond hearing,” McIff Allen ruled, acknowledging that “some district courts have determined the issue differently.” 

The detention was legal under a Trump administration policy that interprets immigration law to mean all immigrants who arrived illegally can be treated as if they’re at the border “seeking admission” to the country. 

Stateline found only seven cases where judges favorably cited the administration’s policy of mandatory detention when denying a habeas case. Besides the ruling from a Biden appointee in Utah, there were six involving Trump judicial appointees: four in New York and one each in Puerto Rico and Texas. 

U.S. District Judge Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, a Trump appointee, denied release to Marcelo Jerez, a Dominican Republic native living in Puerto Rico with a U.S. citizen wife and sick 1-year-old child who required his help with monitoring and care.  

“The crux of this case has been the subject of myriad lawsuits throughout the nation and dutiful judges have reached divergent answers,” Arias-Marxuach wrote. 

But relatively few judges in the Stateline review considered the mandatory detention policy valid: Four of the other six cases for the day that did so, other than the Utah case, were denied by a single judge, Trump appointee Judge John L. Sinatra in New York’s Western District court.

Sinatra wrote in one of the cases, for a Venezuelan man who had been allowed into the country in 2024 on parole, that such people should be treated as if they were still at the border “seeking admission,” and face mandatory detention, and should not get the constitutional rights of someone already in the United States with legal status.

“How could it be otherwise? If he were not seeking admission he would have given up and departed already,” Sinatra wrote in his decision. 

David Wilson, a Minnesota immigration attorney who serves on an immigration court committee for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that criminal records among immigration detainees are a bone of contention among judges. There’s widespread disagreement over whether they should be detained indefinitely without bond, he said, even if a U.S. citizen in the same circumstance would be freed on bond in a criminal court. 

“This kind of lingering question is, how long is too long for people with criminal records? Some circuits have come along and said, ‘There is not too long because your criminal activity is what it is, you’re just stuck, if you want to end this stop fighting your case,’” Wilson said. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@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.

HUD is currently finalizing a rule that would allow public housing authorities and property owners who participate in federal housing voucher programs to impose work requirements and time limits on work-ready adults, or working-age adults (younger than 62) who are not disabled.

The federal agency says members of the coalition support the idea of giving housing authorities and providers discretion to require work of up to 40 hours per week for nonelderly, nondisabled adults, supplementing those rules with job training and other supportive services.

HUD argues that current housing policies discourage work and self-sufficiency, and extend the amount of time that people remain on housing assistance. In a social media post, Public and Indian Housing Assistant Secretary Ben Hobbs said the new requirements could generate over $500 million in new resident income.

In 2023, 31% of the people receiving federal housing assistance were nonelderly, nondisabled adults. Of that group, 44% were working and 56% were not, according to a 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service.

More than a hundred public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined the Work & Dignity Coalition, according to HUD. The National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for more low-income housing, produced a list of 58 entities, including the public housing authorities in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Tampa.

Less than 1% of public housing authorities, known as Moving-to-Work agencies, are currently allowed to impose time limits or work requirements on people receiving housing assistance. HUD cites Champaign County, Illinois — which requires each able-bodied adult to work or be in school for at least 15 hours per week, and each household to generate 30 hours of work income at the minimum wage.

“I think that the important thing to note is that this is all about self-sufficiency, even if there might be some fear over what is required and how that would affect their housing,” said Peyton Pannell-Johnson, a spokesperson for the Housing Authority of Champaign County. “There is a team that needs to connect people to work, and then a team that follows up with each client.”

But housing advocates argue that the proposed requirements will make it more difficult for people to keep their housing assistance. The Congressional Research Service also warned in its 2025 report that imposing work requirements on federal aid recipients often trips up people who are working already.

“Work requirements can increase the burden for working recipients to prove that they remain eligible for benefits by requiring that they produce additional or more frequent information about their wages and hours,” the research agency stated. “There is an inherent tension between helping families meet their basic needs and promoting work in low-income assistance programs.”

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.

“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court is a win for Nevada and for the sovereign right of states to conduct their elections in the manner they see fit,” said Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford in a statement Monday after the court ruled against the Trump administration’s effort to disqualify ballots arriving after Election Day.

The decision rounds out a trio of wins in the past week for Democratic states and voting rights advocates. However, with much at stake in the upcoming midterm elections, voting rights advocates say they remain vigilant against any additional attempts by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to restrict access to the ballot box.

“While this ruling preserves our state’s election processes for now, we remain prepared to do everything we can alongside our partner organizations to ensure our election system in Nevada isn’t undermined because of Washington politicians,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah.

Trump on social media called the high court’s ruling “a tremendous loss” and pushed for the SAVE America Act, which targets the extremely rare phenomenon of noncitizen voting by requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The legislation has passed the House but remains stalled in the Senate where a handful of Republicans and all Democrats are opposed.

Mail ballots under attack

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrived within five business days. The court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that “nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day.”

In Nevada, ballots postmarked by Election Day must be counted if they are received by election officials within four business days. (If the postmark is missing or unclear, the ballot can be accepted up to three days after Election Day.) A dozen other states have broad grace periods similar to Mississippi’s and Nevada’s. Thirty states accept military and overseas ballots delivered after Election Day.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar praised the SCOTUS ruling and emphasized that mail ballots have been widely embraced.

“Rural voters, military and overseas voters and working voters of every political party rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard in a way that works for them,” said Aguilar in a statement. “In the June Primary election, 60% of voters used mail ballots – with our most rural counties using them at the highest rates.”

In Douglas County, 3 out of 4 people–77%–used a mail ballot for this year’s primary election. Statewide, nearly 86% of voters have used a mail ballot at least once since 2022.

The overwhelming majority of mail ballots in Nevada are received on or before Election Day, data shows. In 2024, less than 2% of ballots – almost 12,000 – in Clark and Washoe counties were received after Election Day.

Added Aguilar, “Nevada is a battleground state and every single eligible vote counts – those votes can make an impact in the closest of races.”

Local voting advocates praised the SCOTUS decision.

“A ballot postmarked by Election Day is a vote cast by Election Day, period,” said Shelbie Swartz, executive director for Institute for a Progressive Nevada. “Voting is a right, not a race against the postal service. Americans who do everything required of them to cast a ballot should not lose their voice because of delays they cannot control.”

“Mail delays are not hypothetical,” said Barbara Hartzell, executive director of Indigenous Voices of Nevada, in a similar statement. “They happen every day. That reality is especially familiar in rural and Tribal communities, where mail service often takes longer and voters may have few alternatives beyond driving long distances to an in-person polling location.”

In the lead up to the June 9 primary, the Nevada SOS office recommended voters use a ballot dropbox after June 2 in order to ensure the ballot arrived on time. An earlier arrival also provides additional time for curing time, should there be a problem with the ballot that the voter needs to address.

Trump executive order shot down

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling comes the week after two U.S. District Court judges ruled againstTrump executive orders that sought to restrict how states operate their elections.

Trump, through an executive order issued earlier this year, sought to create a nationalized list of eligible voters and direct the U.S. Postal Service to only send mail ballots to those on the list. States and elected officials that did not comply would be at risk of losing federal funds or criminal prosecution.

A judge ruled those provisions of the executive order unconstitutional and beyond the president’s authority.

Trump also, through an executive order issued in March 2025, sought to require proof of citizenship for voter registration and restrict mail ballot counting. That executive order had previously been put under a preliminary injunction that was made permanent last week.

Next battle: Overseas voters?

The Republican National Committee and Jim Marchant, the Republican challenging Aguilar for SOS, sued the State of Nevada on Friday over a state law addressing what they’ve dubbed “never-resident voters” — a no doubt minuscule number of U.S. citizens born abroad and who vote based on their parent or legal guardian’s last residence in the U.S.

According to Democracy Docket, which reported the Nevada suit, similar legal challenges have been filed in Nebraska, Colorado, Virginia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Michigan. The Michigan case was rejected by a court there in April.

Marchant is an ardent election denier who continues to peddle unfounded conspiracy theories. He believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

In 2022, Marchant ran for secretary of state against Aguilar and lost. While on the campaign trail that year, Marchant said that “the people of Nevada have not elected anybody since 2006. They’ve been installed by the deep state cabal.”

In May, ahead of the competitive Republican SOS primary, Marchant told News4 in Reno he believes 20,000 votes were “manufactured” to secure an Aguilar victory in 2022. When asked for proof of that claim, Marchant directed the reporter to “ask Tulsi Gabbard,” at the time the director of national intelligence, and President Trump.

Marchant did not respond to the Current’s request for comment Monday.

This story was originally produced by Nevada Current, 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.

Police said the crash was reported around 8:30 p.m. June 30 after a motorcycle traveling eastbound on Greely Street at a high rate of speed lost control and left the south side of the roadway.

According to police, the motorcycle struck a utility pole and guide wire, continued eastbound and then overturned, ejecting the rider.

Officers and Tiffin Fire/Rescue responded to the scene and found the rider with serious injuries. The rider was taken to Mercy Health — Tiffin Hospital before being flown by Life Flight to Mercy Health — St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo.

Police said the rider’s identity is being withheld at this stage of the investigation. The rider’s current medical condition was unknown as of the department’s release.

Investigators said there is no evidence suggesting any other vehicles were involved.

Anyone who witnessed the crash is asked to call the Tiffin Police Department at 419-447-2323.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The account comes from a single source — an anonymous Columbus operative the outlet says works exclusively with it, granted anonymity over fear of professional retaliation — and was published by The Rooster, a subscription Substack that covers state politics. TiffinOhio.net has not independently corroborated the operational claims, and the Ramaswamy campaign has not publicly responded. What follows is the source’s account as relayed by the outlet.

According to the report, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley and his staff have been shut out across four fronts. McColley’s senior aides have been barred from the campaign’s weekly strategy and scheduling calls, the source says, with spending decisions made by Ramaswamy’s inner circle. The source also alleges McColley has no role in messaging: policy initiatives and media rollouts are dictated from the top, the report says, leaving his staff to defend abrupt rhetorical shifts they were given no warning about.

On the campaign trail, the report claims, McColley and his aides are routinely left off the guest lists for major rallies and high-dollar donor dinners, sometimes learning of Ramaswamy’s stops through public press releases. The source characterizes McColley as too passive to force the issue and says he often stays home rather than appear independently.

The most concrete allegation concerns the campaign’s own branding. Months into the cycle, the report says, the operation still has not added McColley’s name to its yard signs or its official media kit — and McColley has pushed repeatedly behind the scenes to be included, to no effect. That claim is checkable against the campaign’s public materials; the others rest on the source’s word alone.

Ramaswamy, the controversial biotech entrepreneur and failed 2024 presidential candidate, won the Republican gubernatorial primary in May and is the party’s nominee to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine. He named McColley — the Senate President, who represents the 1st District covering Napoleon and surrounding northwest Ohio counties — as his running mate in early January, and DeWine endorsed the pairing that same week. On Nov. 3, the ticket faces Democrats Amy Acton, the former state health director, and David Pepper, a former Ohio Democratic Party chair.

One thread in the report lines up with earlier mainstream coverage. The source frames Ramaswamy’s outreach to Christian and evangelical voters — a high-turnout bloc in Ohio’s rural and suburban counties — as a glaring weakness. Independently, NBC News reported in January that Ramaswamy’s religion was a live issue at the McColley rollout in Cleveland, where speakers stressed McColley’s Christianity. NBC reported that Center for Christian Virtue president Aaron Baer told the crowd Ramaswamy had committed to picking a strong Christian as his No. 2; Ramaswamy, who would be the first Hindu governor in the United States, confirmed the conversations but described his commitment as something short of a promise.

The Rooster also says it broke the news of McColley’s selection in January, before the official announcement — a claim NBC News corroborated in crediting the outlet. The report adds that the pick came together only after Ramaswamy abandoned a near-final plan to choose former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, going so far, the outlet says, as to commission a Ramaswamy-Mandel logo before calling McColley less than a day before the rollout. NBC confirmed that Mandel emerged as a late contender; the logo and timeline details come from The Rooster.

Stripped of the unverified specifics, the report’s core assertion — a nominee who has boxed out his own running mate — would point to friction at the top of a Republican ticket that polling has shown to be competitive against Acton in a state Democrats have not won at the top of the ballot in 20 years.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump and his allies had spent several days in June savaging California over its slow vote counting and baselessly alleging its contests were fraudulent. But now the president divulged that his actions went beyond just public criticism.

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Trump recounted. 

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has focused the power of federal law enforcement — and even a top U.S. intelligence official  — on elections and discredited grievances over the president’s 2020 loss. 

In January, the FBI raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. FBI agents are probing the 2020 election in Milwaukee and subpoenas have gone out to officials in Arizona. The Department of Justice demanded to see Detroit-area ballots and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it took voting machines from Puerto Rico. The FBI searched the offices of an Ohio voting rights group in June.

Democrats, election experts, former federal prosecutors and others say the administration’s actions raise deep concerns about whether the White House will use groundless investigations to disrupt the November midterm elections. They say Trump’s recent acknowledgment that he personally directed a federal prosecutor to examine voting in California only underscores their fears.

“The notion that a president or anybody in the White House calls up the U.S. attorney’s office, certainly on our end, would have been considered, I think, completely inappropriate,” said Stephen McAllister, who served as the U.S. attorney in Kansas during the first Trump administration.

Shattering a norm

After Watergate, the Department of Justice built a reputation for independence from the White House. While presidents nominated DOJ leaders and set broad priorities for the department, they were expected to steer clear of specific investigations. The norm was tested during the first Trump term but didn’t entirely break. 

By contrast, the second term has shattered it, creating a clear path for the president to act on his false claims of stolen elections, according to individuals who have worked in the Justice Department and critics of the Trump administration. Growing evidence, they say, points to Trump personally intervening in federal law enforcement action on elections — or top officials getting the message and acting accordingly.

“I think the focus and the direction is whatever the president wants, and I think this is wrong,” McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Kansas, said of the current Justice Department. 

“The DOJ, especially post-Watergate, there were a lot of things done to try to strengthen it as an institution that could stand up and protect, defend the rule of law,” he said. “And this administration has torn so much of it down.”

The California election shows how quickly the Justice Department can take action after Trump makes his views known.

California’s primary election was Tuesday, June 2, but election officials are allowed to take roughly a month to complete vote counting. The lengthy process is a product of the state’s large population, as well as its reliance on voting by mail. 

While politicians, including Democrats, have called on the state to speed up its count, the sometimes plodding process isn’t evidence of fraud.

Late the night after the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.

It isn’t clear which U.S. attorney received the call from Trump or when exactly he placed the call or if it actually occurred. California is divided into multiple federal judicial districts, each with their own top federal prosecutor. 

Asked about the call, the White House referred States Newsroom to Trump’s comments and the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to questions.

By the Friday morning after the election, First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway with the FBI. He also dispatched a prosecutor to observe vote counting.

In the days that followed, Essayli gave several interviews with conservative media, including an appearance on commentator Glenn Beck’s show where he predicted criminal cases. “I expect people will be charged,” he said.

After Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who frequently clashes with Trump, posted on social media that Trump had “just admitted it.”

“The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election,” the post said.

DOJ pursuing 30 lawsuits on voter rolls

Ahead of the midterms, Trump and other administration officials have shown a high level of interest in how elections are administered. 

Last week, the president refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement a nationwide requirement that voters show documents proving their citizenship. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict voting by mail, which a federal judge blocked last week.

The Justice Department has filed 30 lawsuits against states that have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers. 

The Department of Homeland Security also overhauled a powerful computer program into a system that can search voter rolls for possible noncitizen voters (a judge recently halted use of the reconfigured system).

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement when asked about Trump’s approach to election-related investigations.

Jackson named several federal laws — including the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act — that she said give the Justice Department “full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

“This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” Jackson said, noting Trump’s support of the SAVE America Act.

Within the Justice Department, criminal investigations involving elections have traditionally been treated with particular sensitivity, McAllister said. 

Anything touching on elections needed to be coordinated with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., he said, adding that there was a lot of centralized control to prevent U.S. attorneys “from just poking around where they shouldn’t be.”

The Justice Department has previously published a manual on prosecuting election crimes on its website, but at some point it was removed without explanation. In June, a group of Democratic senators voiced concern its disappearance could presage attempts to interfere in the midterms. They noted that during Trump’s first term the manual was accompanied by a memo outlining the DOJ’s election non-interference policy.

Robert Weiner, who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, said the government used to enjoy what the legal community calls the presumption of regularity — the belief among judges that it was acting lawfully. He said courts should not extend that presumption now.

Trump may be trying to impair the ability of local election officials to conduct fair elections and “generally create chaos” that could serve as an excuse to seize voting machines and not accept legitimate election results, Weiner said.

“I am very worried,” said Weiner, who is now the director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. “I think we have to act on the assumption that bad things are going to happen. That’s not saying that they will. We have to be prepared and able to counter.”

US Senate Dems form task force

Some Democratic states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut and others — have passed new limits on federal election interference. At the federal level, Senate Democrats have formed an election protection task force and announced plans to train their staff members as election observers.

“The president of the United States is clearly laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the midterms and try to undermine confidence in any election results that he is not happy about,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told reporters.

Voting rights advocates fear the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County election facility in January offered a window into what it might look like for federal law enforcement to seize ballots after the November election.

While Trump has long promoted false allegations about voter fraud in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the raid shocked election experts in part because the FBI obtained a search warrant, meaning a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of federal crimes would be found at the election facility.

Fulton County officials vocally condemned the raid and successfully sued to unseal the affidavit used to support the warrant. The 19-page document included previously investigated claims about the 2020 elections and revealed the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who Trump last fall made a special government employee to look into the 2020 election. 

Trump appears to have taken a personal interest in the Fulton County raid. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was photographed at the scene and later told Congress she was present at Trump’s request. The New York Times reported that she put the president on the phone with FBI agents the next day.

Gabbard left her role in June, but Trump has indicated he wants the new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to also look into elections. The director of intelligence, a Cabinet-level position established in the wake of 9/11, is supposed to help lead the U.S. intelligence community and has no formal role in elections.

Pulte, who has no previous intelligence experience and previously led the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is known for antagonizing the president’s perceived opponents, including the former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James.

“He may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters in early June.

Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager at All Voting is Local Georgia, praised Fulton County officials for aggressively pushing back against the raid. 

She said that while she is concerned the search could create a chilling effect among voters and election workers, she has been heartened that it had also motivated some people to sign up to work the polls.

While no one has a crystal ball, Pyle said, she expressed hope that Fulton County’s rejection of federal interference will minimize future attempts.

“I think that’s optimistic,” Pyle said. “I think we prepare as best as we can and we just have to be ready to defend the results.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

DeWine explained that a case from Mississippi, pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, weighed heavily on that decision. If the court held that it’s illegal to accept valid ballots after Election Day, he worried, it could wreak havoc on Ohio’s 2026 election.

Instead, a 5-4 court determined Monday that Mississippi’s grace period — and by extension, other state’s grace periods — are perfectly valid.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, state law dictates when they must be received.”

Ohio impacts

The U.S. Supreme Court’s vindication of a state’s role in setting election deadlines will protect grace periods around the country.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states and four territories currently allow absentee ballots to arrive after Election Day.

And that figure was even higher just a year ago. In 2025, Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah all changed their laws to require absentee ballots arrive by Election Day.

Ohio did, too. Before the change by Ohio Republican lawmakers, the state used to allow absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day the four-day grace period to arrive.

But because Ohio lawmakers acted preemptively, voters in the Buckeye State will still have to get their ballots in by Election Day this November.

League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller voiced frustration following the court decision.

“Shame on the Ohio legislature for complying in advance with a ruling that didn’t even go their way,” she said in a statement.

This November will be the first general election without an absentee ballot grace period in Ohio. The change will likely impact several thousand voters.

According to an Ohio Capital Journal review, nearly 7,800 absentee ballots arrived after Election Day during the 2024 election.

The bill eliminating Ohio’s grace period, Ohio Senate Bill 293, got fast tracked through the legislature late last year.

The bill was introduced Oct. 14 and passed both chambers of the General Assembly just over a month later on Nov. 19. In December, it landed on DeWine’s desk.

That prompted an uncomfortable decision. DeWine had previously stated he considered the election integrity matter “settled,” when he signed a photo voter ID law in January 2023.

DeWine went on to say he did not expect “to see any further statutory changes to Ohio voting procedures while I am governor.”

But last December, on the final day he could act, DeWine signed S.B. 293.

In an email, DeWine’s spokesman, Dan Tierney defended the decision, given the information available at the time.

“Governor DeWine was required to act on S.B. 293 in December 2025.” Tierney said. “He could not wait to see what future decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States would be before determining whether to sign the bill. Ultimately, the chaos and voter disenfranchisement that could have occurred if today’s decision went another way were too much of a risk not to have clear standards.”

To Miller, though, the consequences of Ohio Republicans forcing the issue are impossible to ignore.

“For many seniors, voters with disabilities, rural Ohioans, and college students, voting by mail is a necessity — not a convenience,” Miller added.

“We congratulate voters in other states who can benefit from this (U.S. Supreme Court) ruling, while we continue helping Ohio voters overcome unnecessary barriers created by state lawmakers.”

The decision and the dissent

The Republican National Committee and Mississippi Republican Party asserted existing federal statutes set not just the deadline for casting ballots, but also the deadline for receiving them.

They claimed Mississippi’s five-day grace period violates federal law because the term “election” — set for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — encompasses both actions.

The plaintiffs point to advent of absentee voting during the U.S. Civil War. At that time, no state counted soldiers’ ballots if they arrived after Election Day.

The only explanation, they claimed, is that federal law didn’t allow for late ballots.

But Barrett batted that argument away.

There are several potential reasons for an Election Day deadline, she wrote. Perhaps states, like the plaintiffs, believed late ballots would fuel claims of fraud, or it may have simply been more efficient.

“Frankly,” Barrett added, “in this first experiment with absentee voting, extending the deadline might not have even occurred to them.”

And she noted states changed practice when absentee voting became popular again during World War I.

If plaintiffs’ arguments rely on drawing inference from states’ behavior, shouldn’t that example carry similar weight?

Barrett’s reasoning relied heavily on the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which establishes procedures for soldiers and expats to cast ballots in U.S. elections while abroad.

That statute makes repeated references to state deadlines set by state law for the receipt of ballots.

“If the election-day statutes established a nationwide ballot-receipt deadline,” Barrett wrote, “these references to state ballot-receipt deadlines would make little sense.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the ballots cast in a given election are like a single document expressing the will of the voters.

“What the election-day statutes demand is that this authoritative choice be made on election day,” Alito wrote.

Although he insisted he has no objection to absentee voting or early voting as a practice, Alito wrote, “Election Day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days. The election-day statutes require that federal elections occur on that date.”

Examples of states allowing late arriving ballots from soldiers abroad were simply “departure from this norm,” he wrote, and the majority opinion is blithely brushes aside “two centuries of American election practice.”

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.

She and her husband had planned the pregnancy, and excitedly told their family at 12 weeks, a landmark in pregnancy when she felt Charlotte was safely on her way.

At about the same time, Hanline had an anatomy scan, due to a backup in scheduling for ultrasounds.

Two hours after the anatomy scan, she was told by doctors that Charlotte had very little kidney tissue, and a 3% chance of survival.

“If she were to live, she would have to go on dialysis for her whole life, and then also have kidney transplants every 10 years or so,” Hanline was told.

Several more tests confirmed the issue, and also identified a severe heart defect. Hanline listened to kids and parents laughing at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital as she was told her daughter would never come.

“We sat in a room full of 15 specialists and they all told us that our daughter had a 0% chance of life, that she would either be stillborn or live seconds and then die,” she told the Capital Journal.

Despite having an inviable pregnancy confirmed by a host of tests and doctors, Hanline still couldn’t have the procedure to end the pregnancy right away. She was told she would need to wait another two weeks before labor could be induced.

“And then I would have to wait those two weeks, knowing my daughter was non-viable,” Hanline said. “I was feeling her every once in a while, and it was an awful, awful reminder that I was never going to meet her.”

Doctors said they feared being arrested and/or losing their licenses if they provided any other option. Confusion reigned, as a six-week abortion ban was not being enforced, but still sitting in court awaiting a final decision.

It was 2023, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case had ended nationwide legalized abortion the year before.

The issue had been sent back to individual states. Ohio voters had put the right to abortion care in the state constitution just one month earlier.

The Post-Dobbs landscape

When doctors told Hanline they wanted to wait to induce labor, she was 21 weeks and four days along. Because of the new amendment, abortions were legal until viability, generally considered to be 22 weeks gestation.

She and her husband called surrounding states after finding full clinics in Ohio, and found all other states were at capacity.

Luckily, she said, one of her physicians was able to find her a spot in the Cincinnati area, 45 minutes away, when Hanline was at 21 weeks and six days.

“In those 45 minutes, I saw no less than three billboards telling me I was going to hell, showing me pictures of babies, like, ‘why don’t you want to keep me,’” Hanline said.

“It was pretty awful, because I did want to keep my daughter so badly, and I would have given anything to not be having to say goodbye to her.”

It was also difficult when she went to D.C., and felt like she wasn’t heard by members of Congress.

Last year, she visited the office of Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. A staffer listened to her story, she said, then reiterated Husted’s publicly pro-life stance.

“It was really hard to understand how we differed on that, when I was just telling (the staffer) how badly I wanted to meet my daughter,” Hanline said.

Last week, she went along with the organization Free & Just to press for abortion care support.

Alongside Hanline was Ashley Ammerman, a Blacklick resident who was also happy to find out she was pregnant with her first child in 2015.

Genetic testing at 10 weeks showed the fetus was positive for Trisomy 18, a condition the vast majority of fetuses don’t survive.

“(The doctor) comes in the room with just the worst look on her face that I’ve ever seen,” Ammerman said of her appointment following the genetic testing. “She said there’s just no chance of viability at all.”

Specialists did other tests, not only confirming the diagnosis, but finding other issues as well.

“It was luck of the draw, is what they told me,” she said. “These are all completely standalone abnormalities that could happen.”

In order to terminate the pregnancy in Ohio at that time, Ammerman was given two options.

She could go to the hospital and have two doctors sign a document saying the procedure was necessary, which was required because the mother’s life was “not necessarily at risk,” or she could go to a women’s health clinic.

“If the two doctors were to sign off, it would be about $10,000, a night or two in the hospital, a lot of trauma,” Ammerman said.

“They said ‘Planned Parenthood’s about $800, they’re wonderful, you can go in and have the procedure.’”

She went with the latter. Similar to Hanline, with the help of one of her physicians, she was able to get in, and over the course of three days, received treatment and had the abortion.

Before all three of the appointments needed to get the abortion, protesters yelled at her and family members who came with her, she said.

“It was absolutely devastating, a wanted pregnancy, not something I ever thought I’d go through,” Ammerman said. “I was absolutely comfortable with my decision, but that doesn’t make it easier.”

Hanline, Ammerman, and individuals from other states, said they spoke with staffers for Ohio Republican U.S. Rep Warren Davidson, and Democratic U.S. Reps. Joyce Beatty and Emilia Sykes during their time in D.C.

They weren’t surprised by the responses from all involved, with Beatty and Sykes’ support for abortion care clear, and Davidson’s opposition just as plain.

Sykes is chair of a reproductive justice task force within the congressional Reproductive Freedom Caucus, and has sponsored and supported legislation for overall reproductive care, women’s health protection, contraception, IVF,  and fertility treatments.

“I will keep fighting to protect those rights and ensure every woman can make her own health decisions without politicians getting in the way,” Sykes said in a statement to the Capital Journal.

Beatty is a fellow member of the Reproductive Freedom Caucus. On June 24, the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Beatty stated on X that “abortion is healthcare, and everyone deserves the right to choose.”

Davidson also made a statement about the Dobbs anniversary on his official X page, saying the decision “correctly returned abortion policy to the states and the American people’s elected representatives.”

“The Constitution never created a right to abortion,” Davidson’s post continued. “Every life is a gift from God and deserves protection.”

Ohio’s protection

Immediately after Dobbs was released, then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost requested that a federal court reinstate the six-week abortion ban that had been tied up in court since 2019.

A primary problem for physicians at the time of the six-week ban, called the “Heartbeat Act” by supporters,” was the need for an “affirmative defense,” according to Dr. David Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Cleveland.

Hackney has since written a forthcoming book about the medical landscape for high-risk obstetrics after Dobbs.

In an affirmative defense, the physician must prove that an abortion was needed to preserve the health and life of the mother, rather than the burden of proof falling on the state.

“When a physician is considering abortion in high-risk circumstances, placing them under an affirmative defense causes confusion and hesitancy, which can in turn yield dangerous delays,” Hackney told the Capital Journal.

Abortion rights supporters represented by the ACLU sent the ban back to court after about 80 days.

The year after Roe v. Wade was struck down, 57% of Ohio voters approved the constitutional amendment that put reproductive rights like abortion until viability and miscarriage treatment into the state’s founding document.

To legal experts, it was exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court asked states to do under the decision.

“Dobbs was all about giving the power to the states, and what our state chose to do was pass this amendment,” said Jessie Hill, director of the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve University, who worked with the ACLU of Ohio in multiple reproductive rights cases.

With the constitutional amendment now in play, a Hamilton County Common Pleas Court permanently blocked the ban, citing the new development.

While the state appealed the decision for other reasons, Yost said he would not fight the six-week ban decision.

“(The amendment) changed everything from a legal standpoint,” Hill said.

Cases are still ongoing regarding a 24-hour waiting period (even as lawmakers consider another bill to create the same waiting period), the use of telehealth for medication abortions, and transfer agreements for local hospitals and abortion clinics.

While Ohio has made the law clear through its constitution, Hill said things could become tricky if the federal government passes any policy against abortion rights.

Federal law preempts state law as a general rule, something state and federal lawmakers have brought up with so-called “fetal personhood” bills.

The measures aim to give embryos and fetuses constitutional rights.

Such potential laws are seen as unpopular, but the threat still remains.

Under the Trump administration, the FDA has been directed to reconsider approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, a drug that was approved more than two decades ago.

Ohio’s Husted has been a part of congressional hearings on the “dangers” of mifepristone.

Cuts to Medicaid funding slashed resources for and caused closures of Planned Parenthood, even though clinics can’t use federal funds specifically for abortion care.

“Having a hostile government at the federal level means that our hands are kind of tied,” Hill said.

Hope on behalf of the future

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Hanline was in the early stages of pregnancy when she spoke with the staff at Husted’s office in 2025.

She’s now the mother of a four-month old son, and plans to continue the fight on his behalf, and on behalf of the rest of her family.

“If I can just make people stop and think and start to question their own beliefs because my experience challenges their preconceived ideas of what an abortion is, I need to just keep chipping away,” she said.

Ammerman now has a nine-year-old, and her daughter is one of the many reasons she will continue supporting reproductive healthcare.

They both believe legislators who are against abortion rights could stand to hear the stories of current and future mothers who wanted their pregnancies, but are still thankful abortion was possible.

“I got married, I wanted a kid, I had a house, I had the financial security, I was ready,” Ammerman said.

“So for them to hear a story like mine, I think unfortunately, it has more weight than a story where a teenager was irresponsible in their eyes, even though both stories are equally important and have the same outcome.”

The change that the two mothers hope for could come in part from the upcoming November election.

As Hill continues to track and litigate reproductive rights cases in Ohio, the final word on all of them could come from the Supreme Court of Ohio.

“Having justices who are going to be accountable to the will of the people who passed the amendment, and who said we want the government out of our healthcare decisions, is really important, as is having justices who are going to read the text and follow what it says,” Hill said.

This story has been edited to clarify Hanline’s pregnancy timeline, and Husted’s stance on abortion.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio and Massachusetts senators made an unlikely team when they co-authored an op-ed last Tuesday that proposed a fix to Social Security. 

An outside group praised the proposal as a vital first step, but called for additional action to be taken.

Warren D-Mass., is a leading progressive and one of the favorite targets of President Donald Trump’s racially tinged name calling. Moreno won office in 2024 partly on the power of Trump’s endorsement and his embrace of the MAGA movement.

But the two teamed up to advocate a solution to the looming insolvency of Social Security.

“We don’t agree on everything, but here’s one thing we do agree on: Congress must act now to save Social Security for generations of Americans to come,” the pair wrote in the New York Times. “Social Security is a core component of our nation’s promise — a covenant between the federal government and Americans who pay into it throughout their working years so they can retire with dignity.”

They explained that the retirement benefit for older Americans is again under threat.

“That promise is at risk of unraveling,” Moreno and Warren wrote. “For years, seniors in Ohio and Massachusetts have told us how concerned they are about the future of Social Security.”

They were referring to a report earlier this month by the Social Security Board of Trustees saying that Social Security will be insolvent by 2032 and Medicare — the health program for older Americans — will become so six months later.

If that happens, the average Ohio beneficiary will have to live on $487 less a month.

There are 2.2 million Social Security recipients in Ohio and their average benefit is just $1,900 a month, so insolvency would mean they would lose a quarter of an already-small income.

“That’s just six years away. Instead of cutting benefits for the retirees who count on Social Security, we need to take bipartisan action to protect those benefits, reward work and restore fairness,” Warren and Moreno wrote.

“That starts with a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.”

Social Security is funded by a 6.2% tax paid by employees that is matched by their employers. But it is only paid on the first $184,500 of payroll income.

That means the vast majority of workers pay Social Security tax on all of their incomes, but some wealthier Americans don’t — and the richest only pay on a tiny portion of their incomes.

Moreno and Warren said this is unfair.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” they asked. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

They added that removing the cap would make Social Security solvent for a generation.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said there’s a double hazard if elected leaders think only in terms of a single fix and a single generation. 

“Good for Sen. Warren and Sen. Moreno for saying we need to do something about this,” Goldwein said in an interview in which he called the senators’ proposal “a perfectly reasonable idea.”

“But saying that this is the whole solution, that’s wrong,” he said. “Politicians need to keep talking about this because time is running out.”

He called the Warren-Moreno proposal “raising the tax max” and called it “the most popular, most commonly discussed plan out there for raising revenue.”

And, Goldwein said, it would put a real dent in the solvency problem.

His group estimates that getting rid of the cap would close the solvency gap by 50% and delay insolvency by 22 years if benefit rules stay the same.

However, “it can’t be a full fix,” Goldwein said. “There’s not enough money there. As a starting point, I think it’s a given that any Social Security reform plan is going to need more revenue.”

Goldwein, who has worked on Social Security and related issues for the executive branch and for congressional committees, added, “Regardless of your ideological point of view, we’re out of time to do this on the benefits side alone. We have only six years to insolvency, and you just can’t get benefit savings fast enough.”

So he advocates coming up with a package of reforms that will make Social Security solvent for the next 50 to 75 years.

“We don’t want to have a kick-the-can thing that’s going to make us feel really good but bring us right back here in a couple decades,” Goldwein said. 

That approach is especially hazardous because when lawmakers face the next crisis, the most palatable options will be off the table, he said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has already proposed several reforms and Goldwein said many more are in the pipeline.

One would be to rein in spending by capping the amount a couple can collect from Social Security at $100,000 a year.

Another would reduce the rate of cost-of-living increases for the richest recipients so that their dollar-amounts match those of the next-lowest income group.

Goldwein proposes another reform that would replace Moreno and Warren’s “raising the tax max” proposal.

He would have employers pay tax on all compensation.

“This would raise a similar amount of money to the tax max, but it does it in a much more efficient way,” Goldwein said. It would be a tax on all wages above the $184,500 cap, “but it also includes all fringe benefits. Right now employers are getting tax breaks for paying people in the form of health care or stock options or transportation benefits.” 

When insolvency loomed in 1981, Congress appointed a commission that proposed a package of reforms, many of which were amended into the Social Security Act two years later.

Goldwein said a similar commission could be appointed now and work along a tighter timeline because many viable proposals are already out there. 

As for Medicare, Goldwein said Congress would be wise to approach that piecemeal.

“With Social Security, you really want to solve this all at once,” he said. “With Medicare, you can work on it incrementally because so much of Medicare is how do we get the payment structure right. How do we direct people to the best kind of care at the lowest cost. We can do that little by little as we learn more.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

We are mired in conspiracy theories, artificial intelligence, and the peddling of misinformation by some of this country’s top leaders.

As a result, obtaining and sharing clear, factual, and accessible information from trusted messengers has never been more important. 

This need for clarity from official sources is why the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office’s decision to post information that could easily mislead voters about what identification is needed to cast their ballots on Election Day is so concerning. 

The posters depicted large images of documents like a certificate of naturalization, birth certificate, and certificate of citizenship, as ‘acceptable proof of citizenship,’ which are only required at a polling place if a voter is challenged on the grounds that they are not a citizen and the voter wants to vote a regular ballot instead of a provisional ballot.

The poster placed the actual forms of identification which all voters must show when voting in the fine print at the bottom of the document — potentially confusing voters on whether they could or could not vote on election day.

It is bad enough that voters are forced to navigate increasingly muddied information online, but to be served information from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that could misinform and dissuade voters from participating in elections is deeply unsettling and disrespectful to Ohioans. 

These flyers are clearly confusing and seem designed to score points with the federal government.

The impacts are also clear — the inclusion of documents that many Ohioans don’t have easy access to could keep some voters from voting at all, especially voters of color, senior or youth voters, or naturalized citizens. 

Election officials across the state are already tasked with implementing legislative changes, with limited resources to educate voters.

Local election administrators have enough to do without having to fact-check the Secretary of State’s office’s materials.

To see the office use its power to require hanging this confusing flyer undermines the work of those officials as they try to ensure that elections are run lawfully and that their communities can exercise their constitutional freedom to vote — something that seems further and further away with every legislative session. 

The citizens of our state deserve clear and accurate information to weigh in on the policies and people who will make decisions that impact their daily lives.

We believe these posters belong in the recycling bin and should not be posted in the 2026 general elections.

Instead, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose should require signage that clearly displays the forms of identification that are accepted — an Ohio driver’s license or identification card, a United States passport or passport card, or a U.S. military ID card, U.S. military dependent ID card, Ohio National Guard ID card, or U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs ID card. 

In a world filled with misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies from so many of our leaders, we must require the utmost commitment to the truth from the Ohio Secretary of State and other trusted messengers whose voices must remain trusted, nonpartisan, and rooted in the values of democracy.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A list obtained by Stateline of canceled grants includes those awarded to universities, community organizations, city and state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates in states such as Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Texas and West Virginia. The grants were canceled two years before their expiration dates because the programs did not align with agency priorities, according to one of the grantees who received a termination notice.

The program is part of the agency’s Office of Population Affairs and is a “national, evidence-based grant program that funds diverse organizations working to prevent teen pregnancy across the United States,” according to the HHS website. The agency provides funding to programs that develop and evaluate innovative approaches to prevent teen pregnancy as well as to prevent sexually transmitted infections among adolescents, and to promote positive behaviors.

Ayana Bradshaw, president and CEO of AccessMatters in Philadelphia, told Stateline her organization received the termination notice of its $1.2 million grant on Friday, and it was effective the same day. Bradshaw said the letter cited a misalignment with agency priorities, specifically that the program “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

AccessMatters’ Adolescent Health Initiative is entirely funded by the federal grant and provides free sexual and reproductive health programs to more than 1,100 teens between the ages of 13 and 19. The program provides information, education and referrals for healthcare as needed.

“This is devastating for the youth that we serve,” Bradshaw said. “It also impacts us as an organization, our staff, and it impacts the partners that we had who supported us in implementing this program.”

During the first administration of President Donald Trump in 2017, HHS took the same action, ending grants for more than 80 recipients two years before they were set to expire. Legal advocacy organization Democracy Forward sued the administration on behalf of several grantees and won a permanent injunction after courts ruled the action violated agency regulations.

The Trump administration identified the teen pregnancy program as one to cut in its 2025 budget request, and it was included in the final 2026 appropriations bill. The language accompanying that bill said grants for sexual risk avoidance must use medically accurate information and teach youth about risky behaviors “without normalizing teen sexual activity.”  

Teen birth rates have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — about 72% since 2007. Experts attribute that decline to fewer teens deciding to have sex earlier, sex education and better access to contraception, especially for girls. 

The agency also released two new grant programs this week, one of which is titled “Replicating Effective Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs,” with $63.4 million available to be awarded. The other is “Rigorous Impact Evaluation of Programs to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and Achieve Optimal Health,” with $8.3 million available.

Both opportunities tell applicants that they must pass an alignment review process to ensure they meet agency priorities. That language mimics Trump administration language in the 2027 Notice of Funding Opportunity for Title X grants, which a national family planning organization filed a lawsuit over last week, arguing that it violates Congress’ intentions and administrative procedure.

Tara Mancini, director of public policy at reproductive health advocacy organization Power to Decide, said she expects the administration’s decision to cancel the grants to be challenged again in court.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@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.

Her husband had choked her, Robinson said. Shoved her. Forced unwanted touch. Controlled the finances.

The woman and the man married in the United States after being in a relationship for many years. Robinson’s client submitted the marriage certificate and letters from a long-time friend and the man’s daughter, vouching that the marriage had been in good faith, meaning they genuinely wanted to be together.

As a domestic violence survivor, she’d applied for legal status. But federal officials announced policy changes late last year.

Under the federal Violence Against Women Act, known as VAWA, abused foreign national spouses of United States citizens or green card holders, or abused foreign national parents, can file a self-petition for a lawful immigration status if they are experiencing abuse. The 1994 law, was sponsored by then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden and enacted during the Clinton administration. It has been renewed several times, most recently in 2022 during Biden’s presidency.

But the Trump administration announced new narrowed guidelines in December, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been increasingly scrutinizing domestic violence survivors’ applications for legal status, making more stringent asks of attorneys and their clients, such as more concrete proof of cohabitation during a “good faith” marriage.

Despite photos and declarations, including four single-spaced pages of testimony from a witness who had known Robinson’s client and the alleged abuser for three decades, the woman’s application to live in the United States with legal documentation was denied. Immigration officials said the evidence wasn’t enough to prove the marriage was in “good faith,” said Robinson, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, a legal resource center for immigrants. 

The agency says the new requirements aim to prevent fraud, saying that misuse of the system can cause significant delays in processing self-petition requests.

But the changes, which include narrowing the definitions of “battery” and “cruelty” and requiring that petitioners prove they resided with their abusers, are adding barriers for survivors who often are in tenuous situations, advocates say. Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, many immigrants experiencing abuse may be in fear of filing paperwork, especially if perpetrators use deportation as a means of threatening their victims.

“VAWA was designed to create protections for survivors of intimate partner violence and domestic violence,” Robinson said. “These protections are essentially falling apart.”

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says the revisions aim to prevent fraud, saying that misuse of the system can cause significant delays in processing self-petition requests. There have been recent cases of attorneys whose clients have accused them of filing fraudulent claims.

The immigration agency also cited a significant increase in filings by men and parents between 2020 and 2024. Over the years, Congress broadened the language of the law to explicitly allow protection for male victims such as those in same-sex couples.

“By clarifying the policies and requirements for aliens filing VAWA self-petitions, we are better equipped to protect program integrity, combat fraud, and manage the VAWA program as intended by Congress,” the agency wrote in its December announcement, calling the increases in male and parental applications “alarming.”

Cristina Velez, legal and policy director at ASISTA, which provides consultation and training for immigration attorneys across the country, said preserving the integrity of the program to make sure it helps legitimate survivors is critical. But she said an increase in male applications doesn’t necessarily indicate fraud. She had male clients in her private practice who had been abused by U.S. citizen sponsors, including same-sex spouses, she said.

“The government has the capability of identifying fraud through means other than narrowing the definition of battery and extreme cruelty,” she said. “I would encourage them to take those other kinds of steps.”

Velez added that any change in application patterns should prompt the government to learn more by asking questions such as, “What is this change based on? Is it that more people are learning about this avenue of relief, or is it something else?”

Officials should focus their accountability on lawyers and abusers who take advantage of immigrants, said Cecelia Friedman Levin, director of the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors.

“Many of these cases are now adjudicated with a fraud-focused lens, which to my mind can create a chilling effect of survivors coming forward to access these protections,” she said. “A few bad actors are not an excuse to punish survivors for whom the program was designed to rely on.”

The updates to the Violence Against Women Act’s policy manual requires that those seeking self-petitions prove that they resided with the abuser — who has to be a U.S. citizen or a permanent legal resident — while they were married, and that the abuse occurred during that period. This means if a person experienced abuse before marriage, and fled during marriage if their spouse showed signs of abusing them again, the prior abuse wouldn’t qualify under the policy update. They also should provide proof of their abuser’s citizenship or permanent legal status. USCIS says it will “attempt” to verify that status or, if it can’t, may consider  information offered by petitioners. 

In addition, they must provide proof that an abuser’s prior marriage had been legally terminated.

“The intent behind it is to prove the validity of the marriage. But that should not be a burden on the applicant to prove that the person terminated their marriages before they married them,” said Malou Chávez, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

Chavez said while it may not be common, there have been situations where a survivor believed the person she married had gotten a divorce, and actually hadn’t.

“Our clients have had to leave in the middle of the night, barefoot with three things that they were able to grab, as a result of the abuse,” said Laura dePaz Cabrera, an immigration lawyer in Gainesville, Florida.

It can take domestic violence victims several attempts to leave the relationship, and abusers may be controlling a person’s finances or have bills only under their own name, making proof of residence harder. Research shows victims are at their most vulnerable to violence when trying to leave.

“Survivors of abuse, they don’t typically have a spouse who’s going to join them on a credit card or add them to their cell phone bill or take a lot of pictures or have traditional evidence,” said Cabrera. “It puts this specific population at an almost insurmountable disadvantage, in many cases, of having to prove cohabitation within documents that are completely unable to exist — and that maybe intentionally don’t exist due to the abuse.”

In the case of Robinson’s client, “Her spouse never put her name on the lease. Almost nothing was in her name,” he said.

The guidelines also narrow the definition of “battery or extreme cruelty,” bypassing the legal definition of battery, which refers to non-consensual touch. Instead, it adheres to a dictionary definition: “to strike with repeated blows of an instrument or weapon, or with frequent missiles; to beat continuously and violently so as to bruise or shatter.” 

Its definition of “extreme cruelty” is clarified to denote an act “to the utmost possible degree” that “endangers the life or health of the other.”

“To say that in order to qualify for this immigration benefit, the abuse needs to have been unusual in some way — it really flies in the face of what is known about domestic violence, and what VAWA was meant to address,” Velez said.

Evidence guidelines are also more stringent under the changes. For example, for photographs of physical abuse, the self-petitioner now needs to identify who took the photographs, when and where. 

Last month, a U.S. court ruled in favor of a class action lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind existing protections against deportation for survivors of abuse and sex and labor trafficking.

“So many of my clients have been told, by their abusive partners, ‘If you call the police, you’ll be deported, and the children will stay with me,’” said Jane Stoever, director of the University of California, Irvine School of Law’s Domestic Violence Clinic.

Stoever said she’d been able to get a deportation case dismissed for one survivor client, but the client still has to meet with deportation officers every six months. She had been stabbed and had broken bones at the hands of her child’s father. She still fears deportation, as it was a tactic he would use to threaten her.

This month, members of Congress in the Democratic Women’s Caucus wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, saying the policy manual’s changes have “weakened longstanding protections” for immigrant survivors.

“Without protections in place for survivors to report violence coupled with stories about enforcement actions at courthouses and other sensitive locations,” the members wrote, “immigrant survivors are left with no safe avenues to report their abuse.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@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.

Ohio is home to more than 200 data centers, making it about the fifth-highest state in the country by count. Virginia remains the national leader, with Northern Virginia widely described as the world’s largest data center market. But the gap that matters most is in what has not been built yet. A University of Virginia analysis projects Ohio will add 77 data centers by 2030 — roughly the span of the next governor’s four-year term. A single proposed campus near Piketon, in Pike County, has been pitched as a potentially historic project: the U.S. Department of Energy says SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, plans to build what it described as the world’s largest artificial intelligence data center on leased land at the Portsmouth Site, and WOUB reported the Pike County project could become one of the largest data center campuses in the nation.

What a governor actually controls

A governor does not personally approve data centers. But the office controls nearly every state body that decides where they go, what they cost, and how they are powered. As governor, Ramaswamy would appoint the nine-member board of JobsOhio, the state’s private development arm that hands developers their incentive packages; the Ohio Power Siting Board, which signs off on where large energy projects and their power sources are built; the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which sets the rules utilities operate under; and the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, which grants the industry’s tax exemptions. As one analysis of his portfolio and the agencies he would oversee put it, the boards that subsidize, site and regulate the industry would all report to him.

The siting process already tilts toward approval. Under House Bill 15, the energy law enacted in 2025, certain power-project permit applications are automatically approved after 60 days unless the Power Siting Board affirmatively denies them, according to Policy Matters Ohio. Since June 2025, the board has approved more than 2,000 megawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas generation — power plants built to serve a single large customer — including, in October 2025, a 73-megawatt fuel cell facility within 800 feet of a Franklin County neighborhood.

What Ramaswamy has promised

Ramaswamy has not been subtle about his intentions. “It takes two years to build an AI data center or Bitcoin mining firm or whatever — all of which I want in the state, by the way,” he told a Republican dinner in Wintersville in March 2025, according to The Times Leader. On his verified X account that same month, he wrote: “We’re seeing an AI data center boom (which is good), right at the time when we face supply constraints on baseload power generation,” adding, “I’ll unshackle energy production in Ohio, from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, without apology.” His campaign website promises to “streamline energy project permits and remove unnecessary regulations so projects get built on time and on budget.”

In May, Ramaswamy keynoted Utah’s Operation Gigawatt Summit, an industry event built around accelerating energy production, infrastructure and deployment. The summit website says it focused on energy production at scale, grid modernization, infrastructure for growing demands, and policy that enables building. After winning the May 5 primary, he pledged that Ohioans would “wake up to lower utility bills because the state is producing more energy” under his administration.

The bottleneck — and the bill

The promise of lower bills runs into a problem Ramaswamy has not resolved publicly: how new electricity generation would offset the enormous demand the facilities he wants would create. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel says a single hyperscale data center can draw as much electricity as 100,000 homes. New baseload generation, whether gas or nuclear, takes years to bring online.

The grid bottleneck is real, but the status has changed. AEP Ohio had paused new data center service commitments while regulators considered a data center-specific tariff. In July 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered AEP Ohio to file new tariffs and lift its moratorium on connecting new data centers. AEP later said data center customers had previously estimated needing more than 30,000 megawatts of electricity; after the tariff process began, 13,022.7 megawatts paid for formal studies and 5,642 megawatts signed binding contracts under the tariff, in addition to 12,219 megawatts of contracts signed before the tariff went into effect.

Meanwhile, the costs are landing on households and the state budget. Ohio’s data center industry collected an estimated $2.5 billion in state and local tax breaks between 2017 and 2024, and the state’s data center sales tax exemption alone cost about $1.6 billion in 2025 — roughly 11 times an earlier Department of Taxation estimate, according to figures reported by Signal Ohio. The Public Utilities Commission has since approved an AEP tariff requiring large new data centers to pay for at least 85 percent of the electricity capacity they reserve for 12 years, an effort AEP says is designed to keep infrastructure costs off other customers. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel notes that data centers create relatively few permanent jobs once they are built, and a Democratic congressman has introduced federal legislation aimed at making the facilities pay their own way.

Industry and business groups counter that the economic return is real. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation credits data centers with supporting about 95,217 jobs and contributing $11.8 billion to Ohio’s gross domestic product in 2024. At a recent legislative hearing on the industry, company representatives told lawmakers they would pay for the grid upgrades their operations require.

What could slow it down

The buildout is not guaranteed, and the resistance has come from a notable place: the rural, conservative parts of the state that make up much of Ramaswamy’s base. The Ohio Newsroom reported earlier this year that around 18 municipalities were considering or had already enacted moratoriums that pause construction and approval of data centers. Tiffin’s city council approved a 12-month moratorium of its own. An all-volunteer group organized as Ohio Residents for Responsible Development cleared the Ohio Ballot Board in April and gathered signatures for a constitutional amendment to ban data centers drawing more than 25 megawatts. The effort came up short of the signatures needed for this November’s ballot and is now targeting 2027.

Outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine has also used the office as a brake, vetoing a 2025 attempt to repeal the sales tax exemption and later pausing new exemptions after the cost overruns came to light. The Associated Press reported that DeWine’s office cited the rising cost of the tax break and the Legislature’s review of the industry in declaring a pause on granting the incentive to new applicants. Whoever succeeds him inherits that same veto pen.

The contrast on the ballot

Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, former state health director Amy Acton, has staked out the opposite approach. Her “ActOn Lowering Costs” agenda calls for lowering household costs, and the Statehouse News Bureau reported that Acton wants more guardrails for data centers, including requiring them to cover added utility and environmental costs, using union labor, and restoring energy-efficiency programs rolled back under House Bill 6.

Ramaswamy’s enthusiasm has also drawn scrutiny over his finances. A May 2026 report from the progressive group Innovation Ohio, titled Vivek Ramaswamy’s Data Center Portfolio: Divided Loyalties, concluded that his personal holdings span chip makers, cloud and data center operators, industrial real estate trusts, and cryptocurrency — every tier of the industry he would regulate. “Ramaswamy is far too entangled with this industry to make sure it does right by our communities,” Innovation Ohio President Michael McGovern said in releasing the report. Ramaswamy has framed the buildout as an economic opportunity for the state and rejected new limits in favor of producing more energy.

The general election is November 3, 2026.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a 5-4 decision, the court found that federal law does not prevent states from accepting late-arriving ballots. The ruling is a victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates, who had said setting a hard, Election Day deadline for ballot arrival would risk disenfranchising voters amid fears of deteriorating mail service.

The case, RNC vs. Watson, centered on whether federal law overrides a Mississippi law that requires mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days of the election. Thirteen states have similar laws, which extend a “grace period” to ballots that arrive through the mail after polls close.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said that federal law didn’t preempt the state law because elections represent when voters make a decision, which must be done on or before Election Day. Voters who cast their ballot by mail have made a decision by Election Day, Barrett reasoned.

“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote.

Barrett cautioned that the decision rested on the interpretation of federal law, not the U.S. Constitution. She noted that the court was not considering the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections — suggesting that if Congress passes a nationwide ballot arrival deadline that the justices might uphold such a law.

Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined part of the dissent.

“If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated,” Alito wrote.

States with grace periods

In addition to Mississippi, other states with some form of grace period include Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Some local election officials had warned that requiring all ballots to be received by the close of polls would burden their offices as they try to quickly warn voters about the change just months before the midterms. More ballot drop boxes that let voters keep their ballots out of the mail could help, they say, but also cost money.

“Ultimately, the voters may be harmed as well,” election officials in California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington wrote in a court brief, warning that some ballots may not be received in time, “despite best efforts by careful and proactive administrators and local governments.”

But some Republican secretaries of state had urged the justices to strike down “grace period” laws. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray wrote in a court brief that an Election Day deadline “provides the bright-line rule that effective election administration demands.”

At least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day 2024 and arrived within a legally accepted post-election window, The New York Times has reported, citing election officials in 14 of 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. 

Overall, about 30% of voters cast a mail ballot in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

RNC challenged law

The Republican National Committee challenged the Mississippi law, which was defended by Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson. The RNC argued a longstanding federal law that sets the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day for federal offices preempted state laws that allow ballots cast by Election Day, but received later, to count.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October 2024 that federal law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. President Donald Trump last year also unilaterally attempted to require mail ballots to be received by the end of Election Day in a sweeping executive order on elections. Much of that order was blocked in federal court.

The Supreme Court issued Monday’s decision against a backdrop of uncertainty surrounding mail ballots. Trump signed an executive order in March that would restrict voting by mail by requiring states to provide lists of possible mail ballot voters to the U.S. Postal Service in advance. A federal judge recently blocked major portions of the order, triggering a near-certain appeal.

Paul Clement, an attorney for the Republican National Committee, said during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in March the prospect that the outcome of an election could change because of ballots arriving after Election Day would be unacceptable to losing candidates. After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump demanded election officials not count ballots that came in after Election Day, but states kept counting ballots.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late-arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result. Full stop,” Clement told the justices.

Attorneys for Watson argued that both legal and historical precedent supported his position. States may decide that voters have made their final choices when ballots are submitted to state officials rather than when they’re received, according to Watson.

This is a developing report that 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.

The Next250 demonstration, organized by a coalition of advocacy groups, featured a massive “Declaration of Interdependence” requiring more than a dozen people to hold it during a march past the northern barricaded perimeter of the White House, where President Donald Trump was present this weekend.

Event organizers scheduled the rally to counter the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 programming, which is taking place on the National Mall over several weeks.

The few hundred rallygoers convened for nearly four hours in McPherson Square before marching toward the White House via the former Black Lives Matter Plaza, a pedestrian-only zone created by the city in June 2020 during unrest after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

The plaza was repainted  in March 2025 under the order of Mayor Muriel Bowser after Trump took office and Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., introduced legislation in Congress saying it had to be redone or the district would lose federal funding. 

Causes represented ran the gamut: advocacy for stricter gun laws, a $25 federal minimum hourly wage, universal voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and leader of the Living Wage for All coalition, said lobbying for higher wages is “maybe the biggest” priority of the Next250 platform.

“For the last several years, we’ve been thinking ahead about wanting to use the 250th anniversary of the country as a moment to declare our unity as a people around a set of values and policies,” Jayaraman said.

“We’re often told we’re too polarized to get anything done, but the truth is that we actually know that we agree as a people across red, blue, and purple states that everybody who works deserves to earn enough to feed their families. Everybody who sends their children to school should be able to do that without them being shot up by assault weapons. Everybody wants a planet to live on, and a climate we can live in.”

Jayaraman praised Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., for introducing a bill on June 25 to raise the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. 

Murphy was joined in the legislation by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Andy Kim, D-N.J., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore. A companion bill in the House is sponsored by U.S. Reps. Delia Ramirez, and Jesús “Chuy” García, both Illinois Democrats, Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., and Lateefah Simon, D-Calif.

Clara, a 56-year-old Mexican immigrant from Queens, New York, who did not want to share her last name for fear of being targeted, said she’s worried about the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Trump ordered the end of birthright citizenship, a right granted in the Constitution, upon beginning his second term.

“As a mother of U.S. citizen children, that worries me about the future of the country. I have a U.S. citizen daughter, and I think that one of those federal changes could affect other immigrant families,” Clara said through an interpreter, Kimberly Vega, 27, of Staten Island, New York.

Both sat with Las Doñas, an advocacy group for women immigrants that has chapters throughout the U.S.

Reymane Sanders, 36, of New Haven, Connecticut, traveled to the rally with the organization Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People & Families Movement to advocate for restoring the right to vote across the U.S. for convicted felons. Sanders served 17 years in prison.

“Typically I definitely support (the cause) when it comes to filling out petitions, but this will be the first time that I actually put my body, my mind, everything all into the whole movement,” said Sanders. 

The Next250 demonstration was collectively organized by the separate organizations All of US, Next 250, Get Free and 50501.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The plea resolves an 18-count indictment against Bolton, who lives in Bethesda, Maryland. He has agreed to pay a $2.25 million penalty, the DOJ said. He could face up to five years in prison, according to the release.

During his stint as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, Bolton recorded “highly sensitive classified information” from his official duties in a personal diary. He shared the diary entries with two family members who were not cleared to have access to the information, which included top secret material, according to the indictment.

“John Bolton held a position of extraordinary public trust as the country’s top National Security Advisor, and he betrayed that trust, jeopardizing our nation’s security,” Hayden O’Byrne, the acting deputy assistant U.S. attorney general for the National Security Division, said in the statement. “Today’s resolution ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information.”

Bolton and Trump

Bolton’s attorney, Abbe David Lowell, said in a statement Friday that Bolton’s plea took responsibility for a mistake, which was “what real leaders do,” and contrasted that approach with Trump’s conduct while the Department of Justice secured similar federal charges against the then-former president in 2023.

“By contrast, President Trump thumbed his nose at the classified information laws, took actual classified documents to his Florida mansion, interfered with the investigation of that conduct, and has never accepted any accountability for his conduct,” Lowell wrote. “Ambassador Bolton, whose offense was only keeping a diary which contained classified information, kept a record to preserve history, but Donald Trump kept secrets to serve himself.”

Since leaving the White House, Bolton has been a consistent critic of Trump’s foreign policy. 

That has continued even after he was indicted last year. Bolton, who also held roles in President George W. Bush’s administration and is associated with the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party, has repeatedly slammed on social media Trump’s deal with Iran as recently as this week.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I knew and learned that disability rights and everything that I am able to do as an intervention specialist, or a special ed. teacher, was hard fought for and won, which also means it was under threat,” Thomas said.

She left her job to lead the Columbus Education Justice Coalition, but Thomas said she misses the classroom every day, and has held on to the belief that the job of an educator “may be one of the most politically charged careers in this day and age.”

“I do think that if you are called to do this work, it is worth it, but you should go in eyes open, and go in knowing public education is under attack, and if certain folks have their way, then other systems and education would be under attack, too,” Thomas said.

Educators and advocates like Thomas are worried that reduced public school funding and a lack of resources has taken its toll already, causing teacher shortages both in Ohio and nationwide. But there is hope that opportunities exist, if the state can get behind them.

National, pervasive, and ongoing

Anyone and everyone in the education field is looking for solutions to staff shortages in public schools. While advocates blame the problem on a lack of financial support from the state government, officials are pushing for more creative recruitment strategies.

“The teacher shortage issue, the teacher pipeline issue, whatever buzzword we’re using to identify it at the moment, is something that’s national, pervasive, and has been ongoing for quite some time now,” said Jason Wagner, Ohio’s interim superintendent of public instruction.

Wagner told a May meeting of the Ohio State Board of Education that across the country, more than 400,000 teaching positions were unfilled or filled by teachers without full certification in the 2024-2025 school year. That amounts to 1 in 8 teaching positions in the U.S.

The biggest shortages are in the areas of special education, science, and math, Wagner said, though deep shortages are also present in English/language arts, elementary education, and career technical education.

State data is a little more complicated, as the full picture of what the teacher shortage looks like needs work, according to educators and advocates. The Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers said anecdotal evidence from around the state certainly shows a struggle to attract and retain qualified teachers, but they’re awaiting new data on teacher “vacancies” from the state.

“It could be that we’re not seeing a whole lot of openings yet, but this anecdotal data of having less applicants apply means that looking down the road we could have a potential shortage bigger than what we have right now,” said Melissa Cropper, head of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

The most recent state operating budget included a provision directing the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to begin collecting data on teacher vacancies in the 2026-2027 school year. That data isn’t expected to be released until at least the end of 2027, according to Wagner.

The interim superintendent said the state’s annual education report cards show a “pretty steady, gradual decline” in the rate of properly certified teachers. He said it’s something the state “should take note of,” but that Ohio is faring better than other states when it comes to qualified teacher retention.

Ohio’s percentage of core academic courses taught by properly credentialed teachers stood just above 97.5% in 2024, a small rise from the previous year, though still lower than any year between 2015 and 2022. Wagner said pandemic-year credential flexibility caused a jump in 2020.

“So while, yes, we can observe trends here, it is worth noting that Ohio does rank very highly as far as … national averages compared to other states with actually having properly certified teachers in the classroom,” Wagner said.

He also noted that Ohio’s starting salaries are “comparable” with the U.S. average. According to state data, Ohio’s average starting salary for a teacher is $43,800, versus the U.S. average of $44,530.

Still, he said, the vacancy data is going to be “very helpful when we have it.”

Teachers need more

Math teacher Laura Fehskens said she came to her subject area because of the shortage of math teachers when she came out of school.

“I wanted to be a teacher, but I also wanted to have a job when I came out of school, so that was one of the tipping points in choosing secondary math, was that I knew there were jobs out there,” said Fehskens, who teaches at the Miami Valley Career Technical Center.

Though that was more than a decade ago, she has watched school administration battle with a fading pool of candidates for jobs.

“I spoke with both my direct supervisor and one of the other supervisors, and they stated that the pool of qualified candidates is maybe half as big as it was when he began as a supervisor 15 years ago, and it’s even worse for math,” Fehskens said.

Fehskens and Thomas agree on some of the main factors playing into the lack of interest in the field: lack of respect and support for teachers, a lack of commitment to consistent funding for public schools, and the increasing weight of documentation and standardized testing.

“I hear from a lot of my friends who are still in the classroom that they don’t have time to teach anymore because of the paperwork that goes with it,” Thomas said. “I had a lot of paperwork … but it’s triple now with the legislation that has come from the state, and a lot of the things that are mandated at the federal level.”

Education advocates decried the underfunding of public schools as EdChoice private school vouchers were made nearly universally available to all income levels. Opponents of the voucher system say its taking away from public school coffers and population.

Without the proper funding for wages and resources, educators say class sizes have increased, teachers are overburdened, and it’s a struggle to meet accommodations for the students that need it most.

Fehskens said Miami Valley has had to get “super creative” in finding ways to provide small group testing to those with special needs and individualized education plans that require them. Sometimes that means pulling a student out of an elective, or conducting two days of testing just to serve a student properly.

“If we had the staff that we needed, if we had the funding needed to provide for those staff, then those students would better receive those accommodations in real time and that’s, of course, going to be better for the student and the teachers in the long run,” Fehskens said.

Bringing in a new generation

While colleges and universities are working to find ways to bring in new teachers, a state-funded program to build up the workforce didn’t make it past the state operating budget.

The Grow Your Own Teacher scholarship that provided $7,500 per year for four years to students going into education is no longer accepting applications as the state works to “wind down” the program, according to Jana Fornario, of the Ohio Department of Higher Education.

The program allowed students to receive the scholarship if they agreed to teach for at least four years in their home district. If a spot was not available in their home district, the scholarship winners could serve at another “high-need” district.

The scholarships had recently been expanded to allow students at educational service centers, community schools, and career tech to be nominated for the scholarships. In the 2025-2026 school year, 856 students were nominated for the awards, 206 were awarded scholarships, and 168 accepted, according to state data. The amount was a significant bump from the year before, which Fornario said could be because of the expanded eligibility, but also because the program was more publicly known.

“I think the flexibility contributes, but I also want to say that we saw much more interest and awareness from districts,” Fornario told the state board of education.

For the 2026-2027 school year, the agency was able to award scholarships with remaining funds, taking students from previous waitlists of applicants. A scholarship was accepted by 143 students this year.

“I believe if we had been able to conduct a new round, I think we would have seen continued exponential growth, in all likelihood,” Fornario said.

Wagner told the State Board of Education that while financial incentives are important, growing the teacher workforce “has to be a comprehensive approach.”

“Reducing the turnover rate, engaging in efforts to increase our retention, not only benefits our students, but also benefits district and school administrators who are trying to fill these gaps in ways that are sustainable and not costly to the district or the school that they’re in,” Wagner said.

New bills currently active in the Ohio Statehouse would work to narrow grade bands for educator licenses, and could give student teachers compensation to incentivize them to stay. Ohio Senate Bill 144, which has bipartisan support but has been stuck in the Ohio House since November, would require the Ohio State Board of Education to specify whether a license is being issued to teach grades Pre-K through five, fourth through eighth grade, or grades seven through 12. Current law only requires licenses to specify pre-K through eighth or grades seven through 12.

“We really think that any kind of shortage or staffing issues at the middle level will be solved with not just a (preschool through eighth grade) license, but the P through 5, and then a four through eight comprehensive license would be able to solve those shortages just as easily,” Dr. Melissa Askren-Edgehouse, president of the Ohio Association of Private Colleges for Teacher Education, said during a meeting with the state board of education. Askren-Edgehouse is also the director of the school of education at the University of Mount Union.

Ohio House Bill 523 would allow a public school to pay a student teacher a stipend determined by the school, and allow public colleges and universities to establish a lower tuition rate for a student enrolled in a “teacher preparation program” while working as a student teacher. The bill also has bipartisan support, has passed the House, and is awaiting Senate consideration.

Associations and academics working in teacher education said higher education institutions need to bridge the gap to bring new teachers into the workforce, which is happening at some schools.

Universities like Bowling Green and Miami of Ohio already have partnerships with technical schools and career centers to help high-schoolers get a leg up in the education field, according Dr. Alicia Crowe, president of the Ohio Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Kent State University, where Crowe is an interim dean and professor, is also working with multiple local schools to create teaching pathways.

Private institutions are trying out similar programs to help reduce the cost for students hoping to go into education.

“Many of these programs are surrounding primary education or primary intervention specialists, but they can earn an associate’s degree (at a community college) and then only need four semesters at a university,” Askren-Edgehouse said.

The use of “teacher academies” is also proving useful for students exploring the idea of becoming an educator, giving students hands-on experience in schools and with teachers.

“The programs are doing great at the high school level, and we’ve been seeing some success with the students coming to us,” Askren-Edgehouse said. “So it’s great that they’re having that exposure very early on when they’re still in high school, so they can really say yes, this is definitely the profession for me.”

On top of giving teachers incentives to stay in the field, earnest appreciation goes a long way without the need for extra resources, according to Wagner.

“It is our obligation to spread the message that yes, it is tough, but it is worth it, that this is a noble profession, that we have educators who make a difference in people’s lives,” Wagner said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A mix of 116 school districts and independent schools have armed staff members, as of June 17. Many of the schools are rural, but there are some urban and suburban districts. 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law in 2022 that grants local boards of education authority to decide whether to allow their teachers and school workers to carry firearms.

It lowered the required training hours for armed personnel from 700 hours to at least 24, but school boards have the authority to mandate more hours. 

“It’s not a sufficient amount of training,” said Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper. 

“We’re talking about highly intense situations that require a lot of not only tactical training on how to use weapons. but how to deal with making split second decisions.” 

She testified against the bill when it was in the legislature in 2021. 

“I wish that (the lawmakers) would trust us with what we’re actually trained to do, which is to educate students,” Cropper said. “We are firm believers in local control around issues, but we still think it is bad policy for schools to allow teachers to carry guns.”

The law did grandfather in some school districts that had previous training, as long as the training met the requirements of the law. 

There have been more than 430 school shootings since Columbine in 1999, according to The Washington Post. 

Antwerp Local Schools in Paulding County has had a few armed staff members for years. The rural school district has about 700 students and about 100 staff members. 

Police response was the main factor in the decision to arm staff, said district superintendent Marty Miller.

Antwerp has a police department, but they also rely on the sheriff’s department about 10 miles away. 

“Our concern for us was if there was a situation that unfolded, what kind of law enforcement could we get here, and how fast,” Miller said. 

“What we could get here if we needed law enforcement obviously was not going to be sufficient. His party can be over for the bad guy in terms of accomplishing what he wants to accomplish.”

The district currently has four staff members who are armed and receive training each year, Miller said. The district also has a school resource officer. 

“We are confident that they will respond if needed, and that they are there just gives us a better feeling when something happens,” Miller said. 

The district decided not to arm any teachers, but rather staff members who are moving around during the day. 

The district wants people to know they have armed staff members. 

“If it can be a deterrent — and what may appear that there’s only one police officer in town, kind of thing, but there are armed staff — that might convince a bad person who has intentions, ‘maybe I won’t go near that place’ because of that,” Miller said. 

“It’s just letting the public know that your children are protected.”

Euclid City Schools Board of Education in Cuyahoga County decided to arm some of the district’s staff in 2022, said district spokesperson Dominick Ferlito. 

All of their armed employees are Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy trained.

“Our top priority is providing students and staff with a safe, welcoming environment where students are free to learn, create and reach their full potential,” Ferlito said in an email. 

**“**We continue to work closely with local law enforcement and safety partners to regularly review and strengthen our safety procedures and protocols.”

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.

With six months left before the 79-year-old walks off into the sunset, the impact of his belated call to action on capital punishment is negligible. He knows it.

Persuading right-wing supermajorities in the Ohio Statehouse to end the death penalty or, failing that, getting a statewide public vote on the issue anytime soon is a nonstarter.

Just months ago, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman declared he would vigorously oppose getting rid of state executions. Ohio Senate President Rob McColley said he could not imagine his Republican caucus repealing the death penalty law.

Ditto for the Republican candidate for governor McColley is running with, Vivek Ramaswamy.

Even the new attorney general DeWine appointed last month to finish former AG Dave Yost’s term swiftly rejected his benefactor’s argument. Andy Wilson did say he was grateful the governor had not commuted the sentences of the 113 inmates on death row in Ohio — which DeWine could still do to prevent their executions after he leaves office.

But surely the seasoned politician had no expectation that his party would be receptive to his latest directive when it broadly supports the death penalty as a tool for retributive justice.

So why tilt at windmills with a parting appeal to abolish it as a conscience-clearing move to no other end? 

And why did DeWine wait until he was almost out the door to take a public stand against capital punishment? He had eight years to do something.

Yes, DeWine has maintained an unofficial moratorium on state executions throughout his governorship.

It has been clear from Day One of his administration that the longtime proponent of the death penalty changed his mind about it.

Given his evident aversion to state-sanctioned killing, it seems dubious that DeWine had a sudden epiphany about the subject.

Well-established data on the death penalty has consistently shown that it had no proven deterrent effect on violent crime.

Extensive research across criminology, economics and law also concluded as much in study after study.

Yet DeWine wants us to believe that only now did he reach the same conclusion that  reams of empirical studies have underscored for ages; there is no credible evidence that the death penalty reduces homicide rates.

The governor suggested the analytics of capital punishment as a non-deterrent prompted his demand to scrap the death penalty as a prudent, if not moral, course.

DeWine explained his change of heart on the death penalty as a “cumulative” process that had only recently crystallized into certain opposition. (You will forgive me if I don’t quite buy DeWine’s ‘Road to Damascus’ story about his overnight metamorphosis on the death penalty).

Ohioans may agree or disagree with the governor’s position, but few expect anything to come of it. GOP lawmakers have no intention of fulfilling the governor’s legacy bucket list.

DeWine’s eleventh-hour pitch for abolishing the death penalty was a performance for publicity. Another all-show-no-go passion project that draws attention but goes nowhere.

Daytonians are nodding. They gave up waiting for DeWine to “do something!” on commonsense gun control after the 2019 mass shooting in their city.

He gave impassioned assurances to spearhead sweeping gun reform measures through the General Assembly which went nowhere. But DeWine did sign every gun rights absolutist bill that loosened gun regulations drafted to protect the public. 

Ohioans love their state parks and thought their governor did, too. He never missed an opportunity to grandstand on park enhancements.

But when it came to safeguarding Ohio’s treasured natural resources, DeWine sided with fossil fuel polluters itching to drill in state parks and wildlife preserves in 2023.

Ohio Senate Bill 219, which awaits his signature in 2026, is an even worse giveaway to outside gas producers that cuts corners to drill inside state parks, weakens environmental regulations, cuts local leverage and more.

DeWine could give another gift to the oil and gas industry at the expense of public lands even as he showcased Ohio’s 76 state parks as the best in the nation. 

The governor also signaled that he’s done signing voting restrictions that Republican lawmakers regularly send to his desk.

But he could cave to Trumpian right-wingers on another deeply flawed mail-in voting bill (Ohio House Bill 472) rushed through the legislature at the last minute that would make it harder for many eligible voters, especially seniors, the disabled, students, and Ohioans in rural areas to vote by mail?

DeWine could veto egregious voter suppression or in-park drilling—or quietly sign off his acquiescence in a Friday night news dump to avoid publicity.

But he wanted to generate attention with his staged press conference about the death penalty. And the national media noticed.

A red state governor calling for an end to state executions doesn’t happen every day.

DeWine banked on glowing coverage that portrayed him (wrongly) as a moderate Republican.

His record of enacting extreme legislation — from abortion bans and fracking in state parks, to permitless conceal carry, relentless voting barriers, and the most corrupt energy bill ever — belies his constructed image as a measured Midwest conservative willing to go the mat for what he believes.

I guess the lame duck governor might yet surprise with a warranted veto or sustained commitment to repeal Ohio’s death penalty.

But if past is prologue, he won’t. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

With artificial intelligence, experts say, hours of footage can be analyzed in minutes, making it easier for police to track or target a participant long after the demonstration ends.

As law enforcement agencies increasingly embrace AI, some civil liberties advocates, legal scholars and policing experts warn that the technology could amplify surveillance, introduce hidden biases into investigations and make it harder to challenge evidence in court. They also worry about a future in which AI takes on a more active role in policing and criminal investigations.

“It’s especially concerning sort of the ways that these tools could supercharge that kind of surveillance and enforcement,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization at the New York University School of Law. Levinson-Waldman has written extensively about the risks of police surveillance and the unregulated use of AI in policing.

Artificial intelligence in policing is not new. For decades, law enforcement agencies have used data-driven and automated tools, including facial recognition systems, automated license plate readers, predictive policing models and video analytics that can flag objects or activity in recorded footage.

What is changing is the speed, scope and complexity of those tools. As police departments accumulate growing volumes of digital evidence — from body camera footage and surveillance video to jail calls, social media records and case files — AI is increasingly being used to help sort, search and analyze that information.

“AI is going to basically be able to sort through otherwise overwhelming amounts of data in ways that we just haven’t seen yet, and give police and prosecutors and the government a lot more power over us in ways that I think will be deeply uncomfortable for many of us,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance,” a book published this year.

Cris Moore, a computer scientist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a research and education center, said the technology is advancing faster than agencies, regulators and courts are able to fully assess its implications, raising questions about transparency, accountability and the role automated systems should play in policing decisions.

“It’s fair to say that the speed at which technologically created evidence has been adopted, and the aggression with which it’s being pushed makes it hard for the legal community to keep up,” Moore said.

State legislatures and police departments are still developing rules to govern how AI can be used in public safety settings. While some agencies have adopted internal policies or vendor-specific guidance, there is no consistent national framework, and state-level approaches remain limited and uneven.

At least two states, California and Utah, have recently enacted laws regulating the use of generative AI in police report writing, requiring disclosure when AI is used and adding safeguards around accuracy and oversight.

More broadly, more than a dozen states have passed laws regulating related technologies such as facial recognition, drone surveillance and automated license plate readers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Emerging tech

Some of the major companies offering AI-powered tools for law enforcement include Axon, Motorola Solutions, TRULEO, Flock Safety, Clearview AI and others. Their products can search body-worn camera footage, analyze large datasets, review digital evidence and case files and identify potential suspects through facial recognition.

Some of these systems are built into centralized platforms that are able to pull and search for data from sensitive databases and police records.

There are very real constitutional, statutory and practical risks with this new model of agentic policing.

– Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, law professor at George Washington University

Mark43, a cloud-based software company serving more than 300 public safety agencies, offers two AI-powered tools. ReportAI helps officers draft reports using information from dispatch records and body camera footage, while BriefAI summarizes case information for investigators and supervisors.

Police agencies can choose which AI features to enable and who can access them, and the system maintains audit logs of AI-assisted activity. Mark43 told Stateline that dozens of agencies are using, testing out  or evaluating the AI features.

“Our core mission is to help responders spend less time on administrative work, so that they can spend more time serving in their communities,” said Wendy Gilbert, Mark43’s senior vice president of product.

Some experts are wary of AI being used for decisions that could affect a person’s rights or freedom, such as identifying suspects, recommending enforcement actions or influencing arrests. Critics warn that AI-generated outputs can make mistakes, reflect biases in underlying data and create a risk that officers or investigators place too much weight on the technology’s recommendations.

They also argue that many AI systems operate in ways that are difficult for the public — and sometimes even officers — to fully understand.

One source of concern is the possible advent of “agentic policing.” Future technologies could integrate body-camera footage, camera networks and other data sources into a single system capable of generating investigative leads, identifying potential suspects or suggesting connections between cases.

Even if humans remain responsible for final decisions, critics say, such systems could shape investigative judgments in ways that make it more difficult to understand how conclusions were reached.

“All that data is going to be dumped into an AI model, and they’re going to query it to say who’s the most likely suspect,” said Ferguson of George Washington University. “The AI is going to be running the agentic analysis of it and come up with the answer, and then police and prosecutors have to kind of work backwards to see if it’s accurate.”

Ferguson warned that this flips the traditional investigative process on its head.

“We’ve never started with an answer and made people work backwards,” he said. “There are very real constitutional, statutory and practical risks with this new model of agentic policing.”

AI companies and some law enforcement agencies argue the technology is designed to assist officers, not replace them. They emphasize that officers are responsible for reviewing, verifying and approving AI-generated information, and that the tools are intended to reduce administrative work and help people navigate large volumes of data more efficiently.

“AI should increase accountability, not reduce it, and so we’re doing everything in our will to provide transparency, governance and human control,” said Zach Barden, the lead product manager for AI at Mark43.

In recent years, a growing number of police officers across the country have been accused of misusing AI-powered tools, including automated license plate reader systems, available through their departments to track people for personal reasons.

In April, a former Costa Mesa, California, police officer pleaded guilty to using law enforcement databases and Flock Safety cameras to monitor his wife, a mistress and several romantic rivals. Similar allegations have surfaced in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

Flock Safety, one of the nation’s largest providers of automated license plate readers, uses roadside cameras to capture images and video of passing vehicles, including license plates and basic vehicle details, and store them in searchable law enforcement databases.

Some communities have reconsidered their use of automated license plate reader systems, with at least 30 cities ending or canceling contracts since early 2025 amid growing concerns about surveillance and data sharing, NPR reported in February.

A Flock Safety representative was not available for an interview with Stateline before publication. In a May blog post, the company said misuse of its system is rare and noted that permanent audit logs help identify and investigate improper access.

The company said the camera network has helped agencies recover missing people, connect cases across jurisdictions and identify suspects more quickly.

Reshaping public safety operations

While some law enforcement agencies have moved forward with early deployments, others are taking a more cautious approach as they assess potential benefits and risks.

In Maryland, the Montgomery County Police Department, one of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, is in the early stages of exploring potential uses of AI, including tools to support non-emergency call handling, translation and transcription services, and report writing to reduce administrative workload and improve efficiency.

“We want to bring technology to policing, but we need to make sure that we do it safe(ly), we do it efficiently, and that when we do do it, we’re setting the community and ourselves up for success,” said Capt. Cody Fields, the director of the police department’s media and public information division.

In Arkansas, officials are developing the Arkansas Criminal Intelligence Network, a centralized cloud platform designed to connect data across police agencies in the state and support the use of advanced AI-powered analytical tools.

In Hawaii, the Maui County Council earlier this month approved a $1.7 million expansion of high-tech policing tools, including cameras and drones supported by AI to assist with real-time monitoring and emergency response. Last year, the Honolulu Police Department announced a pilot program with Axon, which offers a generative AI feature that helps draft police reports using video and audio transcriptions from body-worn cameras.

Legal and evidentiary concerns

Police reports often play a critical role in investigations and court proceedings, and some experts warn that errors introduced by AI systems could have significant legal consequences if they go undetected.

Errors introduced by AI systems, including inaccuracies, omissions or misinterpretations of context and language, could influence how evidence is understood by investigators, prosecutors and judges.

Experts and industry leaders generally point to a few safeguards: clear disclosure when AI is used in reports, mandatory human verification of all AI-generated text, regular independent auditing of tools, and training for law enforcement and legal stakeholders on how the systems function and how to trace outputs back to raw audio, video and other source evidence.

Those recommendations align with a framework released earlier this year by the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice, which calls for rigorous independent validation of AI systems, enforceable procurement standards, ongoing performance monitoring, and clear human oversight to ensure operators can override AI-generated outputs.

“The pace of change is really pretty dramatic, and there’s a lot of energy and churn and attention to these issues,” said Jesse Rothman, the director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s task force on artificial intelligence. “The opportunities and the risks are really serious.”

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@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 report estimates that imprisoning a woman costs between $87,000 and $122,000 a year, or roughly 25% to 75% more than the average annual cost of about $70,000 per incarcerated person, including both men and women.  Women make up about 10% of the nation’s correctional population.

Researchers attributed the higher costs to a combination of factors, including smaller prison populations, the need to house women with different security classifications in the same facilities and higher healthcare expenses.

“As the number and cost of incarcerating women grow, policymakers have an opportunity to pursue approaches that better enhance accountability, public safety, fiscal responsibility, and the well-being of families and communities,” Stephanie Akhter, the director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission, said in a news release.

The report projects those costs will continue to grow over the next decade. Researchers estimate the number of women under correctional control, including prisons, jails, probation and parole, will rise from about 992,000 in 2022 to 1.1 million by 2035.

Most of that growth is expected to occur in confinement settings. The women’s prison population is projected to increase 27% by 2035, while the jail population is expected to grow 20%, according to the report.

As a result, annual spending associated with women’s involvement in the justice system is projected to rise from between $23 billion and $26 billion in 2025 to between $30 billion and $34 billion by 2035.

The report says the increase reflects both projected population growth and rising correctional costs. Researchers noted that women’s prison populations declined during the COVID-19 pandemic but have been growing again since 2021, in some places rebounding faster than men’s populations.

The analysis also attempted to quantify some costs that fall outside correctional budgets. Researchers estimated that the loss of unpaid household labor and caregiving performed by women in prison amounts to about $2.8 billion annually, a figure projected to rise to $3.8 billion by 2035.

A companion report released alongside the analysis modeled the effects of cutting women’s time served in prison by 50% in Illinois and North Carolina. Researchers estimated that earlier releases would result in roughly 100 additional arrests annually in each state among women who otherwise would have remained incarcerated, with about 9 in 10 involving nonviolent offenses, while generating more than $60 million a year in net savings.

The reports were prepared for the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission, which studies women’s involvement in the criminal justice system and related policy issues.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@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.

Most of the critical violations were marked corrected during the inspection. At four facilities—a Tiffin Kroger, The Corner Restaurant in Bloomville, a Tiffin Bob Evans and Mi Tequilas in Fostoria—at least one critical violation was not recorded as corrected on-site. Under Ohio’s food code, a critical violation is one directly linked to the risk of foodborne illness.

Inspected Thursday, June 11, 2026, the Tiffin supermarket received one critical violation during a standard/process review inspection. Health district inspectors cited the store under the cold-holding rule for time/temperature controlled for safety (TCS) foods after a seafood island case registered 50°F. Inspectors recorded shrimp at 50°F and salmon at 45°F, above the 41°F maximum required to limit bacterial growth. According to the record, no temperature alert had been received for the case, and staff planned to monitor whether it was in defrost mode and remove the shrimp and salmon if it was not. Kroger #594 carries a Risk Level IV designation, the highest risk category assigned to food operations.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/10-seneca-county-food-facilities-critical-violations-june-2026/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The contributions were made to joint fundraising committees set up to raise money for Merrin’s Ohio 9th District bid, including one tied to Emmer Majority Builders, a fundraising venture led by U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minnesota, that pools major-donor money for targeted Republican candidates. Those committees transferred their net proceeds to Merrin’s campaign.

Adam R. Kidan, listed in the filings as an executive at the Florida firm Atlantic Solutions Group, contributed $3,500. Kidan and Abramoff pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and wire fraud in the fraudulent purchase of the SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet — the deal at the center of the corruption scandal that sent Abramoff to prison — and in 2006 each was sentenced to five years and 10 months in federal prison. The two were ordered to jointly pay $21.7 million in restitution; Kidan has since become a prolific Republican donor, giving more than $1 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

James H. Batmasian, identified in the filings as the owner of a Florida investment firm, gave $1,487. Batmasian, the largest commercial property owner in Boca Raton, pleaded guilty in 2008 to failing to remit about $250,000 in federal payroll taxes and served an eight-month prison sentence. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020.

Both men have contributed to numerous Republican candidates and committees.

Merrin, a former state representative from Monclova Township who describes himself as a real estate investor, won the May 5 Republican primary and faces a Nov. 3 rematch with Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a district redrawn to lean Republican. The contributions are detailed in filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Merrin’s campaign could not be reached for comment.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a statement issued June 25, DeWine said the 6–3 ruling in Mullin v. Doe means more than 10,000 Haitians living legally in Ohio through TPS — most of them in the Springfield area — “will now be here illegally and will be subject to immediate deportation.”

“Today’s decision is a legal decision. As I have stated in the past, the policy to remove these individuals from this country is a mistake,” DeWine said. He added that the Haitians “were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday,” but that “today it is now illegal to employ them.”

DeWine described conditions in Haiti as dire. “The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And, the economy is in shambles,” he said. He pointed to the federal government’s advisory against traveling to Haiti and to the Federal Aviation Administration’s prohibition on U.S. carriers flying there because of the danger of aircraft being fired on by gangs.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” DeWine said.

What the court decided

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the TPS statute bars federal courts from reviewing most challenges to the termination of the program, and that a claim by Haitian plaintiffs that the termination was motivated by race was unlikely to succeed. Justice Samuel Alito announced the judgment of the court. The decision reversed lower-court orders that had paused the terminations and cleared the way for the Department of Homeland Security to end protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

The case reached the court after then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem moved in 2025 to terminate the designations for both countries. The court’s opinion notes that Haiti’s designation was set to end following a November 2025 notice. The current homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, is the named party in the consolidated cases.

In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the TPS holders had asked only to remain in the country while their case continued, and parted with the majority over a ruling she said would expose them to severe harm. The terminations are set to take effect within weeks unless the lower courts intervene, according to legal groups representing TPS holders.

What it means for Ohio

TiffinOhio.net has reported that an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield — a mix of TPS holders, citizens and people with other legal status — part of roughly 30,000 people with temporary status across central Ohio. Local officials and economists have estimated that deportations would remove hundreds of millions of dollars in annual economic activity, including about $300 million a year in Clark County.

DeWine has been among a small number of Republicans to oppose the administration’s effort to end Haitian TPS, and he has previously argued that stripping the workers of legal status would damage Ohio’s economy. The DeWine family also has personal ties to Haiti: the governor and his wife, Fran, helped support a school there named for their late daughter, which closed in 2024 because of gang activity.

Hours after the ruling, hundreds of people gathered in Springfield to support Haitian residents, with clergy, attorneys and community leaders urging families to prepare legally for possible deportation.

Background

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to provide short-term relief for people who cannot safely return to their home countries. Haiti was first designated in 2010 after a devastating earthquake, and the protection was extended in 2021 after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Although intended as a temporary measure, TPS designations have in practice lasted for years.

Ahead of the decision, immigration attorneys and Springfield faith leaders had warned that a ruling against TPS holders would immediately strip work authorization and protection from deportation. The U.S. House voted in April to extend TPS for Haitians through 2029, but that measure has stalled in the Senate.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nathaniel H. Cain, 23, entered not-guilty pleas to both counts at an arraignment on Thursday, June 18, before Seneca County Common Pleas Judge Damon D. Alt, court records show. His bond was continued at $75,000 with no 10 percent option, and the judge scheduled a pretrial hearing for Tuesday, July 28.

A grand jury returned the two-count indictment on Monday, June 8. Count one charges domestic violence under Ohio Revised Code 2919.25(A), a first-degree misdemeanor; count two charges strangulation under R.C. 2903.18(B)(2), a third-degree felony. Cain was originally charged by complaint in May with a single count of strangulation, and the domestic violence count was added through the indictment.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/fired-trooper-cain-pleads-not-guilty-strangulation-domestic-violence/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Riley Q. Flores, 26, of Costa Mesa, California, faces two first-degree felony charges — rape and kidnapping — filed June 24 in Circleville Municipal Court, according to court records (case No. 2600530). The charges, brought by the Circleville Police Department, stem from alleged conduct on June 23. The warrants were entered with no bond, according to dispatch records.

Circleville police asked for help locating Flores shortly after 3:30 p.m. Thursday, telling dispatchers he had fled on foot the night before and was believed to be unarmed, the records show. Authorities tracked his cell phone to an area north of U.S. 224, and deputies found him hiding in a barn near the northwest corner of U.S. 224 and South State Route 19, the Sheriff’s Office said. He was in custody by about 4:35 p.m. Deputies from the office’s enforcement unit, working with the Circleville and Bloomville police departments, made the arrest without incident.

After the arrest, detectives executed a search warrant on Flores to recover evidence relevant to the investigation. The warrant was signed by Judge Damon D. Alt of the Seneca County Court of Common Pleas, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Flores was taken to the Seneca County jail and remained in custody pending transfer to Circleville, the seat of Pickaway County in south-central Ohio. He had not entered a plea, and court records did not list an attorney for him. The charges are allegations; a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until convicted.

“I am proud of all of our personnel involved in the apprehension and the execution of the subsequent search warrant to assist the Circleville Police Department with their investigation. It’s great to see the resources, training, and technology we work diligently to provide for our deputies being utilized to continue to make this county and other communities a safe place. Job well done to all involved!” Sheriff Fredrick W. Stevens said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Standing alongside local officials, demonstrators held signs reading “Jon the Con,” “First Energy’s Golden Boy” and “Ohioans can’t afford Jon Husted’s corruption,” some pairing photos of Husted with the rising cost of their electric bills. Several wore T-shirts reading “Unpaid Protester.” Community members and local leaders gathered to oppose FirstEnergy’s proposed rate increase and to link it to the fallout from the HB 6 scandal, WTOL reported.

What brought residents out was the latest in a string of rising electric costs. FirstEnergy’s proposed three-year distribution plan would add about $5.30 a month each year to a typical Toledo Edison residential bill — an average increase of roughly 2.8% annually — according to figures the company provided to WTOL. The plan affects only the distribution portion of a bill and would take effect only if the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approves it.

The officials who joined the residents echoed their message. “At a time when Ohioans are worried about affording a tank of gas or a loaf of bread, here’s just another cost that the hardworking families of Toledo and Ohio are burdened with,” Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said, per WTOL. “So we might ask ourselves why. Why is this happening?” State Rep. Erika White, a Democrat who represents Ohio House District 41 in Lucas County, called for transparency: “We pay some of the highest utility costs across the country. We need accountability first. Where are the funds going?”

FirstEnergy says the plan is about strengthening the grid, not past misconduct, and rejected any connection to the HB 6 scandal. “We’re a different company than we were back then, new leadership and new plans to improve,” spokesperson Brooke Conlan told WTOL. Conlan said the plan supports about $800 million a year in infrastructure upgrades and about $83 million a year in tree trimming and vegetation management, “all aimed at reducing outages and improving restoration times.”

The demonstrators’ anger traces back to HB 6, the 2019 law that delivered a ratepayer-funded bailout to nuclear plants owned by a FirstEnergy subsidiary and sits at the center of what prosecutors have called a roughly $60 million corruption scheme. Evidence in the state criminal case against former FirstEnergy executives Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling — and reporting by The Associated Press drawn from Husted’s official calendars — has documented meetings and phone calls between Husted and central figures in the scheme, as TiffinOhio.net has reported. Separately, the average Ohio residential electric bill has risen about $663 a year since the law took effect, based on PUCO data, though not all of that increase is attributable to HB 6.

Husted has never been charged with or accused of any crime in connection with the scandal, and he has denied playing a meaningful role. “My role was very clear. I wanted the nuclear power plants to remain operational,” he said in a January 2026 interview with NBC4 Columbus. Husted, a Republican, was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. Mike DeWine in January 2025 and faces former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in the Nov. 3 special election.

The state case against Jones and Dowling ended in a mistrial on April 1, and a retrial is scheduled to begin Sept. 28 in Akron. For residents who turned out Thursday, there is also a more immediate avenue: the PUCO will take public comment as it reviews the rate proposal. WTOL reported it contacted Husted’s office for comment and was awaiting a response.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The schedule opens at 9 a.m. with the Cruisin’ Thru the Years classic car show, sponsored by Reineke Family Dealerships, running until 11:30 a.m. Registration opens at 8 a.m., and a sign-up form is available online.

The outdoor pool opens at noon and stays open until 6 p.m. Day passes can be purchased at the pool, and memberships are available online. Food vendors will be set up in the park throughout the day.

Inflatables for children, sponsored by NOPEC, will be available from 2 to 6 p.m. Live music begins at 4 p.m., with Spoiled Rotten performing from 4 to 6 p.m. and headliners Walley and the Beavs taking the stage from 7 to 10 p.m.

Fireworks are scheduled to begin around 10 p.m. Because of the size of the shells being used this year, the display will be set off from the baseball field across from the YMCA on Summit Street, the city said. No parking or viewing will be permitted on the north end of Hedges-Boyer Park, and the city advised visitors to expect limited parking in the park on July 4.

All events are free to the public except admission to the pool.

For more information, residents can call (419) 448-5408, visit www.tiffinohio.gov or check the Tiffin Park & Recreation Facebook page.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

State officials are set to decide whether to accept bids or open up 23,000 acres of publicly owned wildlife preserves in eastern Ohio to the fracking industry.

The votes Monday could amount to a significant expansion of Ohio’s public lands leasing process, which has existed in dormant fashion since 2011 but was kick-started in 2023 via legislation passed by Republican lawmakers and signed by Gov. Mike DeWine. 

The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, a panel of gubernatorial appointees, will decide whether to accept the best bids for about 15,000 acres, split between Jockey Hollow and Egypt Valley wildlife areas. The two expanses stretch over a hilly section of the state a few miles east of Piedmont Lake. 

The commission is also scheduled to vote on whether to open another 8,000 acres of Egypt Valley to oil and gas development. If approved, the state will have leased out more than 30,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park and six state wildlife areas, mostly in the Belmont-Harrison-Guernsey county region. 

Ohio received about $57 million in signing bonuses from the first 7,000 acres leased by the state, mostly via the lease at Salt Fork, one of Ohio’s largest. And that doesn’t include the 18% to 20% in royalty payments Ohio is set to receive when extraction begins. 

An Ohio Department of Natural Resources spokesperson couldn’t immediately provide state royalty revenue data on Thursday.

Near-unanimous opposition in public hearings to fracking public lands

Despite near-unanimous opposition in public hearings and written comment periods, the OGLMC has almost always accepted land nominations as they’ve rolled in since 2024. 

State law shields the identity of the company that “nominates” the land at the OGLMC and only releases a company name when a winning bid has been selected. 

A subsidiary of Gulfport Energy, an Oklahoma company, previously won a small lease for about 31 acres of Egypt Valley. A company spokesperson didn’t respond to an inquiry. 

The state acquired the land at Egypt Valley via the Wildlife Restoration Act, which uses money from a special tax on guns and bullets to buy land for conservation purposes. Consol Energy gave Ohio what’s now Jockey Hollow after it was “extensively” surface mined between 1958 and 1968, according to ODNR.

The projects approved by the DeWine administration have all proposed drilling vertically from well pads adjacent to public lands. Thousands of feet underground, those well bores turn 90 degrees and reach laterally for oil and natural gas trapped in shale underground.

Save Ohio Parks, a grassroots advocacy group of environmentalists in Southeast Ohio, issued a statement criticizing what it has described as a “rubber stamp” OGLMC legal process. 

“This is an insane amount of land that could be approved and awarded for fracking in just one meeting,” said Cathy Cowan Becker, board president at Save Ohio Parks. “If all these nominations and bids move forward, the state will have approved four times as much of our public land for fracking in 2026 as it did during the last three years combined.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

More than a dozen people spoke at a rally outside of Springfield’s City Hall Thursday night. 

“We had hoped that this would be a time of celebration, but it has become a time of lament,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church.

“This is not a time to throw a punch or a rock, it is the time to turn the other cheek. It’s a time to go the extra mile to sacrifice our comfort and to suffer if need be to protect the lives of others.” 

People cried and hugged each other. Several held signs saying ‘Immigrants Make America Great,’ ‘Springfield is for everyone,’ ‘Love thy neighbor,’ and ‘We are commanded to welcome strangers.’ 

Some of the speakers prayed for the Haitians and Springfield. The World House Choir from Yellow Springs lead the group in songs. 

Mia Perez, founder of Voices of Immigrants, urged Haitians to act now. 

“Do not wait until ICE is at your door,” she said. “Gather your documents, keep copies of your immigration papers, work permit, passport, court notices.”

Many of the speakers emphasized this is the time to help Haitians. 

“You must also prepare,” said Katie Kersh, an attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Dayton.

“You need to decide what you stand for and what you are willing to fight for in the coming days.”

Springfield Neighbors United has launched an emergency food and diaper drive, said Rev. Dr. Marian Stewart, one of their volunteer leaders. 

“There are a lot of babies in town,” she said. “Let me tell you, we need to take care of them in this hard time. These days, I ask you, follow your heart, put kindness, empathy, and compassion in the center.”

Ruby thanked Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, for his support and asked him for help. 

“We need resources to provide translators, we need resources to help with food, and anything the state can do would be deeply appreciated,” Ruby said. 

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.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is 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. 

“Haitians who came to this country with the promise of safety, who follow the law and apply for TPS and often asylum have now been left with no TPS protection,” Kersh said. 

This means Haitians can theoretically be detained by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at any moment, she said. 

“These individuals followed the law, and the law abandoned them,” Kersh said. 

She recommends Haitians living in the U.S. talk to an immigration attorney for a consultation to evaluate their options. 

Haitians can apply for asylum, but the Trump administration put an indefinite freeze on processing all asylum applications at the end of 2025.

“Our immigrant neighbors and community members need to prepare,” Kersh said. “They need to make a plan, they need to decide what will happen to their children if they are detained.”

More than 1,000 children born in Springfield with American citizenship have Haitian parents, Viles Dorsainvil has previously said. 

“I’m not sure the school district will know how to deal with it,” Dorsainvil said on Thursday. “And the parents as well, they do not know if they will continue to send their kids to school.”

Dorsainvil came to the United States from Haiti in 2020 and is the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield.

“This decision has brought fear, uncertainty, and pain to countless families who have built their lives, contributed to the communities and called the United States home,” he said. 

Dorsainvil spoke directly to his fellow Haitians. 

“We will not allow fear to define us,” he said. “Our resilience has carried us through these many hardships before, and it will continue to carry us through this one as well.” 

Dorsainvil also thanked the Springfield community. 

“You have welcomed your neighbors, spoken out against injustice, defended vulnerable families, and refused to let hate and division have the final word,” he said. 

“Your friendship and your courage has given hope to many people during one of the most difficult chapters of their lives as we face this unsettling moment.” 

“We want you here,” someone shouted from the crowd while Dorsainvil spoke. 

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.

“You cannot remove our neighbors without us feeling the hurt,” said Rev. Michelle Boomgaard with Christ Episcopal Church in Springfield. 

“You cannot remove children from our children’s classrooms, their friends, without us feeling hurt, you cannot remove star athletes from our sports teams without us feeling the hurt.”

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.

“Many of them cannot safely return to Haiti,” said Biassu Pierre, a community organizer for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality. 

“They came to the United States to escape violence, stability, and danger. Going back to Haiti is not simply returning home, it’s good men returning to a place where their lives are at risk today.” 

Ohio state Rep. Munira Abdullahi, D-Columbus, said this is the time for people to come together. 

“Are we going to let them take our neighbors away from us? Absolutely not,” she said. 

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.

Debate over a third reconciliation bill has been simmering in the background for months, though GOP lawmakers have yet to reach consensus about whether they should draft another massive package, like they approved last year, or a more narrow one that could help the party boost defense spending.

That budget reconciliation process gives Republican leaders a way to get around Senate rules that would otherwise force bipartisanship, giving them a loophole out of negotiating major legislation with Democrats. 

But it comes with several hurdles in order to get that special treatment, including that each provision in the bill have an impact on federal revenue or spending that is not deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. 

Those in-the-weeds restrictions aren’t especially important to President Donald Trump, who wants Republicans in Congress to prioritize a voter identification bill, which cannot move through reconciliation, over everything else.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., tried to find middle ground in late June, proposing lawmakers use reconciliation to create a grant program for states that implement voter identification requirements. 

Johnson acknowledged the challenges to using reconciliation amid narrow majorities in each chamber, but said he thinks Republicans can accomplish their goals if they “stick together.” 

He, however, didn’t have details to share. 

“Stay tuned. We’re working through that,” Johnson said. “Doing a reconciliation bill is a very complicated process of consensus building, where we have a collection of ideas that, I think, every Republican, certainly, agrees with in principle.”

A few hours later, sitting in the Oval Office, the president batted down the idea of any compromise on the elections bill, creating more public disagreement between the top Republicans in the country. 

“Not really. No,” Trump said when asked whether he’d “be open to a compromise measure” moving through the reconciliation process. 

Hardball tactics

Lobbying for the full bill, which would require people show proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID when casting a ballot, isn’t only coming from the president. 

Far-right Republicans in both chambers are using hardball tactics to cajole their leaders to get the legislation to Trump’s desk, even if it means delaying work on their colleagues’ priorities.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee is one of several Republicans posting on social media and holding press conferences. He recently called for Americans to “encourage your senators to resume debate on the Senate floor—with a plan to keep debating it until it passes.”

“Tell your senators: Pass the SAVE America Act,” Lee wrote in another post. “Accept no excuses or half measures.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has become somewhat frustrated with constant pressure from some of his members, who are diverting time and resources to a bill that cannot pass. 

“At the end of the day, I have to deal with reality,” Thune said. “And sometimes the alternative universe that is X doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground.”

Thune said it’s been “very clear” for some time there isn’t enough support among Republicans to change the Senate rule that requires at least 60 lawmakers vote to limit debate on most bills. That legislative filibuster forces bipartisanship and gives the minority party, which could be Republicans as soon as next year, a seat at the table. 

“There are not the votes to nuke the filibuster and there aren’t going to be 10 Democrat votes to all of a sudden support the SAVE America Act,” Thune said. “Those are just hard realities and I think people at some point have to come to grips with that.”

Trump cancels signing for housing bill

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said that despite months of effort, the voter identification bill doesn’t have the votes to become law. 

“If you can’t get to 60, you can’t pass it. I mean, that’s pretty simple,” she said. “Now, he says talk it to death and people will change their minds. I don’t think that’s a strategy that’s going to be in success. We tried that earlier this year to keep talking, we didn’t get to the end.” 

Capito said voters want to see Republicans focus on issues that can improve people’s lives, like the broadly bipartisan housing affordability bill both chambers approved this month. Trump was set to sign that bill during a ceremony on Capitol Hill but canceled at the last minute to try to push through the election bill. 

“So, yeah, they want to see us do something,” she said. “They don’t want to see us sitting up there yakking all the time.”

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, wants to use the time to avoid another government shutdown when the next fiscal year begins Oct. 1 — no easy feat following three shutdowns over the last year. 

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., hopes to reach final agreement on the farm bill in the months ahead after years of delays and stopgap measures for those agriculture and food safety net programs. 

He brushed aside demands from some other GOP lawmakers to use the budget reconciliation process to pass another party-line package.

“We had trouble with the one that we just did and that was very, very narrow. I mean, that was strictly Homeland Security,” Boozman said. “When you start doing a bigger package, like they’re talking about and you start involving various committees, it becomes a lot more issues involved that you have to work out. And so it just gets very complex.”

Boozman added that working through the several steps of that process takes weeks, which lawmakers may not have. 

Other priorities

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said the party needs to focus on legislation that would lower “the cost of everything,” in part, by eliminating taxes on gasoline and health care.  

“That’s something that would be a huge benefit to every working person out there immediately,” he said. “Let them take all health care costs off of their federal taxes, so they paid no taxes on it.”

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy said he thinks lawmakers should use the budget reconciliation process to significantly bolster defense funding. But he said “duh” when asked by States Newsroom whether the limited number of days in session would make that difficult. 

Lawmakers are set to be out of session for nearly all of August and September.

“I think if we want to get more money for defense, we have to do it through reconciliation, which means we need to start immediately,” he said. 

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno has a lengthy list of issues he wants to see Republicans address before November, including a bill he’s set to release later this summer with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren that would shore up the Social Security trust fund. 

“It’s not really a third-rail issue, because what we’re saying is that everybody should pay the same amount of money for Social Security,” he said. “When you have something that literally 90% of Americans support, I think we should be able to get something on that across the finish line.”

The two lawmakers wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times the bill would raise the cap that ensures people don’t pay into Social Security on earnings more than $184,500.

“Since the vast majority of Americans make less than that, most people are paying Social Security taxes on 100 percent of their earnings while the highest earners are paying on only part of theirs,” they wrote.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck — than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” they added. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said he’d like lawmakers to ensure E15 gasoline, a blend that includes 15% ethanol and is usually unavailable in summer, can be sold year-round, though he hadn’t thought about any other issues the party should press for ahead of November. 

“I guess I can’t answer your question,” he said. “I just haven’t thought about it.”

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 from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell specifically halts the department’s new definition of “professional” degrees, which was limited to 11 fields and would impose lower loan caps for groups not included in its definition, including nursing, teaching and social work. 

The ruling, which covers two consolidated lawsuits, came just a week before the provision was slated to take effect July 1. It marks a setback for a key part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s forthcoming overhaul of the federal student loan system. 

The department finalized regulations, published May 1, that implement sweeping changes outlined in the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law, including new caps on federal student loans, with different limits based on whether a degree was “professional.” 

But it overreached by narrowing what degrees qualified as professional, Howell wrote, saying Congress intended to keep the definition in place when the law passed in July 2025.

“The Rule is likely contrary to law,” Howell wrote. “The Rule’s definition of ‘professional degree,’ and thus the category of students benefiting from the high loan caps, is likely narrower (than) what Congress intended.”

But she declined to halt the department from enforcing the forthcoming loan caps because they were written into the law. 

Howell wrote that “this litigation cannot remedy plaintiffs’ primary frustration over the elimination of uncapped borrowing to pursue graduate education and the concomitant benefits of enabling more students from working families to earn a graduate degree in a chosen career field and attracting students more broadly to enter the American workforce in fields understaffed and in areas underserved.” 

Challenge from health professionals

Wednesday’s ruling stems from a pair of combined challenges by associations representing people in fields that do not fall under the new “professional” definition and would thus face lower annual and lifetime borrowing caps. 

One suit was filed in May by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners; the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners; the American Association of Colleges of Nursing; the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health; the National Education Association; and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. 

The other lawsuit was filed earlier in June by the PA Education Association and the American Academy of Physician Associates. 

In the May suit, the challengers argued that “the final rule’s definition of ‘professional degree’ excludes many degree programs that prepare students for a specific profession, and that may qualify as a professional degree under the 2007 regulatory definition adopted by Congress, including degrees in nursing, education, public health, and marriage and family therapy.” 

Unlimited borrowing eliminated

Part of the regulations eliminate a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing and establish new annual and aggregate loan limits for those students.  

Graduate student loans will be capped at $20,500 annually and have a $100,000 aggregate limit, while professional student loans would have a $50,000 annual limit and $200,000 aggregate cap. 

But the programs within the department’s “professional” category and thus subject to the higher loan cap are limited to: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology and clinical psychology. 

In response to a request for comment, the department said in a statement it was “reviewing the order and will take appropriate action,” adding that “we look forward to implementing the RISE student loan provisions and offering new, affordable repayment plans on July 1.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

States and territories showed off cultural and agricultural exports at exhibits stretching nearly a mile. Attendees snapped photos on the small Grand Ole Opry stage in the Tennessee booth, kids tried putt-putt at Indiana’s miniature golf course and cowboys rode horses at Montana’s rodeo. 

A 110-foot Ferris wheel slowly turned at the center of the freshly manicured lawn, framing the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol in the distance on either side. Nearby stood a model of Trump’s controversial “triumphal arch.”

People collected swag from each state — drawstring bags from Ohio, stickers from South Dakota, snacks from Tennessee — and could receive a stamp on state fair passports.

The fair is part of the larger Freedom 250 programming and kicked off Wednesday night with a rally on the mall featuring a speech from the president that closely resembled his remarks along the 2024 presidential campaign trail. The festivities will continue over Independence Day, when Trump will deliver a second speech followed by what is promised to be an impressive fireworks display. 

The president will visit North and South Dakota as part of his Freedom 250 tour for the opening of the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library and Independence Day eve fireworks above Mount Rushmore.

Freedom 250 then extends into August with a high school athletic competition in Washington, D.C., dubbed the “Patriot Games” and a Freedom 250 INDYCAR race around the National Mall.

The administration’s celebration is separate from the America250 commission, created by Congress a decade ago, and which has its own nationwide programming this year.

From Lake Erie to the Ohio River

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and first lady Fran DeWine greeted guests in Ohio’s pavilion. The couple posed for photos in front of a map of the Buckeye State.

“We wanted to see on the wall all the different things, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, all the different fun things you can do in Ohio,” the Republican governor said, adding the state has local celebrations and initiatives planned for the 250th anniversary, including “Movies in Ohio” for community showings of films that feature the state.

Ohio’s first lady showcased a children’s literacy exhibit on the opposite wall and touted the roughly 427,000 participants in the state’s partnership with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a program that mails free children’s books monthly to households with kids under age 5. 

“We’ve mailed out 27 million books. We know that a child’s brain is 80% developed by age 3, so we want to get them those books early,” she said.

Reflecting on America’s milestone birthday, the governor said, “We’re always a work in progress, Ohio’s a work in progress, this country is a work in progress.”

“I think you know the thing we need to keep in mind, all of us, is there’s some essential core principles that we all believe in. … We may disagree about different policies, but the core principles are the same,” he said.

Cartwheels on the lawn

People from various states walked from exhibit to exhibit, while stopped in the nation’s capital during road trip vacations.

Tanya Geders, 43, of St. Louis, Missouri, did a cartwheel in the mall lawn, trying to persuade her son to join in. The family stopped at the state fair on their way to Virginia Beach.

“We’re like, well, if we go to the ocean, we can go to D.C. and what a better time to be here than the 250th anniversary,” Geders said.

Robyn Toman, 71, of Severn, Maryland, escorted her 12-year-old grandson Miles to meet DeWine and grab a photo with the governor.

Toman said she remembers the country’s bicentennial.

“I was a kid about his age, and I came in 1976. I said, ‘We’re gonna go, let’s go down to D.C. for a couple days and see this,’” she said. 

“We’ve enjoyed it. We went over to the archives yesterday, and saw the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. And, oh, that was so nice, that was fantastic.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio analyzed the most recent U.S. Census data to find that the more than 5,600 Black-owned businesses in Ohio employed more than 64,000 employees. The data also showed that annual payroll for those businesses had increased by 82% between 2017 and 2023.

“The data on the economic impact of Black-owned businesses in Ohio demonstrates that the state’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths and that the success of the Black community leads to success for the state overall,” the institute stated.

Annual payroll from Black-owned business went from $1.3 billion in 2017 to $2 billion in 2023, according to census data.

Analysis of data from the same period by the Brookings Institution spotlighted five areas of Ohio, three of which have seen growth and two that have seen dips in the number of Black-owned businesses. In the Toledo metro area, 3.3% of all businesses are owned by Black employers, an increase of 85% from 2017. The Akron metro area has seen a 27% increase in Black-owned businesses, and the Cincinnati area saw 125% growth between 2017 and 2023, with 3.5% of all businesses Black-owned.

The Dayton area and the Youngstown metro area have seen drops in Black-owned businesses, with Dayton’s number dropping by 56%, and Youngstown’s down by 39% between 2017 and 2023.

While the areas had overall increases over the seven-year span, all but one area saw drops in Black-owned businesses when the data was narrowed to 2022 to 2023, the most recent data studied.

Toledo’s number went down 1%, Akron’s lowered by 29%, Youngstown’s was 77% less, and Dayton’s Black-owned businesses saw a 56% drop. Cincinnati saw a rise of 18% in the one-year span, according to the Brookings Institution.

The data was similar to states around the country, with the institution showing 72 metro areas in the U.S. with growth, of the 116 areas studied. Metro areas with the largest losses from 2022 to 2023 were Atlanta, San Francisco, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Virginia Beach. The study said “recent attacks on government programs that center on diversity, equity, and inclusion threaten continuing progress,” noting the Minority Business Development Agency’s elimination by the Trump Administration, and changes to the Small Business Administration’s program to bring federal projects to “socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses.”

“With numerous structural barriers to growth – such as credit access, intergenerational wealth gaps, and outsized levels of debt – Black-owned businesses will not magically grow without inclusive and intentional policy and investments,” Andre Perry and Hannah Stephens wrote for the Brookings Institution.

White employers continue to own the most businesses by far in the nation, and data shows Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander employers own the least, with Asian American, Latino or Hispanic, and Black owners falling in between. Despite this, Black employers saw the second-largest proportional increase, according to the Brookings analysis.

“As underrepresented race and ethnic groups own more employer businesses, their share of ownership moves closer to their share of the population,” Perry and Stephens wrote. “This growth is a tool to combat centuries of racial disparities in ownership and wealth.”

In 2023, Black Americans made up 14.4% of the U.S. population, but only owned 3.4% of businesses, according to census data.

In a 2023 report by the Ohio Department of Development, the state reported the Black community as 14.5% of the state’s total population, and reported Black-owned businesses made up 11% of all businesses.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A great bulk of everyday people are sinking in a quicksand of endless struggles, feeling desperate, helpless, hopeless, while our feckless, egomaniacal, careless, reckless ruling class showers itself in gaudy, self-obsessed, look-at-me excess.

The most vile aspects of our national character and the worst of the American stereotypes crash around our public space chewing up people’s lives and hawking them into the spittoon of our collective historical shame:

Loud, loudly wrong, ignorant, excessive, might-makes-right, cruelty, armed-to-the-teeth, strutting and striding, bullying, and oh-so-tough.

Oh, so weak.

So very very weak.

So insecure, and so obviously so insecure.

Deluded like children playing at action heroes in their movie-minds, with no care or concept of the depth and breadth and complexity of actual human life in the very real world.

Except children have the capacity for growth and wonder and curiosity impossible for these calcified so-called adults running the country.

The callous selfishness of, Greed-is-good and I’m-gonna-get-mine-so-who-cares-about-anybody-else.

The cowardly myopia of, It-doesn’t-affect-me-so-what-do-I-care.

The chilling ignorance, lack of empathy, lack of humanity, lack of compassion, and lack of historical comprehension spewed in the eternal American sins of continued shameless racism and discrimination being enacted once again as a matter of brutal public policy.

And they think they’re being clever.

They especially think they’re being clever when the courts that they’ve vandalized, radicalized, and politicized officially excuse their atrocious behavior.

This time the pathetic fools declaim, Racism-is-actually-over-it’s-reverse-racism-that’s-the-problem, as they follow the timeless playbook.

And this debased ignorance becomes sanctified in the decisions of the nation’s highest court, to roll back civil rights, voting rights, human rights.

The sick, fetishized cruelty of, Good-I’m-glad-those-people-are-being-hurt-they-deserve-it.

The stone-cold pathological depravity of, Empathy-and-compassion-are-actually-bad-things.

America faces our anniversary as the world’s oldest democracy not as a celebration but a reckoning.

We must now take stock of our situation and decide whether we shall snuff out the remaining embers of our constitutional republic in sacrifice to the egomania and moral rot of the age.

A free people may vote their way out of freedom; that is a free choice, but it is also a robbery of future generations who would never then have any such choice.

This betrayal of future generations steals their birthright, the “apple of gold,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, the “political religion of our nation” enshrined in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and never yet fully realized, now being betrayed once again.

Consider the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence in full.

In full is key.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

It begins with our fundamental equality as human beings — and therefore deserving of the same exact natural rights and dignity no matter who we are, all of us included, nobody left out, all of humanity.

The second sentence does not end at the individualistic “pursuit of happiness,” a common mistake.

It ends much later, not on the note of individualism in the introductory clause, but on the collectivism, collective interest, and supremacy of the people over the government found in its concluding lines.

Because all of this — all of our government, everything you see — is meant to be for the safety and happiness of the people, all the people. Full stop.

That’s so far from reality right now it’s a joke, and that’s where we’ve gone so catastrophically wrong.

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, —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.

The introduction about the individual under the laws of nature is an extension of Lockean thought based on Thomas Aquinas based on a synthesis of Augustine of Hippo and Aristotle:

This fundamental idea that we are all, by our nature, indeed born free in nature, in the full bloom of our individual righteousness of diversity, and we only bind ourselves together voluntarily in what Rousseau called the social contract.

The Declaration acknowledges the greater truth of that bond, and its basis in both our individual natural rights and our free choice of social contract, by proclaiming that all governmental power is derived “from the consent of the governed.”

This is the contract for our collective good, where we recognize that our own narrow self-interest must have limitations to protect the interests of others and our collective interests now and into the future — even and perhaps especially for our ideological opposites — because that’s how we ensure the protection of ourselves, and aspire to liberty and justice for all.

Moreover, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends” — destructive of the people’s natural rights to life and liberty, meant to be secured in the bond of self-government — the people further reserve the right of supremacy over our government to do as we wish to effect our collective safety and happiness.

Put simply, all power is inherent in the people and politicians are nothing but public servants. Do not worship them, ever. They are your employees, nothing more. Hold them accountable, relentlessly.

And if politicians are only serving themselves, if they are only serving their own greed and lust for power and the moneyed elites who plunder and profiteer, and they sacrifice the public good at the altar of power and greed and ego, then they have betrayed the public trust and they are of no use to our self-government in their positions.

Past Americans spilled their blood for the rule of law now being ignored.

Past patriots gave their lives for the freedoms, liberty, and protections now being betrayed.

The birthright of future generations is at stake.

We can continue on in a hateful mess of chaos and destruction, or we can heal and build together.

That decision is before each and every one of us right now, and every day.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Texts from colleagues and rumors on social media delivered the unsettling news: The Auburn Board of Trustees had voted to dissolve the school’s faculty senate and give itself ultimate authority over academic decisions, including curriculum.

“What was really surprising … is the lack of knowledge that most of our faculty leaders had about the decision,” said Brooks, who’s been teaching at Auburn since 2006.

Faculty leaders across departments at Auburn — one of two flagship public universities in Alabama — said they learned of the proposal a day before the vote. The board approved the changes unanimously and without public discussion.

“To have that (decision) be the sole product of the Board of Trustees, with no input from faculty, is really unusual,” Brooks said.

The move at Auburn came two months after Alabama’s Republican-dominated state legislature passed a law curtailing the power of faculty senates at the state’s public colleges and universities. That law exempted Auburn and the University of Alabama, because their governing structures are enshrined in the state constitution. Some faculty felt Auburn’s eagerness to follow it anyway signals the board’s willingness to bend to political pressure.

The Auburn trustees did not respond to a request for comment, though the board said in a statement that its new policy is “intended to advance academic quality, transparency, consistency and institutional alignment while preserving meaningful faculty participation.”

Alabama isn’t alone. Since last year, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas and Utah have enacted similar laws that give greater power to politically appointed boards and administrators while weakening tenure protections and faculty sway over curriculum and university leadership. In Indiana, the new state budget gives Republican Gov. Mike Braun full authority to appoint members of Indiana University’s Board of Trustees.

Supporters of such measures frame them as efforts to hold taxpayer-funded public colleges and universities accountable at a time when many Americans are questioning the value of increasingly expensive college degrees. Many conservative lawmakers also say they are taking aim at liberal bias on university campuses.

Multiple studies have found that professors tend to be liberal, though it’s less clear whether they are pushing their views in the classroom. In a 2022-23 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, nearly 56% of faculty described themselves as liberal or far left, compared with about 13% who said they were conservative or far right and roughly 32% who described themselves as “middle of the road.”

“I think our institutions do need to be run, at a minimum, fiscally, as a business, so that we make sure that the money our taxpayers are pouring into … our universities is used and utilized in the correct way,” Kentucky Republican state Sen. Lindsey Tichenor said earlier this year before voting for a measure to allow the state’s public colleges and universities to fire faculty for financial reasons, such as low enrollment in a particular program or department or a budget shortfall.

Opponents said the measure was a way for legislators to get around higher education tenure protections. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the bill, but lawmakers overrode him.

Faculty advocates, free speech groups and unions warn the new wave of laws will chill academic freedom and make universities more susceptible to political influence.

“Students, faculty and staff in almost every state have less say in how colleges and universities are run than they did a generation ago, and I don’t know if that resonates with members of the public,” said Barrett Taylor, a professor at the University of North Texas whose research focuses on higher education policy, finance and governance.

“I do think most people probably don’t want to send their kids to a college where they feel like the politicians are in charge,” he said.

Unprecedented power

One of the most far-reaching of the new measures is a Texas law enacted last year that grants political appointees unprecedented power over the state’s public colleges and universities.

University boards, which are appointed by the Texas governor, now have authority over hiring decisions of college administrators and more control over university curricula. The new law, passed by the Republican-majority state legislature, also limits the power of faculty senates and councils, shifting them to advisory-only roles.

Texas Republican state Rep. Matt Shaheen, the bill’s sponsor, told his colleagues on the House floor last year that its goal is “to ensure degrees earned in Texas are of value and prepare our students for success, both in life and in the workforce.”

The Senate sponsor of Texas’ new law was then-state Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Republican who became chancellor at Texas Tech University a few months after the bill passed. Using his authority under the new law, Creighton in April ordered the school to cancel academic programs centered on sexual orientation and gender identity, and directed faculty to recognize only “two human sexes.”

In a recent survey by the Texas Tech University Faculty Senate, about half of the faculty who responded said they chose to alter their teaching content in response to memos from Creighton and another chancellor laying out new guidelines and restrictions on course content. More than half said they were considering jobs at other universities.

Since the law was enacted, several professors at other Texas public universities have been fired: A Texas State professor was fired after speaking about political organization at a socialist conference; a Texas A&M professor lost her job after a video of her discussing gender identity with a student went viral; and a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, was dismissed from his senior vice provost role for “ideological differences.”

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, in response to the vice provost’s ouster, said on X that “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.”

Model legislation

Texas’ new law closely tracks model legislation shared in February by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. On its website, the institute argues that university board members “can act as a counterweight to the excesses of university faculty and administrators,” and that too much faculty autonomy has made campuses “insular and sclerotic.”

State involvement is necessary, the institute argues, to hold universities accountable to the public. It says that required general education courses should be reviewed and approved annually by administrative boards to make sure they’re relevant and worthy of public investment.

Distrust in higher education has become an election issue, John Sailer, the Manhattan Institute’s director of higher education policy, wrote in an email.

“Legislation is a blunt-force instrument but it isn’t sufficient,” Sailer said. He emphasized that changes have to happen at the institutional level. “Concretely, this looks like giving boards a say in matters that reflect the university’s overarching mission, like the core curriculum.”

But critics argue that everyone benefits from colleges and universities that aren’t subject to partisan politicization. They say the move toward top-down governance at universities will erode academic freedom and pressure faculty to align their research and teaching with ideological interests rather than independent inquiry.

And university boards are increasingly chosen for political loyalty and wealth, rather than for commitment to the institution, said Hank Reichman, professor emeritus at California State University, East Bay, and former chair of an academic freedom committee at the American Association of University Professors.

“I think people are naive if they think that (lawmakers’) political agenda will be limited to just getting rid of DEI and gender studies programs,” he said, adding that he’s seen interference in medicine and other sciences. “It’s really an attack on independent learning.”

Action in multiple states

In Indiana last year, lawmakers gave the governor sole appointing power over Indiana University’s board of trustees by slipping the language into a must-pass budget bill in the final hours of the legislative session. It also limited faculty boards to advisory-only roles.

“The state has an interest in being sure that it (the university) is operated in the best way,” Indiana Republican state Rep. Jeff Thompson told his colleagues on the House floor last April. “And by the way, the governor would be the one that has to answer to the people.”

Braun later exercised his new power by removing three members of the university’s board who’d been elected by school alumni under the previous system. Braun’s replacements included two conservatives: an attorney who previously worked on his campaign and a conservative commentator and former sports reporter who was suspended by ESPN in 2021 for statements about Barack Obama’s father and her company’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements.

In April of this year, Tennessee also enacted a law increasing top-down governance by barring university leadership from taking faculty recommendations on disciplinary decisions. Under higher education’s tradition of shared governance, such decisions would usually involve input from a tenured faculty member’s peers.

Lawmakers in other states also are exerting control over academic programs and degree requirements.

Iowa Republican lawmakers inserted a requirement into a budget bill approved last month that undergraduate students at the state’s three public universities take both an American history course and one on American government in order to graduate. State lawmakers mandated that those courses at the University of Iowa must come through the Center for Intellectual Freedom, which they created last year to counter what they viewed as liberal bias in education.

Utah passed a law this year that diminishes faculty control over exams and assignments, allowing students to request exemptions based on “sincerely held” beliefs, as well as a law that restructures university oversight.

Ohio lawmakers this year tried to tie university funding to institutions’ compliance with a law they passed last year banning DEI efforts, but the bill died in committee.

And in Kansas, the GOP-controlled legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill named for Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist, that bans college free-speech zones that limit where students can protest or advocate for causes.

The legislature also tucked a provision into its budget bill that bans public colleges from requiring students to take courses on “DEI-CRT,” the acronyms for diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory, respectively.

Suspicious of higher ed

Republican lawmakers have been pushing some of the most visible changes, but both political parties are interested in exerting more control over higher education, said Taylor, the University of North Texas professor.

“We’re not arguing that the two parties’ agendas for higher ed are commensurate or equally likely to have the same consequences,” Taylor said, “but we do think that both parties are suspicious of higher education and are seeking to exert more control over it, though in very different ways.”

As a historian, Auburn professor Brooks said she and some of her department colleagues were not surprised to see political battles spill onto campus. The changes have been more jarring, she said, for faculty members in disciplines that are further removed from the culture wars, such as forestry or engineering.

“There seems to be a sense from the (university) administration that the only faculty that are disturbed, unsettled, distressed about the situation are a small group of malcontents,” she said. “I think that’s a complete misconception. It’s widespread.”

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.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not increased since 2009, losing more than 30% of its purchasing power since then because of inflation.

Alaska and Oregon will see statewide increases in the wage floor July 1: Alaska’s $13 minimum wage will increase to $14 per hour. In Oregon, where the minimum wage varies by region, minimum wage rates will reach as high as $16.80 in the Portland metropolitan area. 

In California, where the minimum wage varies across industries, many healthcare workers will see a spike in the wage floor July 1. Hospitals and healthcare systems with more than 10,000 employees must pay most employees at least $25 per hour, safety net hospitals must pay most workers at least $19.28 per hour and dialysis clinics must pay $24 per hour.

This past January, the minimum wage increased across dozens of cities, counties and states. An annual report from the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit advocating for workers’ rights, found that 88 jurisdictions will raise their minimum wages by the end of this year. 

While voters in conservative and liberal states have approved minimum wage increases, the minimum wage remains stagnant at $7.25 across 20 states, according to that organization.

The issue failed to gain traction last week in Oklahoma, where voters rejected a proposal to gradually increase the state’s $7.25 rate to $15 per hour by 2029.

“Tonight, voters chose to protect Oklahoma’s economic momentum and one of our greatest competitive advantages: affordability,” said Chad Warmington, president and CEO of the State Chamber, which opposed the increase, after the vote. 

Opponents of minimum wage hikes, which often includes small business owners, say the mandates can lead to job cuts and higher prices for consumers. But proponents say that a higher wage floor is needed to keep up with rising costs and that workers tend to spend more as their wages go up, boosting the overall economy. 

David Ottoson, who owns the retail store Rainbow Foods in downtown Juneau, Alaska, said the state’s minimum wage levels the playing field for businesses. In a news release from the advocacy organization Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, he credited higher wages as playing a role in the longevity of his natural foods grocery store, which has operated since 1980.

“We’re doing well, and a big reason is that we treat fair wages as an investment. They’re how you keep good people and run a business that lasts,” Ottoson said in the release. 

Most of July’s scheduled minimum wage increases are planned in cities across the country. 

In Chicago, the minimum wage will increase from $16.60 to $17.05. San Francisco’s rate will increase from $19.18 to $19.61 per hour. And in Washington, D.C., the minimum wage will increase from $17.95 per hour to $18.40 per hour. 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@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.

Ethan Lucas Mercado is charged with improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, a violation of Ohio Revised Code 2923.16(B) and a felony of the fourth degree, according to the Seneca County Clerk of Courts. The case is active in Seneca County Common Pleas Court, where it was filed June 23 before Judge Steve C. Shuff. Jail booking records list a $150,000 bond.

The single felony count covers knowingly transporting or having a loaded firearm in a vehicle in a way that makes it accessible without leaving the vehicle. A related misdemeanor charge of driving under a financial-responsibility suspension was dismissed, booking records show.

Mercado, listed at a Findlay address in court records, has retained attorney Sagan S. Kahler, who filed a demand for discovery and a request for a bill of particulars the day the case was filed, according to the docket. Seneca County Prosecutor Derek W. Devine is listed as the prosecuting attorney. No plea has been entered, and Mercado is presumed innocent.

According to reports released to TiffinOhio.net under a public records request, the Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call at about 12:08 a.m. reporting possible shots fired at a trailer at 5473 N. Township Road 63 in Jackson Township. A caller reported that a gold Honda Accord had circled the residence, and the caller’s father followed the car and relayed its location to dispatchers as deputies responded, the reports state.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/findlay-man-charged-felony-2-loaded-guns-car-fostoria/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

John Kulewicz, a Columbus-area attorney and Upper Arlington city councilman who won the May Democratic primary, filed a complaint with Ohio Inspector General Randy Meyer over JobsOhio board chairman Josh Rubin. Rubin is the founder and chief executive of The CJR Group, a Columbus lobbying firm whose clients include American Electric Power — the Columbus-based utility that, so far, is the only Ohio electric company to publicly express interest in the small modular nuclear reactors the new fund is meant to support.

JobsOhio defended its process. A spokesperson told WFMJ-TV that the agency does not discuss the companies it is in conversations with, and that anyone with a conflict of interest must disclose it and recuse themselves from discussions on such proposals. The spokesperson described the effort as one “focused on leveraging Ohio’s abundant supply of natural gas to increase electric generation and natural gas to sites, attracting small modular reactor companies in the future and developing a nuclear workforce that will be required to lead the nation.”

JobsOhio is a private nonprofit economic-development corporation created by the state and funded with profits from Ohio’s liquor enterprise. Its records are largely exempt from public-records law. The agency recently established a $100 million fund to support small modular reactors, or SMRs — including site preparation, workforce training, and incentives for manufacturing and production. The compact reactors are widely promoted as a way to power the data centers driving Ohio’s surging electricity demand. AEP signaled its interest in small nuclear projects on a May earnings call and could be positioned to receive grants or low-interest loans from the fund.

Kulewicz’s complaint centers on Rubin’s dual role: as JobsOhio’s board chairman, he helps lead the agency that created the fund; as head of CJR Group, he runs a firm that lobbies for AEP.

“Common sense and transparency would prevent the head of a secretive quasi-governmental organization from giving a $100 million grant to what appears to be a client of his private company,” Kulewicz said.

He added: “In effect, JobsOhio, using Ohio liquor profits, is paying AEP to develop mini-nuclear reactors that will have little to no local oversight and be owned by the utility company itself. And the CEO of the firm that lobbies for AEP is the Chairman of the state agency that is granting the $100 million to develop the technology.”

No grant to AEP has been awarded, and the inspector general has not determined whether Rubin’s role violated any standard. Kulewicz asked the office to review it.

Kulewicz linked the fund to a broader push at the Statehouse. “It is clear with the Ohio General Assembly’s push to require all data centers to have 50% of their electric output come from on-site generators that Ohioans will see many of these nuclear reactors in their neighborhoods,” he said.

Lawmakers are weighing several measures that would change how large electricity users power their operations. A heavily amended version of House Bill 646, advanced by the Ohio Senate in June, would require the largest data centers — those drawing more than 250 megawatts from the grid — to generate or procure their own electricity rather than draw from the standard service available to other customers. And House Bill 15, the sweeping 2025 utility overhaul, already expanded “behind-the-meter” self-generation and gave the Ohio Power Siting Board expedited authority to approve on-site power plants — approvals that can move forward without local zoning review. In Tiffin, city council this spring enacted a 12-month moratorium on data center development while it weighs whether to allow the facilities at all.

That framework has direct Seneca County roots. The Senate companion to House Bill 15, Senate Bill 2, was sponsored by state Sen. Bill Reineke, R-Tiffin, who represents the 26th Senate District covering Seneca County and serves as Senate president pro tempore. Reineke voted for House Bill 6 in 2019, the FirstEnergy-backed nuclear and coal subsidy law at the center of the largest bribery scandal in Ohio history.

A separate bill would go further. House Bill 862, introduced this spring by Rep. Adam Mathews, R-Lebanon — a lawyer and licensed nuclear engineer — with co-sponsor Rep. Bob Peterson, would allow electric distribution utilities such as AEP to build, own, and operate nuclear plants and recover costs from customers, reversing a roughly 25-year-old ban on Ohio utilities owning power generation. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association has urged lawmakers to reject it.

“This bill is not a nuclear development strategy. It is a utility ownership strategy,” OMA President Ryan Augsburger said, drawing a comparison to House Bill 6.

Kulewicz, who has previously sought investigations into JobsOhio, framed the complaint around accountability. “Ohio needs an Attorney General who will put a stop to self-dealing and backroom deals by enforcing transparency and accountability of public officials,” he said. “Most importantly, mini-nuclear reactor technology in local communities deserves transparency, scrutiny, and local involvement in the decision-making process. As Ohio Attorney General, I will fight for transparency, honesty, and local government inclusion.”

Kulewicz, a longtime attorney with the Columbus firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, won the Democratic primary in May over former state Rep. Elliot Forhan. He will face Republican Keith Faber, the state auditor, in the Nov. 3 general election for the seat being vacated by term-limited Attorney General Dave Yost.

Kulewicz is scheduled to bring his statewide “Transparency Tour” to Tiffin on Sunday, July 12, with a 4 p.m. stop at the Tiffin Historic Trust.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.