The resolution covers a renewal levy for the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board of Seneca, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wyandot Counties, the agency that plans, funds and oversees behavioral health and addiction services across the four counties. Because the rate sits outside the state’s 10-mill limitation, commissioners were first required to formally declare the levy’s necessity, citing Ohio Revised Code sections 5705.221 and 5705.25, before it can advance to voters.

The board does not directly provide treatment. It contracts with local agencies for services that include in-school counseling, crisis intervention training for first responders, and housing assistance for residents living with mental illness. As a renewal, the measure would continue the existing rate rather than add a new tax.

Commissioners Bill Frankart, Anthony Paradiso and Brent Busdeker approved the resolution unanimously.

Task force plans free Elizabeth Smart event in Tiffin

Commissioners also heard an update on the Seneca County Violence Prevention Task Force, which formed earlier this year in response to a fatal Tiffin shooting. Kenneth Clason, a Seneca County Common Pleas Court magistrate who initiated the group, told the board it now includes about 25 organizations and meets monthly.

Clason said the task force plans to bring Elizabeth Smart, a nationally recognized survivor advocate, to Tiffin for a free, roughly one-hour presentation, a moderated question-and-answer session and a book signing at the fieldhouse on the Heidelberg University campus. He said the event is tentatively scheduled for November 17 but that the date could change as the group finishes fundraising. He described it as the task force’s first major awareness event.

The task force launched May 1 at the Seneca County Public Safety Building, following the Nov. 19, 2025, murder-suicide on Huss Street that left four people dead, including two children. Clason, who works under Common Pleas Judge Steve Shuff, said he approached Sheriff Fredrick Stevens before convening the group. He told commissioners the task force has since formed subcommittees and fielded eight additional requests to join after its initial announcement. Busdeker, who said he was recently added to the task force, asked Clason to brief the board.

Commissioners proclaim Elder Abuse Awareness Day

The meeting opened with a proclamation marking June 15 as Elder Abuse Awareness Day in Seneca County. June is National Elder Abuse Awareness Month, and residents are encouraged to wear purple on June 15 to recognize the observance.

The proclamation was presented to Jennifer Schumacher, protective services administrator for Seneca County Job and Family Services, and Jessica Bartson, who supervises the agency’s intake and adult protection units. According to the proclamation, the county’s adult protective services received 132 referrals between May 1, 2025, and May 1, 2026, of which 29 involved alleged abuse, neglect or exploitation of residents age 60 and older. The proclamation also cited an estimate that Ohioans 60 and older will make up more than a quarter of the state’s population by 2030.

Roughly $253,000 in supplemental spending, including two new roofs

Commissioners approved eight supplemental appropriations totaling about $252,781. The two largest were roofing projects drawn from the county’s capital projects fund: $74,500 for a new jail roof and $54,725 for a new roof on the Public Safety Building. Commissioners said the Public Safety Building — the former EMS building at the county fairgrounds — had its roof damaged during high winds in March and was temporarily patched.

The remaining appropriations included $57,980 for a preventive maintenance contract with Earl Mechanical, $42,970 for preventive maintenance at the Justice Center and Annex, $9,406 for the auditor’s office “VIP” cloud migration, $9,980 plus an additional $20 for Board of Elections travel and expenses, and $3,200 for a jail contract-services stipend tied to federal immigration enforcement grants.

Other business

In additional action, commissioners:

• Established a Community Corrections Grant (CCA) fund on behalf of Common Pleas Court II to cover salaries, Medicare and retirement contributions for the court’s Pivot Court personnel.

• Set a June 23 deadline to receive sealed bids for a pavement repair and resurfacing project on County Road 7 and County Road 592 (Project C-2026-2).

• Authorized the board to sign an Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction grant agreement for community-based correction services.

In their reports, commissioners noted a D-Day anniversary commemoration held over the weekend at the Frankart farm. They also pointed to an EMS station dedication and an Ottawa-Sandusky-Seneca Joint Solid Waste District tire-collection event, both scheduled for Saturday, June 13.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The annual update on the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund shows that it will “become depleted” in the fourth quarter of that year, a few months earlier than projected in last year’s report.

That would lead to recipients receiving 78% of their benefits — the projected yearly income to the trust fund — unless Congress acts before then. By 2100, benefits would be only 62%, according to the report.

That decrease would have a significant impact on the tens of millions of Americans who rely on the program to stay out of poverty, especially retirees. 

Social Security Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano wrote in a statement that in order to “protect the promise of Social Security, it is important for lawmakers and the Social Security Administration to work together to ensure the trust funds continue to provide financial stability now and for future generations.”

Bisignano is scheduled to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday, where he will likely face several questions about the new report and whether the administration has policy suggestions for Congress. 

More than 68 million Americans received Social Security payments in April, according to data from the administration. More than 56 million of the beneficiaries were 65 or older. 

Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, wrote in a statement November’s midterm elections will have an impact on who is in the Senate, where lawmakers have six-year terms, in the lead-up to the deadline. 

“It’s important to recognize that the Senators we elect this year will be in office when Social Security becomes unable to pay out full benefits, so this must be a central campaign issue,” he wrote. 

Peterson added that “there are many well-known solutions available” and that it’s “time for responsible, bipartisan leadership to strengthen Social Security and Medicare, ensuring the stability of these programs for generations of Americans to come.”

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote in a statement that “Washington is sleepwalking into a retirement crisis, allowing our nation’s most important trust funds to go insolvent at the expense of over 70 million beneficiaries who count on these programs.”

MacGuineas added that there is “no shortage of options out there to avoid this.”

“It’s time for our leaders to start telling the truth on Social Security and Medicare, and working on real plans to save these programs,” she wrote. “Time is running out.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a federal court filing Monday night, the Justice Department significantly hedged the data-sharing plan, pulling back from a position the Trump administration advanced last week. DOJ lawyers now cast the idea as in the early stages and dependent on approval of a new U.S. Postal Service rule for mail ballots, citing a memo that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin signed earlier Monday.

“The Secretary authorized DHS to continue preliminary conversations with USPS concerning potential data-sharing arrangements, and should USPS finalize its rulemaking process, consider working to advance potential coordination to the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law and privacy protections,” the notice says.

Mullin’s memo, the Monday court filing says, “more accurately reflects the current policy of the Administration with respect to the implementation” of the executive order, reversing a Friday notice that said Homeland Security “contemplates” working to “integrate” the Postal Service’s voter data in an effort to monitor the flow of mail ballots and identify possible fraud. Friday’s filing said Homeland Security would use the information to generate investigative leads.

Trump’s March 31 executive order requires states to submit lists of potential mail voters to the Postal Service if they want ballots delivered and directs Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state. The order faces several lawsuits ahead of the November midterm elections but so far hasn’t been paused by a federal judge.

Trump signed the executive order amid an ongoing campaign to influence how states administer federal elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states run elections. While Congress can pass regulations, the president has no unilateral authority over voting. 

Trump has long attacked mail voting and has also promoted the idea that noncitizen voting is rampant. In reality, it’s extremely rare.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the order represents an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to assert authority over elections. They also argue the order endangers the independence of the Postal Service, which is overseen by a Board of Governors, not the president.

Running out the clock

Michael McNulty, the policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said the Justice Department’s second notice almost appears to anticipate that a court will block the Postal Service’s new rule, which would require states sending ballots through the mail to provide lists of voters.

“It looks like they definitely walked back the USPS data-sharing language,” McNulty said in an interview.

Downplaying the current effect of the rule could be part of a legal strategy to shield the administration from court challenges.

Despite a series of legal challenges, the Trump administration has urged judges not to block the March order because federal officials haven’t taken major action to implement it — making the lawsuits premature. That argument will become more difficult to maintain as the Postal Service moves forward on the new rule for mail ballots and Homeland Security begins to take action.

David Becker, a former Justice Department Voting Rights Section attorney who leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department has sought to “run the clock out” in legal challenges until it’s too late for courts to act or judicial action would cause chaos.

While Trump and his aides speak publicly about the alleged threat of noncitizen voting, in court the Justice Department seeks to minimize the extent of the actions the federal government has taken to carry out the executive order, Becker indicated.

“So I think this is a case of the government trying to have it both ways,” Becker said. “The government is trying to satisfy an audience of one, the president, while at the same time trying to play this rope-a-dope game with the court so that the court might not rule against them, they might say that a case isn’t ripe yet.”

In response to questions from States Newsroom, Homeland Security said in an unattributed statement that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS, is “lawfully implementing” the executive order.

“President Trump has been clear: Nothing is more fundamental than the integrity and security of our elections,” the statement said.

Quest for voter rolls

The Trump administration has spent the past year attempting to obtain unredacted state voter rolls to feed into a powerful Homeland Security computer program that can identify potential noncitizen voters. The Justice Department has filed more than 30 lawsuits seeking to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over the information, but so far none have been successful.

Eight states — including heavily Democratic California, Oregon and Washington — have all-mail elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For those states, complying with the executive order would effectively mean turning over the names of all or nearly all their voters to the Postal Service.

It’s unclear if those lists would include voters’ sensitive personal data, like driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, that the Justice Department has sued to obtain.

In its Monday notice, the Justice Department appeared to suggest Homeland Security had been planning to go beyond the scope of the executive order. 

The executive order does not explicitly direct the Postal Service to share voter and mail ballot data with Homeland Security. Instead, it tells the Postal Service to coordinate with the Justice Department on investigations into suspected election crimes.

Data-sharing arrangements between DHS and the Postal Service “are not directed” by the order, the Monday notice says. Any future sharing would be contingent upon both the Postal Service’s mail ballot rule and “any policy and legal determinations as to the desirability and feasibility of any such data-sharing” — in other words, a decision the Trump administration will make later.

Computer system participation

The Justice Department had also reported Friday that Homeland Security planned to launch a “State Voter Roll Verification” powered by the Systematic Alien Verification for Eligibility, or SAVE, system — the computer program that can flag possible noncitizen voters.

The Friday notice said states would be able to upload their voter rolls to SAVE, but Homeland Security already allows states to voluntarily run this information through the program. Some Republican-led states have previously used SAVE to scan their voter rolls and it’s unclear how the new verification process would have been different.

On Monday, the Justice Department reversed itself on that issue as well. DOJ lawyers wrote in the second notice that the executive order “does not direct that approach, and the new memorandum no longer includes that discussion.”

The Justice Department’s Monday notice makes clear that Homeland Security still plans to create lists of citizens in each state, as mandated under the executive order. The agency plans to have a way for states to obtain citizenship information from federal agencies by June 30, the notice says.

The executive order also requires Homeland Security to allow individuals to access their citizenship-related records and update or correct them ahead of elections. The Justice Department said Monday that Mullin approved a phased plan for a portal accessible to the public.

Monday’s notice, citing Mullin’s memo, says only that those capabilities will be developed and launched later this year after the completion of legal, privacy and technical groundwork. That leaves open the possibility that states will have access to federal citizenship information weeks or months before individual voters will be able to view the same data and call attention to any errors.

Questions linger

What prompted Mullin to sign the memo on Monday is unclear. Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for a copy of the memo.

Early on Monday evening, lawyers for the League of Women Voters filed a court document in a separate lawsuit challenging Homeland Security’s use of the SAVE system that alerted the judge to the Justice Department’s Friday notice. 

“It remains unclear—from the Implementation Notice or otherwise—what specific legal authority either the USPS or DHS have to share, consolidate, and use data in this way,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the initial data sharing plan between Homeland Security and Postal Service.

The Justice Department responded on Tuesday, saying in a court filing that information was “no longer accurate, as of yesterday evening.”

Also unclear is what role, if any, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has played in Mullin’s decision to change course. Trump’s executive order charges Lutnick with coordinating implementation efforts.

The Commerce Department didn’t respond to States Newsroom’s questions.

Sixteen Democratic senators last week demanded Lutnick halt implementation of the executive order. The letter, led by Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California, urged Lutnick to preserve records related to the development of the order ahead of congressional oversight.

“Vote-by-mail is safe, secure, and convenient, and it has been used successfully across the political spectrum over many election cycles,” the senators wrote.

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 by the Government Accountability Office documenting problems at Camp East Montana is one of the first independent investigations into a facility quickly constructed from the $170 billion in immigration enforcement and detention funding provided by Republicans’ “big beautiful” law enacted in July 2025 as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign. The camp is considered the largest immigrant detention center in the United States.

The Department of Defense and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August 2025 set up the soft-sided detention site of Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. It was intended to hold as many as 5,000 immigrants and is still currently operating under a private  contractor as well as ICE.

The facility was plagued with several tuberculosis cases and at least four detainee deaths, with one ruled a homicide by the local coroner. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against the government over inhumane conditions. 

“The facility also did not meet key detention standards, risking the safety and security of detained noncitizens and staff,” GAO said.

The report came as the U.S. House this week prepares to take final steps to pass a $70 billion package to fund immigration enforcement until the end of fiscal year 2029. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the legislation into law.

Congressional Democrats requested that GAO do a report on Camp East Montana, including Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Gary Peters of Michigan and Rep. Bennie Thomspon of Mississippi. 

Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that he was concerned the U.S. military was responsible for the quick construction of the detention camp.

“Preventable deaths, inhumane conditions, and millions of dollars in waste are the direct result of the Pentagon cutting corners and handing a billion-dollar contract to an inexperienced vendor that wrote its own performance standards,” Reed said.

$1.3 billion contract

GAO investigators found that the Department of Defense’s contracting vehicle used to handle the $1.3 billion contract for Camp East Montana provided no flexibility and resulted in paying for meals and employee services during times when no immigrants were detained at the facility, resulting in millions of dollars wasted. 

For example, the Army paid the full cost for guards, medical services, transportation, meals and other services from Aug. 1, 2025 to Aug. 15, 2025, when there were no detainees at the facility, wasting up to $11.5 million, GAO said. 

“Further, because the Army set a fixed price for meals based on the capacity of the facility, it paid about an additional $423,000 for meals it did not need when the facility was operating below its designated capacity from August 16, 2025, through September 30, 2025,” according to the GAO report. 

Same failures could repeat, GAO says

GAO investigators also noted that the same mistakes could be made with the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing move to spend $38 billion to convert warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants. 

“GAO points out that ICE’s planned facility expansion—a $38 billion program to convert warehouses into detention facilities using the same contracting vehicle—risks repeating every one of these failures at a dramatically larger scale,” according to the report. 

Investigators made four recommendations, including that ICE consider tiered pricing for food to account for fluctuations in populations of detained immigrants and that ICE ensure that new facilities meet detention standards before housing immigrants. 

The report notes that DHS and DOD agreed with the recommendations. DOD deferred comment to DHS, which did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.

Homicide investigated

Investigators also raised use-of-force concerns, including one in January in which an autopsy found the death of a detainee to be due to asphyxia and ruled it a homicide. 

“However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE, as required,” according to the report. “In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.”

Durbin, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee,  called the GAO report “damning.”

“We now know even more details of how dangerous and irresponsible the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign truly is,” he said in a statement. “Excessive use of force, lacking medical and mental health care, and wasted taxpayer dollars are emblematic of this mass deportation scheme. The American people have rightfully expressed outrage at these policies, and it’s time to hold ICE and their private contractors responsible.”

GAO investigators noted several health issues. They pointed out that none of the detainees with HIV or diabetes had treatment plans in place. 

Also, facility employees did not follow proper procedure for tuberculosis screening. One contractor used a questionnaire rather than administering the required skin tests for tuberculosis. 

Investigators found that as a result in November, a detained immigrant with tuberculosis was housed with the general immigrant population. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Actor Rainn Wilson, widely known for playing Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office,” joined a press conference that U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., and Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., hosted along with religious leaders to advocate for the American tradition of religious freedom.

Reading from the Declaration of Independence, Wilson, an outspoken member of the  Baha’i faith that originated in 19th-century Persia, now Iran, said the nation’s 250th anniversary “is an opportunity to ask profound questions.”

“How can we give fresh expression to the ideals in the declaration?” he asked. “How can we leave behind tendencies that divide us and replace them with a widening circle of concern? We need to be able to speak and think in terms of spiritual and moral dimensions of individual and collective life.

“We need to do that in ways that are meaningful across different perspectives, both religious and secular,” he continued. 

Wilson’s appearance marked the public release of the Baha’i faith’s five-part letter “A Common Endeavor,” which argues for the realization of “ideals, like freedom, equality, and justice” as many Americans have become “exhausted and disillusioned by polarization.”

The press conference was attended by members of several denominations, and is among numerous independent events ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States. 

‘A universal human right’

Boyle cited Baha’i writings that “beautifully” emphasize unity.

“My own Catholic faith teaches a similar truth. Pope Francis reminded us that we are called to come together as brothers and sisters, quote, ‘as children from the same earth,’” Boyle said.

“My hope is that for America’s 250th anniversary, this will be more of a focus on what our next 250 years look like, rather than just a wonderful commemoration of the past quarter of a millennium.”

Bilirakis, an Orthodox Christian who co-chairs the Congressional International Religious Freedom Caucus, said, “Religious freedom is not simply an American value, it is a universal human right, and I truly believe that.”

“Whether we are speaking out on behalf of the persecuted Christians, Muslims, Jews, Baha’is, Hindus, Buddhists, Uyghurs, or members of other faith communities, our message must remain clear,” he said. “Every person is endowed with inherent dignity and deserves the freedom to live according to their conscience.”

Bilirakis is an original cosponsor of a House resolution condemning the Iran government’s persecution of Baha’is. The resolution was introduced in December 2025, just months before the U.S. escalated war in Iran.

Pentagon list

The event on Capitol Hill, though unrelated, happened just one day after the Pentagon modified its list of recognized religions following criticism from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church.

Utah’s two Republican Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis directly appealed to the administration to change the Department of Defense list, which did not categorize the Latter-day Saints as Christian.

On Friday, the Pentagon revised its list of recognized religions for service members to 31, down from roughly 200.

The Pentagon’s shortened list includes the Baha’i faith.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Drawing on testimony from the Select Committee on Data Centers, Ohio state Sen. Brian Chavez put together a laundry list of changes and then grafted them onto a measure originally meant to study the issue.

It’s a significant revision of state policy, touching on tax breaks, nondisclosure agreements, water use and testing, utility billing, and potential impacts on local governments. Despite some quibbles, lawmakers and witnesses found a lot to like in the initial proposal. But given the rapid timeline Chavez envisions for passage — potentially moving to a vote on the Senate floor one day after introduction — opportunities to tweak the language are scarce.

Ohio state Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, complained about the rapid timeline.

“Anything the legislature does in a swift amount of time ends up being bad for everybody,” he said, “because there are always problems with it.”

What’s in the bill

Currently, data center projects can apply for an 100% sales and use tax exemption. It’s a discretionary program, but it has ballooned to roughly $1.6 billion in the last year. The proposal would generally cut that tax break in half, but projects that build on brownfields and bring their own power are eligible for a 75% tax break.

The bill also caps local property tax abatements for data centers at 50% and eliminates access to Ohio’s 30-year mega project job creation grant.

Data center developers’ use of nondisclosure agreements has drawn sharp criticism, and the bill includes a provision stating NDAs do not supersede public records law.

On the water use front, the measure directs the Ohio EPA to develop a water quality testing plan and report “any anomalies” detected as part of its water monitoring program. Data centers, meanwhile, would be required to track and report water usage to state regulators, and employ water conservation best practices including closed loop cooling systems.

Under the bill, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio would create a data center rate class. Similar to the data center tariff the PUCO approved for AEP Ohio last year, the move is meant to apply costs associated with power generation, distribution and transmission to data centers.

Another protection included in the proposal is a surety bond equal to the average salary of all a data centers workers over a ten year period. Chavez described the provision as a way to give “financial insurance to local governments and communities impacted by the development.”

Quibbles & pushback

The Ohio Manufacturer’s Association is currently challenging AEP’s data center tariff in the Ohio Supreme Court, and the group wasn’t thrilled with the idea of extending that approach to the rest of the state’s utilities.

Speaking on behalf of OMA, energy consultant John Seryak explained tariffs spread costs over an extended period of time rather than requiring developers to pay the full amount of their impact up front.

“We see that as pretty workable,” Seryak said, because there’s little opportunity to shift costs to other consumers.

But by implementing a separate rate class, those costs get spread over several years. Seryak pointed to one project in AES Ohio’s territory that would require roughly $230 million supplemental equipment.

“By the time that’s financed over 40 years, with return on equity and interest payments, it’s about $850 million. One project. This tariff would recover only $300 million of that,” he said.

Seryak also contends the tariff’s minimum demand payments could just juice the overall load forecast — forcing utilities to plan for greater capacity which is then spread across all ratepayers. Making data centers pay a minimum amount each month also reduces the incentive to use power efficiently.

Nolan Rutschilling from the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund urged lawmakers to include explicit directives for the PUCO about an upcoming backstop auction.

The regional grid operator PJM Interconnection will hold the auction this September to secure 15 gigawatts of new power generation to meet growing demand driven by data centers. Those costs will get passed on, and PJM has urged states to develop regulations to ensure the costs are borne by data centers. Without them, the grid operator warned, “it is possible that these costs will be allocated to other consumers in the states, including residential consumers.”

“It’s entirely possible that this large load tariff could address that issue,” Rutschilling said, “but I’m urging just some clarifying language to ensure that it does and to ensure that the PUCO undertakes this matter in a timely fashion.”

Cathy Cowan Becker from Save Ohio Parks said there were many good provisions in the bill, but “we’d like data centers to meet their energy demand, at least some of it, with carbon free energy.”

Many facilities rely on diesel backup generators, “which are quite polluting,” she said while battery storage would generate no additional carbon emissions.

What’s next

Quibbles weren’t confined to public testimony. DeMora complained the bill “does nothing” on nondisclosure agreements. Instead of banning them, it simply states an NDA can’t “prohibit or otherwise limit a public record from being made available.”

“They might say that you can find out if there’s an NDA,” DeMora insisted, “but the bill does nothing to stop NDAs.”

Meanwhile, Ohio state Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, worried lawmakers might be doing something that’s “a detriment to data centers coming in and negotiating with local governments.”

The Senate Energy Committee is lined up to advance the bill Wednesday morning, with the goal of voting the measure through the full Senate later that day.

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

From the local government perspective, data centers boost the local tax base without making many demands for services, officials testified.

To the trades, data centers represent a reliable source of good-paying jobs, representatives said. The bulk of that work is in the initial construction, but with servers and chips becoming obsolete every few years, the demand for workers has a long tail, they said.

State lawmakers said they plan to introduce legislation and move it through an Ohio Senate committee in a matter of days.

“Even though it wasn’t our intention when we started this committee to do legislation, we think that we have enough information to get some legislation through before we go on recess,” Ohio state Sen. Brian Chavez, R-Marietta, told reporters.

Chavez declined to elaborate on what’s in the proposal.

Local leaders

To New Albany Community Development Director Jennifer Chrysler, managing data center development comes down to a math problem.

“The city created a formula that calculates a minimum payment for the data centers in New Albany that are in the amount of what that property would have generated if it had been developed as either corporate office or advanced manufacturing.”

Data centers first showed up in the city in 2010, and in the years since, revenue from those developments has helped the local school district avoid going to the ballot for funding, she said. Chrysler said one data center alone generated $3.9 million in local tax revenue.

“If you use our 2% income tax rate,” she said, “that is the equivalent of a company with a payroll of over $165 million.”

“All of that with not as many impacts to our safety services and traffic on the roads,” she added, “Yet we were able to get value from these data centers because of this formula that we developed.”

Johnstown Mayor Tiffany Hollis is far more skeptical of big tech development, but she doesn’t want to see lawmakers block data centers or eliminate a costly sales tax exemption.

Hollis recalled the secrecy surrounding the arrival of Intel in her community.

Land acquisitions began before the project became public, she said, and no one could get straight answers.

“What I watched happen in Johnstown in those early days was entirely preventable,” she said. “When people don’t have information, they fill the vacuum with fear. Rumors spread faster than facts.”

Still, she told lawmakers a one-size-fits-all approach would be wrong. A moratorium on data centers would only help communities outside Ohio competing for new investments. Getting rid of the data center sales tax break would be bad, too.

“That exemption is not a favor to a company,” Hollis said. “It’s the chip local governments use to get investment to the table and keep it there. Take it away, and you haven’t protected anyone.”

Instead, she pushed lawmakers to focus on policies that ensure transparency.

Chrysler, on the other hand, defended nondisclosure agreements. She stressed that New Albany only signs onto NDAs the city drafted, rather than agreements written by the companies.

That approach allows cities to balance public disclosure with protecting information like trade secrets.

“We will severely limit our ability to do economic development if we don’t have the ability to sign NDAs and do them and implement them in the right way,” she said.

Labor perspective

Matt Szollosi is an unabashed cheerleader for data center development in Ohio. The head of the Affiliated Construction Trades of Ohio Foundation said the industry is pushing employment in the trades to new heights.

“Our collective intent here today is to cut through the BS that data centers in Ohio do not create jobs,” he said.

Demand for workers and applications to apprenticeship programs? Skyrocketing, he said. Wages and benefits? Szollosi said those are increasing, too.

“Don’t fall prey to the false reality, being perpetuated by social media influencers that data centers don’t create jobs,” Szollosi said. “This is the reality. In 2025, the building trades have thousands of members working on or in data center plants across the state of Ohio.”

You won’t find those workers on social media, he said, because they don’t have time for that: “Our members work.”

Bryan Stewart added that the opportunities for ongoing work on data centers is significant. The CEO of electrical design firm Superior said his company grew from 300 people 15 years ago to more than 3,000 today.

He explained working on one data center often means working on the next building a company is developing on that site, extending work over several years.

Once a building is up and running, there are opportunities for service and maintenance, as well as retrofitting a few years down the road.

“So, we’re coming back in constantly in cycle working in that facility,” he said. “Because technology changes, so the electrical infrastructure may need tweaked or changed dramatically, and we may be back in building one two years later, and then we’re constantly providing service activities.”

Stewart warned that sweeping action against the data center industry won’t actually harm the big tech firms investing in Ohio — they can just move on to some other state — but it would be devastating for the Ohio companies that have sprung up to serve them.

The way Szollosi put it, “guardrails” to protect local communities are fine.

“We want them to get every penny,” he said, “That’s easy for us, because our members live in those communities.”

“We just don’t want to see any disincentives put in place that cause projects to go elsewhere.”

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.

Most governors recommended state budgets for fiscal year 2027 that would essentially keep spending flat from the general funds that pay for most state services. That’s according to the Fiscal Survey of States by the National Association of State Budget Officers. (Forty-six states will begin the 2027 fiscal year in July.) 

The survey of budget leaders found nearly half the states were implementing some form of spending cuts to balance the books. 

In their budget plans, 14 states said they would eliminate vacant positions, four reported hiring freezes and eight reported changed retirement benefits to reduce costs. Four states reported layoffs and cuts in employee benefits.

“While budgets are tightening, states overall remain in a strong fiscal position due to steps taken in recent years to manage spending carefully and build reserves,” Alexis Sturm, director of the Illinois Governor’s Office of Management and Budget and current president of the National Association of State Budget Officers, or NASBO, said in a news release.

The survey found that most states planned to increase the size of their rainy day funds: 25 states project those reserves to grow in fiscal 2027, 10 expect theirs to decrease and 11 states expect no change in dollars unadjusted for inflation. Four states did not report. 

But researchers at The Pew Charitable Trusts earlier this year found that the power of those reserve funds is weakening as states confront rising costs. Pew researchers concluded that the median state in 2025 could fund its operations on reserve funds for 47.8 days — down from a record 54.5 days in fiscal 2024.

States pay for most spending from three primary tax revenues: sales and use taxes, personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. In the recent survey, 29 states reported tax revenues were coming in higher than forecasted for fiscal year 2026. Nine states reported collections were on target, while 11 said their revenues were below expectations. One state did not report on revenue collections and NASBO noted the revenue numbers may change following the April tax season.

In their budgets, governors proposed a mix of tax increases and decreases for the upcoming fiscal year that NASBO says will collectively have a near-zero net impact on general fund revenues. 

With federal stimulus dollars and strong consumer demand, states recorded record revenue growth in fiscal years 2021 and 2022. But NASBO expects more modest growth for state revenues in the coming years with a slower national economy, the impact of state tax cuts and changes in federal tax policy.

“States are continuing to navigate a tighter fiscal environment than they experienced earlier this decade,” Shelby Kerns, executive director of NASBO, said in a statement. “While revenues in most states are meeting or exceeding forecasts, growth remains modest and many states are seeing ongoing spending demands outpace recurring revenue growth in the out-years.” 

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.

Three years earlier, residents at another Connecticut nursing home, the Quinnipiac Valley Center, were relocated after two resident deaths triggered a state health investigation.

The nursing homes were both owned by private equity-backed Genesis HealthCare, among the largest skilled nursing operators in the nation. It’s already faced lawsuits or investigations in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada and Vermont over allegations of patient neglect and abuse.

This year, Connecticut enacted what may be the strongest law in the country addressing transparency and accountability for private equity-owned nursing homes.

It is the latest in a string of states stepping into a regulatory vacuum created by limited federal laws and a presidential administration that’s proven friendly to private equity while showing little appetite for scrutinizing private equity’s role in the healthcare industry.

Private equity’s foray into healthcare over the past several years, particularly into hospital ownership, has drawn public outrage and legislative scrutiny.

It’s all happening as states are staring down steep federal cuts to Medicaid, the public health insurance for people with low incomes that is also the primary payer for long-term nursing home stays. Those cuts, experts fear, could ultimately direct more older Americans into nursing home care.

Last year, at least seven states (California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington) passed legislation putting more guardrails around private equity’s involvement in healthcare.

Virginia is still considering a bill to curb predatory property financing practices that have been used by private equity in nursing homes.

Illinois lawmakers sent two measures to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker that aim to strengthen oversight and transparency requirements of healthcare mergers or acquisitions, and place new restrictions on private equity ownership of disability service providers. The first bill was Democratic-sponsored, while the second had both Democratic and Republican sponsors.

Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont signed Connecticut’s measure last week. The new law requires nursing homes that are owned by private equity to disclose their financial dealings with the state and bans private equity from controlling day-to-day care decisions about nursing home residents. Lamont also signed a related bill to curb private equity’s influence over hospitals in the wake of financial moves by equity-owned health groups in his state that led to hospital closures.

Genesis HealthCare declined an interview with Stateline, but provided a statement saying it “remains focused on supporting our affiliated centers in delivering high-quality care to patients and residents.”

The nursing home industry argues that private equity controls a relatively small share of the nation’s facilities, and that reported problems have been the result of a few bad actors. The federal government estimated that about 5% of Medicare-enrolled nursing homes nationwide had private equity owners in 2022, but admitted that some nursing homes don’t always list all of their owners in the federal database. Some researchers have pegged the real share as high as 13%.

“Focusing on private equity in long term care has become a distraction from the real issues that impact the majority of providers, like chronic Medicaid underfunding and a growing caregiver shortage,” said John Kane, a senior vice president at the industry group American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, in a statement to Stateline.

“If we truly want to improve care throughout the health care system, we need policymakers to find a proper balance of oversight while still encouraging more investments.”

But a growing number of states are moving to regulate investment companies that draw heavily on Medicaid and Medicare dollars.

“The big question about private equity is not whether profit belongs in the nursing home; it’s whether public dollars meant for care are being converted into financial returns (for investors) without enough accountability,” said Gregory Orewa, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose research has focused on private equity ownership in U.S. healthcare.

“Nursing homes exist to care for the most vulnerable who cannot care for themselves,” he said, “so we should be holding private equity or anybody to high standards on providing quality care.”

Quality and profits

Private equity firms use pooled investments from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and wealthy individuals to buy a controlling stake in a company. Then they try to maximize the company’s value before selling it at a profit, usually within a few years.

Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are attractive to investors because demand is always there; the share of Americans 65 and older has been steadily rising and is expected to continue.

Nursing home care is heavily subsidized by the government through Medicaid and to a lesser extent Medicare, the public insurance program for adults over 65 and some people with disabilities, offering investors a predictable revenue stream.

And it’s an industry where investors can scoop up struggling independent facilities and improve their margins through corporate consolidations, streamlining management, adjusting staffing or capitalizing on valuable real estate owned by the nursing homes.

Private equity’s defenders say it provides nursing homes with much-needed capital, disciplined management and operational improvements that help facilities scale up their services.

But the private equity model’s primary goal in any sector is to generate returns for shareholders, usually within a few years.

Critics say that priority conflicts with the kind of long-term investment that’s needed to provide quality healthcare, such as paying enough to hire sufficient staff or upgrading facilities.

“One of the biggest misunderstandings is that private equity ownership is only bad,” said Orewa, of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The issue is more structural. Nursing homes operate on very thin margins, they depend heavily on public dollars and they care for the most vulnerable people who can’t easily exit when nursing home quality declines.”

Nursing home residents aren’t like other healthcare consumers. They may lack financial literacy, or their decision-making may be impaired by cognitive decline, which could lead to them making choices not in their best interests, researchers have noted. They’re a captive audience, often choosing a facility that’s nearby or near family, rather than shopping around for the best option.

Research on how private equity ownership affects nursing homes has found few positive effects. One large 2023 study found it increases a nursing home’s death rate by 11%. Private equity-owned facilities tended to maintain care quality for sicker patients by adding registered nurses, but researchers found those gains were offset by staffing cuts to the frontline nursing assistants who handle most of the hands-on care. Other studies have linked private equity involvement to increases in emergency room visits and rising Medicare costs.

Orewa and his colleagues published a comprehensive review last year of a dozen major studies, linking private equity ownership to a higher number of deficiencies in nursing homes, increased hospitalization rates and higher mortality. They also found that private equity-owned facilities bill Medicare more than other nursing homes.

Facilities’ financial outlooks initially improved after a private equity buyout, Orewa said, but they later faced long-term challenges. The financial maneuvers that private equity uses to extract more revenue from nursing homes can hurt their stability long term.

Hidden disclosures

All nursing homes that receive federal funding are required to publicly disclose the names of any entities that exercise financial control over them. But companies can use complex methods to mask that ownership, meaning it’s difficult even for experts to find out who really owns a nursing home.

“A lot of nursing homes will not provide that information, and their information may not be audited,” said Michael Fenne, healthcare policy coordinator at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a research group that tracks the private equity industry.

For example: The private equity-backed Portopiccolo Group acquired more than 130 nursing homes across 9 states from 2016-2022 and yet didn’t appear in federal data as an owner of those facilities, according to the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.

And ownership information matters to consumers looking for a safe place for their loved ones: The Portopiccolo Group’s nursing homes have faced heavy fines. A 2023 study by watchdog group Good Jobs First found Portopiccolo had an average fine per facility of more than $81,000, landing it on a list of parent companies with largest average penalties in the U.S.

Predatory tactics?

Virginia lawmakers are considering a Republican-sponsored bill that would cut funding to nursing homes that pay excessive rents to landlords. If passed, it could become a first-in-the nation effort to directly curb a financial maneuver known as sale-leaseback that state regulators have deemed predatory.

In sale-leaseback arrangements, a private equity-backed firm buys a healthcare company, such as a nursing home chain, and then sells its underlying real estate property to a separate investment trust. This sale generates quick returns for investors but saddles the nursing homes with monthly rent payments they may struggle to make, leaving less money available for patient care.

It’s a tactic that has contributed to healthcare bankruptcies across the nation, including for Genesis HealthCare and for Georgia-based nursing home chain LaVie Care Centers.

Increased need for nursing homes

By 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or over, and most older adults say they would prefer to remain living in their homes for as long as possible.

For many, that’s possible because of services — such as home health aides or visiting nurses — that are funded through Medicaid.

But elder care experts worry those services will be the first on the chopping block for cash-strapped states facing $665 billion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This is because federal law requires state Medicaid programs to cover nursing home care, but home-based services are optional.

Most people who receive those home-based Medicaid services need the kind of care that would land them in a nursing home without such services, said Jason Resendez, president and CEO of the advocacy group National Alliance for Caregiving.

“When we take those benefits away, it doesn’t take away the need for that care,” he said. One of the impacts of cuts to home-based services “will certainly be more folks forced to make the hard choice of going into more institutional-based care.”

And cuts to Medicaid could financially weaken smaller, independent or safety-net nursing homes that serve lower-income patients who heavily rely on Medicaid.

“Those distressed facilities may become cheaper acquisition targets for private equity,” Orewa said. “That creates an opportunity for investors with capital to buy at a discount.”

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.

But the public record shows Ramaswamy spent 2020 inside the same pandemic response he now campaigns against: advising the DeWine administration, backing mandatory antibody testing and stay-at-home orders for Ohioans without immunity, pitching a national registry to “segregate” Americans by biomarker — a registry his own company then worked to build — and founding the biotech firm whose subsidiary collected a $2.25 billion settlement over COVID-19 vaccines this spring.

Critics, NBC4 reported, call the contrast “hypocritical”: Ramaswamy attacks Acton over policies similar to ones he was advocating at the same time — in some cases, stricter versions of them.

He advised the response he now attacks

While Acton stood at the podium for Ohio’s daily briefings as state health director, Ramaswamy was advising the state’s pandemic response from the private sector. As CEO of Roivant Sciences, Ramaswamy “worked with the lieutenant governor as an adviser on COVID-19” during 2020, he wrote in a 2021 op-ed cited by the Associated Press. The lieutenant governor at the time was Republican Jon Husted, now a U.S. senator, who appeared alongside Acton and Gov. Mike DeWine at those same daily briefings.

He backed mandatory testing and stay-at-home orders

Ramaswamy’s 2020 positions went beyond advising. A recording from that year exclusively obtained by NBC4 shows Ramaswamy backed universal “mandatory” antibody testing and isolation — a system in which people with natural immunity could return to normal life while everyone else remained under lockdown in a mandatory stay-at-home order, with those locked down first in line for a vaccine.

“It would be a waste, arguably, to vaccinate somebody who already had immunity and I think the only way to ensure that we are sending the right people back to normal life now versus the people we keep in shelter at home mandates is on the basis of individual testing for immunity,” Ramaswamy said in the 2020 recording, according to NBC4.

Sources close to the DeWine administration in 2020 told NBC4 that implementing the system Ramaswamy suggested would have required a government registry of who had antibodies and who didn’t — and that mandated testing and isolation for select groups struck them as government overreach. Those are policies in the same family as the closures imposed by the DeWine administration and by states across the country — the very measures Ramaswamy’s campaign and running mate, then-state Sen. Rob McColley, have condemned as overreach.

In April 2020, on an episode of Rockefeller Capital Management’s client podcast, Ramaswamy laid out the concept in his own words, according to reporting by Contra that transcribed the interview. “Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?” Ramaswamy asked. He answered his own question: “I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back on the basis of having immunity.” He said he had discussed the idea with policymakers, including members of Congress and a U.S. senator.

A discussion draft obtained by Contra shows Ramaswamy formally pitched the strategy, proposing a public-private partnership whose stakeholders would include an “Organization X” — a government division, private company or nonprofit — to maintain “the registry of individuals who are immune and individuals who should be prioritized for testing.”

During the pandemic, Ramaswamy supported vaccines and received one himself, and he advocated mask-wearing, the AP reported — though he has said he never supported governments mandating either.

His company tried to build the registry

The registry was more than talk. Datavant, a health-data company launched in 2017 under the Roivant umbrella, pushed for a national COVID-19 registry that would have allowed the small share of Americans gaining natural immunity to “get back to normal life” while the rest of the population continued to be “segregated,” the AP reported. The quoted language comes from the proposal itself.

Five days after Ramaswamy’s podcast appearance, The Wall Street Journal reported that Datavant was spearheading an effort to create a registry of COVID-19 patients by pooling medical records from across the country, according to Contra. By November 2020, Datavant announced a partnership supporting the National Institutes of Health’s National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a centralized platform built to store and study medical record data from people tested for the virus.

The pandemic paid — $2.25 billion from COVID-19 vaccines

The pandemic was also lucrative for the corporate empire Ramaswamy built. On March 3, Roivant announced that its subsidiary Genevant Sciences and partner Arbutus Biopharma had reached a $2.25 billion global settlement with Moderna over the pharmaceutical giant’s unauthorized use of their lipid nanoparticle delivery technology in its COVID-19 vaccines, including Spikevax. Moderna will pay $950 million upfront in July, with an additional $1.3 billion contingent on a federal appellate ruling. If the full amount is paid, the companies said, it would be the largest disclosed patent settlement in pharmaceutical industry history.

Genevant played a “fundamental role” in the global pandemic response, the companies’ announcement said. Ramaswamy founded Roivant in 2014 and served as its CEO until January 2021 and executive chairman until February 2023, when he stepped down to focus on his political career. TiffinOhio.net detailed that record in earlier reporting.

Then he paid to erase the record

As Ramaswamy entered politics ahead of his 2024 presidential run, he took steps to distance himself from his pandemic-era role. In early 2023, he paid an editor to remove a reference to his service on Ohio’s “COVID-19 Response Team” from his Wikipedia page, the AP reported. Ramaswamy called the edit a simple correction, saying the panel never met.

The attacks, and his explanation

Ramaswamy has kept Acton’s pandemic record at the center of his campaign. At rallies he accuses her of spreading dangerous “COVID ideology,” and supporters have dubbed her “Lockdown Amy.” The latest salvo is a 30-second TV ad from V-PAC: Victors Not Victims, the super PAC backing his campaign, which began airing Tuesday, June 9, branding Acton “the liberal who shut down Ohio, closing your child’s school and your friend’s business.”

Ramaswamy has said his talks with Husted and his support for the COVID registry were about “getting the economy going again,” and he describes his position on the virus as “nuanced.” He says the difference between his 2020 proposals and Acton’s orders is that Acton did not differentiate between people with natural immunity and people without it.

“She never engaged with those data points, and when the legislature required her to draw those distinctions, she did not do the hard work,” Ramaswamy said, according to NBC4. “She quit. It disqualifies her.” His campaign referred the AP’s questions about his time at Roivant to the company, which did not respond.

DeWine: ‘They were my decisions’

The premise of the attacks — that Acton shut down Ohio — is contradicted by the Republican governor who appointed her. Acton signed the closure orders as health director from February 2019 to June 2020 under emergency authority granted by DeWine, who has repeatedly said the decisions were his own — even after endorsing Ramaswamy.

“I got advice from her. I got advice from people around the country,” DeWine said in December. “I was trying to get as much information as I could about something that we did not know much about, and I made decisions based upon that, but they were my decisions. They were not, they were not her decisions.”

Acton’s campaign has dismissed the COVID-19 attacks. “Dr. Acton is proud of the work she did alongside Governor DeWine to put public health over politics, save lives and keep Ohioans safe,” campaign spokesperson Addie Bullock said in a statement to the AP. “It is unfortunate that Vivek Ramaswamy wants to play politics on this issue.”

Ohio ranked 22nd among states in its per capita COVID-19 death rate during the pandemic’s first year, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited by the AP.

Ramaswamy won the May 5 Republican primary and faces Acton in the general election on Tuesday, November 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Once dedicated, the club will be known as the James A. Speaker AMVETS Post 48. Speaker died Aug. 11, 2025, at St. Rita’s Medical Center in Lima at age 76.

A public dedication on June 11

In announcing the dedication, the post said Speaker, as a past commander, “gave countless hours of his time, energy and commitment to this Post, its members and our community.”

“Amvets Post 48 would not be what it is today without Jim Speaker, so please join us as we proudly become the James A. Speaker Amvets Post 48,” the post wrote in its announcement.

The ceremony will be held at the post, located at 1909 S. State Route 100 in Tiffin.

Three decades at the post

Speaker was hired as the post’s canteen manager in 1991 and was part of the group that purchased the land and building where the current canteen sits. He held several post offices, serving multiple terms as commander, and was recognized at the state and national levels for membership campaigns.

Born June 11, 1949, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Speaker graduated from Columbian High School in 1967, where he was a state-qualifying runner and a co-captain of the school’s first cross country team. He was drafted in May 1970 and served 13 months in Vietnam as a radio operator with MACV Advisory Team 87, attached to the 87th ARVN Infantry Division, stationed atop Black Virgin Mountain in Tay Ninh Province. He was honorably discharged in December 1971 and earned the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal and the Vietnam Campaign Medal.

After earning a food service management degree from Terra Community College in 1976, Speaker managed several area restaurants, including the original Taco Bell in Tiffin. In 2018, he received the Veteran of the Year Award from the Seneca County Juvenile Court. He served on the Seneca County United Veterans Council funeral detail and volunteered with organizations including the Wounded Warrior Project, Hospice and Tiffin Youth Football, and he was an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church.

The post has invited the public to the June 11 ceremony at AMVETS Post 48 in Tiffin.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Cain, 23, faces one count of strangulation, a third-degree felony, in Seneca County Common Pleas Court, stemming from a May 19 incident at the Tiffin home he shared with his girlfriend. The Ohio Department of Public Safety Director D. Andrew Wilson signed Cain’s termination letter on Wednesday, June 3, citing a violation of OSHP Rule 4501:2-6-02(I)(2) — Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. The termination was served to Cain at approximately 11:00 a.m. the following day, Thursday, June 4, with that date listed as the effective date.

The records, released to TiffinOhio.net in response to a public records request, trace the full internal sequence.

An OSHP administrative investigation was opened on Thursday, May 21 by Lieutenant Chad E. Smith of the Administrative Investigation Unit, two days after Cain’s arrest. The agency placed Cain on unpaid administrative leave effective Friday, May 22.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/oshp-terminates-trooper-nathaniel-cain-strangulation-charge/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 30-second spot, paid for by V-PAC: Victors Not Victims — the super PAC formed by Ramaswamy’s allies — brands Acton “the liberal who shut down Ohio” and warns that “it gets worse from here.” Here is what the record shows.

Claim: Acton “shut down Ohio, closing your child’s school and your friend’s business”

False as framed. Acton was DeWine’s appointed director of the Ohio Department of Health from February 2019 to June 2020 and signed the orders that closed schools and businesses — but she did so under emergency authority the governor granted her, and DeWine has repeatedly said the decisions were his. “The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it. The buck stops with me,” DeWine told NBC4 in December. DeWine, a Republican, has since endorsed Ramaswamy. Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, disputes DeWine’s account and calls Acton the “central architect” of the restrictions, but the governor who held the authority has said the calls were his alone.

Claim: Acton runs “on a radical far-left platform”

A characterization the record undercuts. Acton, a Democrat, was DeWine’s final cabinet appointment, and the Republican governor praised her without reservation when she resigned in 2020. “No one that I’ve ever met has more passion for helping people, has more passion for public health than Dr. Amy Acton,” DeWine said at the time. “She’s always put the health of Ohioans first.” Acton’s campaign platform centers on school funding, lowering health care and prescription costs, and a working-families tax cut.

Claim: Acton says illegal immigrants “have the right to be here”

Unsupported, and contradicted by her own words. The ad cites no statement, and Acton’s on-record position is the opposite. Asked in January about immigration enforcement, Acton told Ideastream Public Media: “If people are here as criminals, if people are here illegally, we need to enforce the laws of this country and the laws of the state of Ohio. But we need to do that lawfully.”

Claim: Acton “wants woke DEI racial preferences for hiring at Ohio colleges and universities”

Unsupported. The ad points to no Acton statement, and there is no record of her calling for racial hiring preferences at Ohio’s public universities. Ramaswamy, by contrast, has a documented higher-education position: he has proposed closing or consolidating public universities he considers “subpar,” naming the University of Akron, Kent State and Cleveland State, to help pay for an income-tax cut.

Who is paying for the ad

V-PAC is a federal super PAC, which can raise and spend unlimited sums but cannot coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. It reported raising about $18.6 million tied to the 2026 cycle, with its largest contributions coming from out of state: $10 million from Pennsylvania-area investor Jeff Yass and $5 million from New York financier Ross Stevens. The PAC also accepted $275,000 in late 2025 from IT Serve Alliance, a group that has backed expanding foreign-worker visa programs, then refunded it after conservative backlash. Ramaswamy himself drew bipartisan criticism in December 2024 when he argued American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence” while defending tech companies that hire foreign-born engineers.

The campaign’s response

Acton campaign manager Philip Stein said in a statement: “Vivek Ramaswamy has spent his campaign calling Ohioans lazy and backing tax scams that benefit billionaires while raising our costs and bankrupting our schools; no wonder his billionaire friends are coming to his aid. This is just another desperate attempt to salvage his struggling campaign. Ohioans know the truth- Vivek Ramaswamy is only out for himself.”

Acton and Ramaswamy advanced from the May 5 primary and meet in the general election on Nov. 3, 2026.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 214-212 vote sent the nearly $70 billion package to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign the measure. Republican senators approved the bill earlier this month, with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski the only member of the GOP in opposition.  

California independent Rep. Kevin Kiley, who conferences with Republicans, voted no, along with Democrats. 

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., argued Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol need the additional funding so they can deport anyone in the country without proper authorization. 

“They want you to think that it’s just everybody coming in to seek the American dream,” he said. “We have a legal method for that to happen.” 

Scalise then read a list of Americans killed by people who were present in the United States without legal status.

“It’s not some hypothetical, it’s happened over and over and over again,” he said. 

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he opposed Republicans’ plans to “give a blank check to ICE without any guardrails, any oversight, or any accountability.”

“Donald Trump promised America that he would target violent felons who are here illegally, but instead taxpayer dollars are being used by ICE and his violent mass deportation machine to target and brutalize American citizens, in some cases killing them,” he said. 

Jeffries contended that “immigration enforcement should be fair, just and humane” and that ICE “needs to conduct itself” according to the same standards other law enforcement agencies follow. 

Funds will stretch over 3 years

The legislation will provide $38.53 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $26.02 billion for Customs and Border Protection and $5 billion for the secretary of Homeland Security.

The funding, which lasts through September 2029, is in addition to the $170 billion Republicans provided in their “big, beautiful” law. About $100 billion of that remains unspent, according to Democrats. 

Republicans opted not to place any new constraints on how federal immigration agents operate or provide additional funding for oversight, despite officers killing two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. 

Those shootings led Democrats in Congress to demand new restrictions on officers, which led to weeks of bipartisan negotiations amid a 76-day shutdown for the Department of Homeland Security. 

That stalemate ended in April after lawmakers approved DHS’ annual appropriations bill without funding for ICE or the Border Patrol. Republicans had to remove those provisions in order to move the legislation through procedural votes in the Senate that require the support of at least 60 lawmakers. 

A new path

Republican leaders then turned to the complex budget reconciliation process to provide three years of funding for ICE, CBP and the secretary of DHS without requiring any changes to how they operate. 

The special legislative pathway allows bills to move through the Senate with simple majority votes as long as they adhere to certain rules.

Senate Republicans originally included, but later removed, $1.46 billion for several Department of Justice Programs and $1 billion for the Secret Service to make security upgrades linked to the new White House ballroom, also called the East Wing Modernization Project. 

The funding for ICE, CBP and the DHS secretary clears the way for the Trump administration to continue its immigration crackdown until just a few months before his second term is scheduled to end.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

President Donald Trump ordered the operation, which began at 5 p.m. Eastern and was “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” a social media account for U.S. Central Command posted Tuesday evening.

Trump said earlier Tuesday the United States would retaliate after Iran shot down the helicopter late Monday over the Strait of Hormuz, and that the two American pilots aboard were unharmed.

Trump announced the cause of the helicopter’s downing in a Truth Social post just before 1 p.m. Eastern. As of early Tuesday morning, the incident had still been under investigation, according to U.S. Central Command.

“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz. There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote.

Despite recent exchanges of fire, the administration maintains the war, named by the Pentagon as Operation Epic Fury, is over and that an April 7 ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran remains in place. 

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press” with moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News, Trump said, before abruptly walking out of the interview a short time later, “I call it a military exercise because people would rather have it called that. It’s not a big war for us.” 

The two military pilots were rescued at 7:33 p.m. Eastern time after the AH-64 Apache went down off the coast of Oman while the military was patrolling regional waters, according to U.S. Central Command.

“The Soldiers were safely rescued within approximately two hours and are in stable condition. The cause of the incident is under investigation.

“Rescue efforts were led by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the 82nd Airborne Division, with support from U.S. Air Force and Navy units including U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59,” according to the command’s statement posted on social media just after 6 a.m. Eastern.

The U.S. continues to block traffic to and from Iranian ports, and as recently as Monday fired on an empty oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman the military said was breaking the blockade just southeast of the Strait of Hormuz.

According to U.S. Central Command, American forces have disabled seven non-compliant vessels, redirected 134 ships that complied, and allowed 42 vessels supporting humanitarian aid to pass since initiating the blockade on April 13.

Iran has all but choked off international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s petroleum supply traveled before the war.

War status

Thirteen U.S. service members have died in the conflict, which began on Feb. 28. 

The Pentagon’s tally for service members injured stands at 411 as of Tuesday. Despite the administration’s stance that the war is over, the Defense Casualty Analysis System lists one U.S. sailor as “wounded in action” in June as part of Operation Epic Fury.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified last week before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that the U.S. war in Iran was “over.”

In response to a question from Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., about who won the war, Rubio answered, “Epic Fury is over, which is what you would consider the war.”

The U.S. launched the conflict in conjunction with Israel, and the Israeli government’s continued bombardment of southern Lebanon has stymied further peace talks — though Trump has repeatedly claimed Iran wants to make a deal.

Iran and Israel exchanged rocket fire Sunday into Monday for the first time since April.

Despite a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in mid-April, Israel’s bombing campaign has continued in southern Lebanon, as Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters refuse to recognize the agreement.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Tiffin clinic dates and hours

Walk-in clinics at the health district’s Tiffin office, located at 92 E. Perry St., will be held on June 11, June 18, June 23, and June 25 from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Fostoria clinic dates and hours

In Fostoria, walk-in clinics will be held July 21, Aug. 18, and Sept. 15 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the health district’s Fostoria office at 801 Kirk St.

What to bring

Residents attending a clinic should bring a photo ID and insurance card. Vaccines are also available by appointment at the Tiffin office; call (419) 447-3691 ext. 6333 to schedule.

For more information about available vaccines, visit senecahealthdept.org.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Food service begins at 5 p.m. and runs until 7 p.m. or until the food runs out. The menu includes shredded chicken sandwiches, sloppy joes, cole slaw, potato and three-bean salad, baked beans, assorted pies and the church’s strawberry shortcake, made with fresh strawberries and ice cream.

Guests can go through the main food line for a full meal or use a separate dessert-only line for shortcake. The event is dine-in only, with no carry-out available. Assistance is available for elderly guests and people with limited mobility.

New additions and family activities

New this year, the festival will feature bingo and a raffle. Visitors can also take photos with the “Strawberry Truck,” and children can use a bounce house.

A long-running community tradition

“Though the funds we raise are very valuable to our church and our mission, we don’t really see the Festival as a fundraiser,” said Audrey Naegele Flood, president of the church’s Consistory board. “Our congregation has so much fun socializing and visiting with people, this is one of the things we look forward to most all year. Tons of work goes into preparing for this event, but it’s more than worth it for the memories made.”

Troy Kagy, president of the Bloom Township trustees, said he has seen the festival’s impact firsthand. “Having grown up in this church and been involved in this community for years, I’ve seen firsthand what this festival means to people here,” he said. “The volunteers pour hours of work into it, and the good it does for both the church and the community makes every bit of it worthwhile.”

“Every summer this festival draws people to Bloomville and gives our neighbors a chance to gather, catch up, meet new people and enjoy each other’s company,” Bloomville Mayor David Auble Jr. said. “It’s been a cherished tradition in the Village for nearly 70 years.”

Preparing for the festival is a monthslong, all-hands effort, according to the church. Volunteers bake each shortcake ahead of time, hand-cut thousands of berries and set up chairs the morning of the event, then scoop ice cream, make change and keep hot food coming through the evening before washing trays and taking down tents at the end of the night.

How to give and learn more

Supporters who cannot attend can donate online, mail a gift to PO Box 55, Bloomville, or bring a donation to the event. More information is available on the church’s website and its Facebook page.

About the Bloomville United Church of Christ

The Bloomville UCC was founded in 1850 with nine members. The congregation has changed names, pastors and buildings over the years and remains an anchor institution in the village of Bloomville.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Senate passed Senate Joint Resolution 10 on a 22–9 vote Wednesday, June 3, just two weeks after the measure was introduced, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. A final vote in the Ohio House could come as soon as Wednesday, June 10, the Statehouse News Bureau reported. If 60 of the House’s 99 members sign off, the question goes before voters this November.

What the amendment would not do is change how a single Ohioan votes. And that gap — between what the measure claims to accomplish and what it actually does — has produced an unusual coalition of opponents, from the ACLU of Ohio and the League of Women Voters to conservative election activists, while Republican leaders deny the charge that the whole exercise is designed to pull their voters to the polls in a difficult midterm year.

The law already on the books

Gov. Mike DeWine signed House Bill 458 in January 2023, and its photo-ID mandate took effect that April. Since then, every Ohioan voting in person — on Election Day or during early voting — has been required to present an unexpired Ohio driver’s license, state ID card, or BMV interim ID form; a U.S. passport or passport card; or a U.S. military, Ohio National Guard, or Department of Veterans Affairs ID card. The 2023 law eliminated the documents Ohioans had used for years, including utility bills, bank statements, paychecks, and Social Security cards.

SJR 10 would copy the core of that requirement into the Ohio Constitution, where no future legislature or court could undo it without another statewide vote. Sponsors introduced the resolution in mid-May — Sens. Jane Timken, R-Jackson Township, and Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, in the Senate, with a companion measure, House Joint Resolution 9, from Reps. Adam Bird, R-New Richmond, and Heidi Workman, R-Rootstown.

“This is about fair and free elections,” Timken said when the resolutions were introduced, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. On the Senate floor, she pointed to Virginia as a cautionary tale: “After several years of operation, surviving judicial challenges, Virginia repealed its photo ID requirements in 2020 after a single seat in the General Assembly flipped.”

The Capital Journal noted what Timken’s Virginia example leaves out: even after that state returned to allowing non-photo documents, a 2021 review by The Virginia Mercury found only about 0.05% of voters in several large localities cast ballots without showing a photo ID.

A fast track with a campaign behind it

The amendment push did not begin in the legislature. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, called in a mid-May Cincinnati Enquirer op-ed for enshrining voter ID in the state constitution, writing that the existing statutory requirement is “fragile.” Days later, Republican lawmakers introduced HJR 9 and SJR 10. Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon — who shepherded SJR 10 through his chamber — is Ramaswamy’s running mate for lieutenant governor.

The resolutions then moved at a pace rarely seen for constitutional amendments. In committee and on the Senate floor, Democrats offered amendments to guarantee a free state ID card, expand the list of acceptable documents, permit future electronic IDs, and allow same-day voter registration. The GOP-majority committee tabled every one, the Capital Journal reported.

“The general response was, well, those provisions are already in statute,” Sen. Willis Blackshear, D-Dayton, said on the floor. “Well, photo ID’s already in statute. So then the question becomes, if we believe photo ID is important enough to enshrine in the Constitution, then why not include those protections?”

Trump turns up the pressure

President Donald Trump injected himself into the fight Monday night, June 8, posting on Truth Social as the House committee weighed the measure:

“Congratulations to the Ohio State Senate for passing Senate Joint Resolution 10, which would require VOTER I.D. in Ohio Elections! Democrats fought hard against this, presumably so they can CHEAT. I am now asking all of my Republican friends in the State House to, also, PASS THIS NOW, and put a Constitutional Amendment on the Ballot so that the Great People of Ohio can vote to enshrine VOTER I.D. in the State Constitution. I will be watching, and am strongly supportive of this Resolution.”

Trump’s claim that the amendment “would require VOTER I.D. in Ohio Elections” describes a requirement that has been in force since April 2023. His assertion that Democrats opposed it “so they can CHEAT” is not supported by the legislative record; Senate Democrats’ objections centered on the omission of the free-ID guarantee and same-day registration, not on photo ID itself, which remains state law regardless of the amendment’s fate.

Gavarone amplified the post on Facebook within hours: “Thank you Mr. President for your support of Senate Joint Resolution 10! I look forward to its swift passage in the House!”

‘Hope that they turn out’

The central question hanging over the effort is why Republicans are spending legislative time and a ballot line on a law that already exists. Critics across the spectrum have an answer: turnout.

“It’s ‘put something on the ballot attractive to certain voters, and hope that they turn out,’” ACLU of Ohio Legislative Director Gary Daniels told News 5 Cleveland statehouse reporter Morgan Trau, in a story published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Daniels testified that the ACLU’s opposition “is much less about the underlying policy issue of photo IDs for voters and much more about taking away valuable policy and legislative time to quickly place an unneeded constitutional amendment on the ballot for purely political reasons.”

There is recent precedent. In 2022 — another midterm year — Ohio Republicans placed a measure on the ballot banning noncitizens from voting in all Ohio elections, even though noncitizens already could not vote in state or federal elections, News 5 reported.

McColley rejected the comparison. “Seeing this as a turnout juicer or anything like that, it’s not really backed up,” he told Trau, pointing to polling showing broad support for photo-ID requirements. After the Senate vote, he predicted the amendment “will pass overwhelmingly.”

House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, said the GOP was putting the amendment forward “politically.” “This is a way to try and distract voters from the fact that their gas is over $5 a gallon,” he said. “You think that Ohioans, when they can’t afford their childcare, their healthcare, their gas, their utility bills, are going to be motivated, instead, to go out and vote for something that is already the law in Ohio.”

Public testimony has run overwhelmingly against the measure. At one committee hearing on HJR 9, 78 people and groups opposed the resolution while a single Ohio group submitted supporting testimony, News 5 reported. In a later Capital Journal tally, just 2 of the more than 80 witnesses who submitted testimony supported the idea — and neither appeared in person. Asked about that lopsided record, House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, said, “Uh, yes, it means something to me,” before adding: “The number, as we know, often it’s the same set of people who are being invigorated by the same groups to come and testify.”

The fraud the amendment targets is vanishingly rare

Ohio’s own elections data undercuts the security rationale. On the Senate floor, Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, said roughly 22 million votes have been cast in Ohio since 2008 — and 18 voter fraud charges filed in that span. “Phony voting just is not happening very much at all in the state of Ohio,” Smith said. “In-person voter fraud is less common than UFO sightings, or more importantly, Bigfoot sightings in Portage County.”

That tracks with the state’s findings under Republican leadership. Then-Secretary of State Frank LaRose identified possible fraud in about 1 of every 222,000 votes cast in the 2020 election, the Capital Journal reported when HB 458 passed in 2023.

What the amendment leaves out — and what it slips in

When lawmakers enacted photo voter ID in 2023, they included a guarantee that any Ohioan can obtain a free state ID card — a provision tied to the U.S. Constitution’s 24th Amendment ban on poll taxes. That guarantee does not appear in the proposed amendment, a gap voting-rights advocates flagged repeatedly in committee.

“You can easily argue that it is unconstitutional at the federal level to not have free ID,” League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller testified, “that if you require something that costs money, that that is a poll tax.” Miller opposes the resolution but told lawmakers that if they proceed, the free-ID language should at minimum be written into the amendment’s text.

Opponents are equally focused on language the resolution adds. Its final section asserts that nothing in the amendment requires lawmakers to allow voting “in any location or manner other than in person at a polling place on the day of an election.” To Steve David of All Voting is Local Action Ohio, that clause reveals the longer game: “Rather than installing protections for Ohio voters, the General Assembly is telegraphing its intentions to restrict early in-person voting and eliminate the no-fault absentee system.”

McColley has denied any such plan, telling News 5: “There are no plans to eliminate early mail-in voting or absentee voting in the state of Ohio. I don’t believe there would even be support in either one of our caucuses to do that.”

Friction on the right — including a familiar face from Tiffin

The amendment has also splintered the activists who usually champion stricter voting rules. Marcell Strbich, a retired Air Force officer who ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in last month’s Republican primary, testified that the amendment locks in “unequal treatment” because it constitutionalizes photo ID for in-person voters while leaving absentee voters under the current, looser standard of writing identifying information on a ballot envelope.

Among those echoing that argument was Eric Watson of Tiffin, who narrowly lost last month’s Republican primary for the 88th Ohio House District, which covers Seneca and Sandusky counties. Watson told the committee he supports the resolution only if lawmakers “close these loopholes.” “You need to show a government photo ID for many other things,” Watson testified, “so it only makes sense that a government photo ID would also be required for mail-in ballots to help protect one of the greatest privileges we have as a citizen.”

Republican committee members pushed back on the photocopy idea from both directions. Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., raised data-security concerns: “Before you leave today, give me your driver’s license. I’ll keep it for a while and return it to you, maybe, and store all the data. Is that a good idea?” Committee chair Rep. Sharon Ray, R-Wadsworth, questioned the logic itself: “What are you going to compare the copy to? Do you see how nonsensical that is?”

The split reached the Senate floor, where Sen. Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, voted no from the right. “When you mail in your ballot, you should have to have some type of form of ID. Unfortunately, I don’t see that here, and that raises major concerns for me,” Cutrona said. “I think this is creating a loophole within our own constitution if this is indeed passed.” Rep. Ron Ferguson, R-Wintersville, wrote on X that “The Ohio Senate missed the mark, but we have the chance to salvage it in the Ohio House,” calling for “Photo ID for every voter.”

What happens Wednesday

The House’s general government committee took two hours of testimony Monday, June 8, and adjourned without amending the resolution, the Statehouse News Bureau reported. Ray, the chair, signaled changes are still possible: “I think there’s got to be a little bit more conversation regarding the free IDs.”

A final House floor vote could come Wednesday, June 10. Passage requires a three-fifths majority — 60 votes — and any amendment to the resolution would send it back to the Senate. If the chambers agree, the question goes straight to the November ballot, where the voters Republicans are counting on will decide whether to constitutionalize a rule they have been following at the polls since 2023.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a member of the church widely known as the Mormon church, said the policy for military chaplains announced Friday was “offensive” and demanded the Pentagon reverse course, which the department did Monday afternoon.

“It’s also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations,” Lee, a Utah Republican, said in a video statement posted to social media Sunday night.

“So I’m respectfully imploring the people at the Pentagon to reconsider this, not just reconsider but undo it,” Lee continued. “Secretary Hegseth: Tear down that wall. This is not cool.”

Hours later, Lee wrote on social media that he personally spoke to President Donald Trump on the phone about the “Pentagon’s ‘Christian list’” and told people to “stay tuned.”

“I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading,” Lee wrote. “We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief.” 

A spokesperson with Lee’s office told States Newsroom Monday the senator received assurances from the administration that the issue will be resolved.

Just after noon Eastern time Monday, the Pentagon pointed States Newsroom to a social media post showing an updated list without the word “Christian” before any of the denominations.

“The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” according to the post by an account with the handle “DOW Rapid Response,” using the acronym for the administration’s preferred but unofficial name, Department of War.

Sen. John Curtis, a Utah Republican, also spoke out on social media stating the church is “unequivocally Christian.”

“It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the religion’s own foundational tenets,” he wrote Saturday.

A concern from lawmakers is that service members who belong to the Latter-day Saints may not receive services from a Christian chaplain.

The issue places the Pentagon in the middle of a longtime theological dispute between Latter-day Saints, who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and consider themselves Christian, and some members of other Christian faiths who believe the Salt Lake City-based church should be viewed as outside of Christianity.

Latter-day Saint church leaders declined to comment Monday.

The White House pointed States Newsroom to the department’s Monday afternoon social media announcement.

Shorter list

Citing a two-page letter posted to social media Friday, Parnell said the department was making a “long overdue move” to reduce the military chaplains’ overall list of religious affiliations to 31, down from an “unmanageable” 200.

“This decrease in religious affiliation codes is not designed to make any claims on the legitimacy of any faith or religious belief, nor is it intended to provide a list of ‘officially approved’ religions. Rather, it is designed to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups,” Parnell wrote.

The list includes 21 separate Christian denominations, but lists the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints separately.

‘Christian nationalist takeover’

Criticism of the new list reverberated beyond Latter-day Saints.

Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and president and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance advocacy group accused the administration Friday of pushing a “Christian nationalist takeover of the Department of Defense.”

“Religious freedom in the military must mean religious freedom for everyone who serves, not just those this administration finds politically useful,” Raushenbush said in a statement.

“Secretary Hegseth is not ‘streamlining’ anything. He is elevating one narrow religious worldview from the top of the chain of command. That is dangerous, discriminatory and fundamentally un-American. The First Amendment does not allow the government to create a hierarchy of faiths, and it certainly does not allow the Pentagon to decide which beliefs are worthy of recognition.”

Hegseth announced a restructuring of the military’s chaplain corps in March, which he said had been “infected with political correctness and secular humanism.”

Hegseth hosts a monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

All 12 victims are reported to be in stable conditions and their ages range from 14-61, according to the Toledo Police Department. No arrests have been made as of Monday afternoon. 

There have been 217 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to MassShootingTracker.site. 

The shooting happened Saturday night around 5:37 p.m. near the Old West End, a historic Toledo neighborhood that was celebrating its 53rd annual festival. 

“It’s just a shame when a few people, for whatever reason going through their head, decide to disrupt something that has been a beloved community event for many, many, many years,” Toledo Deputy Police Chief Joe Heffernan said during a Saturday night press conference. 

There were at least two shooters who were likely shooting at each other, he said. 

“If we have some people out there, some groups of young people that are thinking that this is exciting, it’s not,” Heffernan said. “This is a perfect example of how, when bullets start flying, they can go anywhere, they can strike anybody.” 

Toledo Police are asking for the community’s help and for people to come to share any videos they might have taken that could lead to the suspects. 

“I am deeply concerned about the situation in Toledo,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said. “Summer festivals should be safe spaces for families to spend time together without fear of violence. Fran and I are praying for everyone impacted by the incident at the Old West End Festival.”

DeWine signed a bill into law in 2022 that got rid of all training, background check, and permitting requirements to carry a concealed weapon.

A 2021 law no longer requires people to retreat before they can justifiably hurt or kill someone with a gun in self-defense.  

Ohio received an F on the Giffords annual gun law scorecard. 

“(Ohio) has very, very weak gun laws,” said Danniyal Ahmed, a senior federal policy attorney with Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 

“We really hope the legislature takes this opportunity to maybe reconsider its strategy on this policy area.”

Ohio state Sen. Willis Blackshear Jr., D-Dayton, called on his fellow lawmakers to take action on gun legislation. 

“This isn’t a Democrat issue or a Republican issue, but a human issue,” he said in a statement Monday. 

“I’m asking Governor DeWine to revisit the commonsense gun legislation he proposed after the 2019 mass shooting in Dayton and fight for its passage. Gun violence is an expense that our cities and our state can no longer afford.”

After a 2019 mass shooting in Dayton killed nine people, chants of “do something” drowned out Gov. DeWine’s speech during a vigil for the victims. 

Ohio politicians were quick to offer their thoughts and prayers.

“Our community is in pain as a result of senseless gun violence in Toledo’s storied Old West End community,” Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur said. Kaptur represents the Toledo area in Congress.

“Praying now for victims and our Old West End community — one of the most joyous and celebrated events in our region will endure. It will take time and work to restore comfort, security, and trust.”

Derek Merrin, a Republican who is competing for Kaptur’s seat in Congress in the general election, thanked the first responders. 

“Please join me in praying for the victims, their families, and everyone affected by tonight’s shooting,” Merrin said. “Let’s pray that law enforcement will apprehend the individuals who carried out this horrendous act.”

Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted said he is praying for those affected by the “senseless violence.”  

Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno said he has been in touch with Toledo authorities. 

“To the thugs behind this lawless violence: we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. This will not stand,” Moreno said in a statement. 

Ohio’s gun legislation

Ohio Senate Republicans recently passed a bill that would penalize local governments for enacting gun safety regulations. 

Ohio Senate Bill 278 allows anyone to sue municipalities that have gun safety laws. It also would let judges fine cities, award money to plaintiffs, and require cities to pay all legal fees. Ohio Senator Terry Johnson, R-McDermott, introduced the bill. 

Ohio Senate Bill 392 would ban cities or townships from making their own weapons restrictions by making gun and knife laws uniform across Ohio. Ohio Sen. Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, and Johnson introduced the bill, which has had one hearing. 

Ohio Democratic lawmakers introduced various bills intended to prevent gun violence, but they have had no hearings so far. They include:

• Ohio House Bill 45 would prohibit certain firearm transfers without a background check. Ohio Reps. Cecil Thomas, D-Cincinnati, and Rep. Rachel Baker, D-Cincinnati, introduced the bill. 

• Ohio House Bill 351 would create the Ohio Task Force on Gun Violence, which would study gun violence as well as programs to reduce gun violence. Ohio Reps. Darnell T. Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Karen Brownlee, D-Symmes Twp., introduced the bill. 

• Ohio House Bill 901 would penalize adults who leave firearms accessible to minors. Brewer introduced the bill.

Requiring background checks on all gun sales and having laws in place to prevent children from accessing firearms are two starting points when it comes to reducing gun violence, Ahmed said. 

“When we see these events that are both really horrific and also gain state and national attention, that’s the time for politicians to actually look to see what has worked in other places, and what the weaknesses in their state’s laws, and take action,” he 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.

The Ohio House Children and Human Services Committee held its own version of a vote-a-rama, passing the four bills in rapid succession.

Ohio House Bill 647, one of two bills that sought to bolster the state’s system for investigating childcare funding fraud, was passed after multiple hearings and amendments to the bill.

Both childcare fraud bills received criticism for separate issues from childcare providers and local prosecuting attorneys throughout the committee consideration process.

National scrutiny of childcare facilities cropped up following a right-wing influencer’s claims that Minnesota childcare facilities, particularly those run by Somali immigrants, were misusing federal funds.

The Trump administration temporarily froze funds to Minnesota and other Democratically-led cities, questioning the legitimacy of fund usage at some facilities.

While Ohio was not targeted, Gov. Mike DeWine and Kara Wente, head of the Ohio Department of Children & Youth, sought to get ahead of concerns, standing behind the oversight of childcare facilities in the state, particularly those who receive federal funding for publicly funded childcare.

H.B. 647 came about as part of the defense of the state’s system, a GOP-led effort to add layers of investigation to the system through the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and Ohio Inspector General’s Office, and spell out other regulations within the system.

The bill had the support of Wente, who said provisions in the bill were goals of the department already.

The committee also moved Ohio House Bill 7, Ohio House Bill 484, and Ohio Senate Bill 218, along for a full House vote, which could happen before the legislature goes on summer break.

The chair of the committee, state Rep. Andrea White, R-Kettering, is co-sponsoring H.B. 7, which would guarantee publicly funded childcare for those who take care of foster children and family members like grandchildren or siblings.

Caregivers are required under the bill to have a job or be in an education or other training program to be eligible for the publicly funded childcare.

H.B. 484 is also a Republican-led bill, one that would create a new pilot program specifically for childcare workers.

Under the bill, the Workforce Investment Now for Child Care program would be established within the Ohio Department of Children and Youth, and publicly funded childcare would be provided to children of childcare facility employees, without consideration of household income.

The bill creates exceptions for child day camp employees and administrators, along with owners of childcare facilities, according to an analysis by the Legislative Service Commission.

The Children & Youth department will be required to complete a report on findings from the pilot program within six months of the end of the program. The bill appropriated $20 million for the program.

This is not the first pilot program to be sent through the legislature related to childcare. A cost-sharing pilot program became part of the most recent operating budget the state passed, appropriating state funds to start a program that would split up the cost of childcare between the state, employers and eligible employees.

That program is also under the purview of the Ohio Department of Children & Youth.

Ohio Senate Bill 218 addresses a very specific population of kids: those whose parents are in the armed forces.

The bill exempts family childcare providers who have already been certified by any military branch from state license requirements, to avoid duplicative regulations.

“Passing Senate Bill 218 would add Ohio to a growing list of states seeking to expand access to quality childcare for military families and reduce barriers for military spouses who support their families by operating family childcare homes and move frequently between states with differing licensure requirements,” said bill sponsor state Sen. Kristina Roegner, R-Hudson, during the first hearing of the bill on Monday.

The bill also had the support of child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, according to the group’s vice president, Brittany Boulton.

“By aligning state policy with existing federal oversight … this bill offers a practical solution that supports military families and the providers who serve them without reducing accountability or quality,” Boulton told the committee.

The House heard a companion bill with similar language, and because of the companion bill, White said the committee had “basically heard this bill,” and moved forward with passage of S.B. 218.

“I understand there is broad support for this bill,” White said before its unanimous passage.

All the bills passed Monday will now move to the Ohio House for a full vote.

House-originated bills will need to move through the Ohio Senate before moving on for the governor’s signature.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Brian Massie, a campaign leader and the co-founder of AxOHTax, announced early Friday that the group hasn’t reached its goal of collecting 620,000 signatures.

Facing a July 1 deadline to submit petitions to the Ohio Secretary of State, he and fellow volunteers have decided to hold off — for now.

To qualify for the ballot, organizers needed to turn in 413,488 valid voter signatures. They’ve been trying to collect plenty of extras, since thousands of signatures routinely get thrown out during the state’s verification process.

“We thought that we would need quite a buffer,” Massie said during an interview with WEWS.

During a news conference in late April, Massie said the campaign had amassed 305,000 signatures. On Friday, he refused to provide an updated total.

“We’re declaring war on the legislators,” he said, describing some members of the General Assembly as callous and slow to act. “And when you’re at war, you never give the enemy any intel. Giving them information — specifically how many signatures — that’s like giving them intel.”

Massie and his fellow organizers say they’ve lost confidence in politicians in Columbus. They’re reflecting the outrage of elderly taxpayers, in particular, who feel overburdened and ignored.

The proposed constitutional amendment would scrap property taxes entirely — on housing, commercial, and industrial real estate and land.

There’s a growing anti-tax movement across the country, as cash-strapped homeowners feel the pain of post-pandemic house-price spikes, broader inflation and tax levies. But no state has jettisoned real estate taxes entirely.

Opponents say eliminating property taxes is a drastic move. Ohio governments would have to make deep cuts, sharply raise other types of taxes or do a combination of both things to have any chance at making up the difference.

“What it ends up being is a tax shell game, the biggest tax shell game you could imagine,” state Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Kirtland Republican, said during an interview Friday. “Because, yeah, we can get rid of property taxes. But then sales tax will have to be tripled. … Homeowners, individuals will end up, I think, paying more in tax. Just different types of taxes. And that doesn’t really solve the problem.”

A coalition called Ohioans to Protect Public Services, which includes firefighters, police, teachers, and librarians, issued a statement Friday morning calling the push to abolish all property taxes “reckless” and pledging to continue fighting the effort.

“Local property taxes pay for services Ohioans count on every day, including police, fire and EMS, 911, public schools, senior services, supports for children and people with disabilities, to name just a few,” Jen Detwiler, a representative for the coalition, said in a written statement.

“Eliminating two-thirds of local tax revenue overnight does not make those needs disappear — it forces our state into impossible choices: severe cuts to local services, massive increases in sales and income taxes, or both.”

Massie said lawmakers in Columbus now have another year to prove they can make meaningful reforms, while the signature-gathering continues.

“We’re saying okay, let’s give the legislators more time. And let’s see what they do,” he said, challenging lawmakers to cut spending and bureaucracy.

The General Assembly approved a handful of tax-relief measures late last year, but homeowners aren’t feeling the effects of those changes yet.

The reforms included some property-tax credits and rollbacks, changes to the math around school levies, adjustments to the state review process for county reappraisals and increases in oversight powers for county budget commissions.

Lawmakers expect those updates to yield $2.4 billion to $3 billion worth of savings for homeowners over the next few years.

“Next month, with the tax bills coming out, people will start to see it,” Cirino said of the impact. “Particularly if you write a check twice a year to pay your property taxes, it will be very visible to you. If you pay through your mortgage, you’re going to have to look for it a bit harder than people who are paying taxes directly.”

He said lawmakers are still discussing additional reforms. “We have a number of bills in both the House and Senate,” he said.

Cirino said he’s sympathetic to homeowners who are struggling.

But he’s clearly fed up with the anti-tax campaign — which faces long odds, as a volunteer-led effort that’s been gathering signatures for just over a year. As signatures age, they’re more likely to get tossed because voters move or die.

“I’m not sure whether these people are delusional or not,” Cirino said, “but they haven’t done their homework. I don’t think they’ve put the intellectual rigor behind evaluating this problem and what the right solution is.”

So far, Massie isn’t impressed with the legislature’s actions. And he views the campaign’s shortfall as a delay — not a defeat.

“We will continue to collect these signatures. And we’re going to prove Jerry Cirino wrong,” Massie said.

As for whether that will happen next year? “My response is, it’s in God’s hands,” he said.

Michelle Jarboe is the business growth and development reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on X @MJarboe or email her at Michelle.Jarboe@wews.com.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The original legislation was passed when Republican Gov. James Rhodes held office. The open meeting laws were passed under Democratic Gov. John Gilligan. This shows that public record disclosure was not a partisan issue.

But now the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court just threw a giant wrench into the gears of Ohio’s public records laws, causing major damage to people seeking public documents.

Republicans no longer want transparency or disclosure. They want to control the documents and control the public narrative.

On May 27, the six Republicans on the court banded together to halt discovery proceedings in a case that required the production of certain public records and the deposition (oral testimony under oath before trial) of then-Ohio Attorney General David Yost.

The court sent the case back to the 10th District Court of Appeals (Franklin County) for that court to review and amend the scope of discovery limiting what the plaintiff could rightfully demand in seeking public records.

Why you should care

The right for anyone to be able to see and receive public records should be inviolate. We must be able to see exactly how our public institutions are operating. We need to be able to peek behind the curtains of governmental secrecy at any time.

Our right to public records should not be compromised or politicized.

The majority decision by the Ohio Supreme Court was a political one. It supported a Republican Attorney General who looks to be trying to evade Ohio’s clear public record statutes to protect from sunlight on pro-Trump political activities.

It is as if the justices knew the decision they wanted to make to support Yost and then tortured their legal arguments and reasoning to support that decision.

More importantly, I see a Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court chipping away at the state’s public records statutes to promote secrecy in government, as a tenet of the MAGA form of Republicanism.

Ohio once was a bipartisan pioneer in public transparency. It is sad to see strong public records laws being diluted by legislative fiats and partisan Supreme Court decisions.

Unfortunately, what the United States Supreme Court is to the Trump Administration, the Ohio Supreme Court is to the MAGA Ohio General Assembly.

This Ohio Supreme Court even has gone so far as to now allow elected judges in Ohio to endorse candidates for any political office.

In April the Ohio Supreme Court, in a 5-1 decision overturned the state’s decades-old ban on judges publicly endorsing political candidates.

That made Ohio the first — and only — state in the nation to explicitly allow state judges and judicial candidates to endorse politicians running for office.

I have no faith in Ohio’s top court to call out governmental impropriety or secrecy.

Therefore, the people need to fight all the harder to make sure our public offices and public officials comply with public records statutes and open meeting laws. We must fight back.

Every time a city, the county, or a university refuses to give public records, they must be fought to demand the people’s right to information.

If not, we will have a government dominated by secrecy and deceit, and not a government open to the people.

Case breakdown

Let me break down the case of Center for Media and Democracy v. Attorney General David Yost.

The parties

The plaintiff describes itself as a governmental nonpartisan anti-corruption watchdog group called the Center for Media and Democracy. An active party on behalf of the plaintiff is David Armiak, who heads research for the center.

The defendant is David Yost, who was Ohio Attorney General at the time. He resigned in early May to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group.

The facts

In 2020, the Center, through Armiak, asked Yost and his chief of staff to provide copies of records related to his involvement with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), and his attendance at RAGA’s 2020 winter meeting. These are conservative, GOP-based organizations that promote litigation to support President Donald Trump.

The center asked for:

All records that pertain to [RAGA], [RLDF], and the RAGA Winter Meeting held February 29 through March 2 from the Office of Attorney General Dave Yost. The scope of this request includes the Attorney General and Chief of Staff. The scope of this request should include but is not limited to emails, attachments, both sent and received, all draft records, briefing books, memos, notes, minutes, scheduling records, text messages, other correspondence (internal and external) and all other records.

Yost responded that the documents being sought were not records of his office, but instead were personal records and therefore did not come under the public records umbrella.

Armiak disagreed and sent an email to the attorney general stating that Yost and his chief of staff’s interactions with RAGA and RLFD were laced with extensive matters of public policy, and that while participating Yost and his staff were conducting public business. He also stated that Yost and his staff attended events sponsored by RAGA and RLFD in their “official capacities” representing the State of Ohio.

Yost countered saying that his office had no “email, test, drafts, memo, minutes, or other correspondence records” requested and repeated that other information was not public record.

Tenth District Court of Appeals

The center did not believe Yost and filed a legal action against him to provide the records. The lawsuit was for a writ of mandamus from the Tenth District Court of Appeals. In essence, the center was asking the court to mandate that the attorney general and his office provide the public records requested.

The court of appeals appointed a magistrate (a lawyer who is not a judge but makes recommendations to the judges) to hear the case.

As part of that litigation, the center attempted to get the documents through a civil discovery process. Discovery is a multifaceted process for gaining information from opponents prior to a case going to trial.

The center used 16 requests for production of documents which, in a civil case, demands that the opponent provide documents prior to trial for the parties’ and the court’s review.

The center also issued eight interrogatories to Yost. Interrogatories are written questions that need to be answered under oath by a party prior to trial.

Additionally, the center asked that Yost sit for a two-hour, under oath, deposition to answer questions about the documents that were not provided. Depositions were also requested from several of Yost’s staff members.

The Tenth District Court of Appeals gave the center the right to pursue these forms of discovery. The magistrate granted the center’s demand that Yost produce documents, with the caveat that some of the documents would be reviewed privately by the magistrate (in camera review) to determine if they should be given to the center.

The magistrate also ordered Yost and his staff members to participate in the depositions.

Yost disagreed with the magistrate’s rulings and appealed the Tenth District’s ruling to the Ohio Supreme Court, consisting of seven justices chosen in statewide elections.

The Supreme Court decision

In a 6-1 decision, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the Tenth District’s ruling, thereby vacating the Tenth District’s discovery order.

The six members of the court agreeing with Yost are all Republicans, as is Yost. The lone Democratic justice on the court, Justice Jennifer Brunner, filed a written dissenting opinion.

The decision, written by Justice Patrick F. Fischer, vacated the orders, saying the Tenth District Court of Appeals “misapplied the law and abused its discretion” in granting the center’s motion to compel the attorney general to comply with discovery measures.

The court vacated the Tenth District’s order demanding discovery compliance and remanded it (sent it back) to the court of appeals for that court to properly apply the discovery rules as outlined by the supreme court.

Let’s try to succinctly summarize the court’s 28-page decision.

The decision states that court-mandated discovery must be limited to what is “relevant and proportional” to the case. The court used the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure (rules governing how a civil case proceeds) as authority.

The supreme court said that in a public records request case, the “relevant and proportional” standard goes to whether the documents requested are or are not public records under the statutory definition.

Discovery must be limited to arguments that the documents are public records and defenses that they are not, according to the court.

Justice Fischer’s opinion stated that the Tenth District’s order inappropriately mandated the attorney general to produce information beyond what was “relevant and proportional” to the question of whether the documents requested fit the definition of “public records.”

“The court of appeals, in our view, placed the proverbial cart before the horse,” Fischer stated.

The dissenting opinion

Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner issued an 18-page written dissent. A “dissenting opinion” does not carry the weight of a majority opinion, but it does state a firm position of a justice against the majority view.

In essence, she said the court’s majority substituted its judgment in favor of the attorney general over the broad discretion given, by law, to the Tenth District Court of Appeals.

She also noted that the court did not give the appellate courts any guidance for managing discovery in a public records case.

She argues that the court of appeals, in fact, applied the discovery rules properly, especially given the behavior of the attorney general and his office and the appellate orders should have been maintained.

Justice Brunner stated that the attorney general’s reasoning for not releasing the documents had shifted and evolved — at one point, he even said some of the documents were, in fact, public records. Therefore, she thinks the many and varied attempts for discovery to lock him down was appropriate by the court of appeals.

“The approach employed by the court of appeals in determining what information would be relevant to the claims and defenses of the parties was not unreasonable, especially in the light of the attorney general’s office’s evasive conduct and evolving defenses,” the dissent says.

Justice Brunner says that the court’s majority opinion limits governmental transparency.

Although the decision may be in sync with the new era of governmental secrecy, Brunner disagrees.

She ends her dissent saying: “Public scrutiny through broad access to public records is a fundamental tenet of the people of Ohio’s right to exercise self-governance. … As this court continues to whittle the public’s right to examine the public’s own records into almost nothing, I ask the people of Ohio to consider whether this is consistent with their collective ideas and values. I have grave doubt that the people of Ohio consent to their government operating in secrecy. I therefore continue my adamant dissent to this court’s path of enabling the government to do so.”

This commentary was originally published by the Athens County Independent.

In Inside Courts, retired judge Tom Hodson explains the complexities of the law and legal cases, helping you understand what’s at stake — and how it affects you.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He played sports, cared about his health and stayed away from drugs. In 2018, when he left West Hartford to start his freshman year at American University in Washington, D.C., she expected his biggest challenge would be adjusting to college life.

Instead, she said, he began using cannabis to cope with social anxiety and as a sleep aid.

Within months, Wadsworth’s son was calling home in the middle of the night, terrified and disoriented.

Over the next several years, his behavior became increasingly erratic, he had psychotic episodes and he was eventually diagnosed with severe cannabis use disorder. That’s when a person’s marijuana use becomes difficult to control and begins interfering with daily life.

Now 25, Wadsworth’s son has spent much of the past several years cycling through hospitals and treatment programs across the country.

“It’s definitely changed the trajectory of his life,” Wadsworth said. “It did nothing but harm him, literally harm every facet of his life — every facet, physical, mental, everything.”

States have spent the past several decades debating whether to legalize cannabis. Now, they are debating how intoxicating legal products should be.

A growing body of research suggests that frequent use of high-THC cannabis increases the risk of cannabis use disorder, psychosis and other mental health problems for users, particularly adolescents and young adults. In response, lawmakers in some states this year have moved to impose stricter potency caps, while others have scaled back or rejected such measures amid industry opposition and uncertainty over research findings.

While cannabis flower once commonly contained THC levels in the single digits, many products sold legally today contain 15% to 20% THC or more. Concentrates — such as waxes, oils and shatter — can exceed 80%.

About 15% of Americans ages 12 and older reported using marijuana in the past month in 2024, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And about 3 in 10 people who use cannabis have cannabis use disorder, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some public health researchers and addiction specialists argue that public perceptions of marijuana have not kept pace with the growing availability of high potency products. They say broader legalization efforts — including the federal government’s recent move to reclassify medical marijuana as a less restrictive drug under the Controlled Substances Act — may reinforce the belief that cannabis is harmless.

“Moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III doesn’t help me save lives by decreasing the perception of that risk,” said Dr. Alta DeRoo, the chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, one of the largest nonprofit treatment providers for addiction and mental health. DeRoo also is a board-certified addiction medicine physician and OB-GYN.

Some state efforts to impose potency limits have been stalled by resistance from the cannabis industry and questions about how far governments should go in regulating a legal product.

In Connecticut, lawmakers this year reinstated a 35% THC cap on flower just weeks after voting to eliminate it. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said they were concerned about the potential public health effects of increasingly potent marijuana products.

At the same time, the legislation moved forward with other cannabis market expansions. Lawmakers removed a 70% THC cap on concentrates, increased the amount of THC allowed in certain cannabis-infused beverages and expanded the market to include products such as topicals, tablets and capsules.

Proposals to cap THC potency have surfaced in statehouses across the country for years. This year, lawmakers in California, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Dakota introduced similar measures, though most did not advance.

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law in May that removes the state’s previous 5% THC potency cap starting July 1. The new law will also add a 12,000 mg possession limit for registered medical cannabis patients and allow patients over 21 to vaporize medical marijuana.

‘A perennial debate’

Lawmakers across the country have proposed a range of measures aimed at limiting the potency of cannabis products.

In Washington state, Democratic state Rep. Lauren Davis has spent years trying to place guardrails on high-potency cannabis products. Since 2020, she has introduced at least five bills that would have capped THC levels in concentrates or imposed safeguards, including age restrictions, warning labels and a higher tax rate on products with elevated THC levels.

Most of those measures were thwarted by opposition from the cannabis industry, Davis told Stateline.

Industry groups and cannabis businesses argued that Washington’s existing regulations already protected consumers and kept cannabis away from minors. Opponents also warned that limiting high-THC products would drive consumers to the illicit market, hurting legal businesses and exposing users to unregulated, possibly contaminated products.

“(The industry) then went on to basically rain down all fire and brimstone and crush every bill that I’ve ever attempted in this area,” Davis said.

The only proposal to become law was a 2024 measure that requires retailers to warn customers about the association between high-potency THC products and psychotic disorders.

Washington state does not currently impose THC caps on flower or concentrates, but it does set limits on edibles and beverages.

Nearly all states have some form of medical-only or hybrid medical and recreational cannabis program, but just eight states, Connecticut, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, have potency caps on some products, including flower, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Potency limits on edibles are far more common.

“This is a perennial debate that comes up in Vermont and elsewhere around higher potency products,” said James Pepper, who chairs the Vermont Cannabis Control Board, the agency that regulates the state’s market.

“I feel like the concerns are certainly real,” he added.

In Oklahoma, a recent incident in which a 4-year-old boy was hospitalized and remained unconscious for more than a day after his parents said he ingested a 1,000 mg edible found at a playground has added to growing debate over high-potency cannabis products in the state.

“We know that some of our medical patients truly do need higher potency products, but do we really need a 2,000 milligram gummy available for anyone with a patient license to purchase in an Oklahoma dispensary?” said Adria Berry, the executive director of the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, which oversees the state’s medical market.

Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed a measure into law last month that will take effect in November, adding stricter packaging and labeling requirements, including restrictions intended to prevent products from resembling candy or appealing to children.

While some industry experts acknowledge the potential harms, they say the focus should be on consumer education and clear information about potency and effects, rather than new restrictions.

An official with Trulieve, a cannabis company that operates dispensaries in eight states, told Stateline that its products are independently tested and that potency information is available for customers to review and ask questions about, including a product’s effects.

“We believe that that piece of information is critical for a consumer to make an educated decision on what type and what potency of product they are looking to consume,” said Lauren Niehaus, Trulieve’s executive director of government relations.

Some advocacy and trade groups, such as the National Cannabis Industry Association and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), argue that policymakers should steer consumers into tightly regulated legal markets rather than imposing blanket THC caps that could push some users back to illicit sellers. They say that accurate labeling, child-resistant packaging and public education campaigns are the best strategies to protect public health and prevent youth access.

“It’s undoubtedly safer and better for public health outcomes to regulate these products,” said Adam Rosenberg, who chairs the board of the National Cannabis Industry Association.

Paul Armentano, NORML’s deputy director, said potency caps oversimplify the risks of cannabis products and fail to account for how consumers actually use them. Consumers view ultra-potent products as a novelty, he said, and ultimately gravitate toward lower-potency options.

“When you look at state-tracked sales in legal states, cannabis flower or botanical cannabis still outsells every other product, and I would dare say it’s because that is the most moderate to low potency product available on the shelf, and that’s what most people want,” Armentano said.

Armentano also argued that some of the strongest calls for THC limits come from opponents of legalization, who see potency restrictions as a way to gradually roll back access to legal cannabis.

What the research says

A study published earlier this year in JAMA Health Forum found that adolescents who use cannabis, including products with higher potencies, had a significantly increased risk of developing psychotic and bipolar disorders, along with higher risks of depression and anxiety. The research followed about 463,000 adolescents in Northern California between ages 13 and 17 and tracked outcomes into early adulthood. The study did not, however examine whether the use of higher-potency products is more likely to cause psychotic and bipolar disorders.

But other research has linked frequent use of high-potency cannabis to a greater risk of psychosis and psychotic disorders, particularly among heavy users. Several studies have found a dose-response relationship, meaning the risk tends to rise as THC concentration and frequency of use increase. Experts caution, however, that many studies cannot definitively prove that cannabis causes psychosis and that individual risk varies widely.

Other research suggests the risk of developing psychosis may be higher for adolescents and young adults, whose brains are still developing, as well as people with existing mental health conditions or a family history of psychotic disorders.

“I’ve seen patients come through our facilities where they haven’t done any other drugs other than just high-potency marijuana, and their psychosis is remarkable,” said DeRoo, of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. “They don’t have a grasp of reality. They come in seeing things, they come in believing things, alternate realities.”

John Puls, a psychotherapist and addiction specialist in Florida, has seen similar patterns in his practice at Full Life Comprehensive Care, particularly among adolescents and young adults using high-potency products.

He said families often don’t believe cannabis alone could be driving such dramatic changes. Beyond psychosis, he added, cannabis can chip away at more ordinary parts of life: Motivation drops, executive functioning suffers, patients miss appointments or forget obligations, and short‑term memory and relationships start to fray.

Some medical and industry experts say that cannabis can provide meaningful relief for some people, including those undergoing cancer treatment or who have chronic pain. But there is very little consensus on appropriate medical uses, dosing and long-term effects, particularly as products vary widely in potency.

“If there’s no standardized testing of products, or if there’s no enforcement of potency limits, then we might be putting people at more risk,” said Dr. Smita Das, an adult addiction psychiatrist and a clinical professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

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.

Ohio has committed a total of $2.3 billion in sales tax exemptions for data centers, new state data shows, though officials say the total cost over the long term could be “significantly higher.”

Some of the largest companies on the planet will receive an outsize share of the pie. That’s $600 million each, distributed over a 40 year window ending as late as 2058, to affiliates of Google, Meta and Amazon. In exchange, the companies agreed to invest billions of dollars in capital in Ohio. 

From there, Cologix gets $93 million in tax breaks spread over two facilities, while Vantage gets $83 million, and QTS Data Centers and Microsoft each get $73 million. 

“Given the uncapped nature of the tax exemption, final numbers could be significantly higher,” the document states. “The term of the exemptions are dependent on increased metrics and investments.”

All told, 18 companies have claimed exemptions worth $121 million on average, according to documents from the Ohio Department of Development that were shared with Signal Statewide by two statehouse Democrats. 

The document’s properties show it was written by the department’s chief investment officer, one day before Gov. Mike DeWine ordered a freeze of the tax exemption given sticker shock when the state Tax Department revealed the exemption cost Ohio $1.6 billion in lost revenue in 2025. 

Rep. Tristan Rader, a Lakewood Democrat, provided a copy of the spreadsheet, the contents of which have been generally withheld from the public or only released in bits and pieces. He said it reflects Republicans’ poor priorities as they advance new restrictions on Medicaid providers while throwing money at well-heeled tech companies. 

“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that we’re spending all this time going after caregivers of disabled children as fraudsters … when we’re handing out billions of dollars to data centers and nobody even seems to know about it?” he said. “And then as soon as they get caught, it’s a bad idea all of a sudden.”

Ohio Department of Development spokesman Mason Waldvogel in a statement that the public has been kept apprised of the tax breaks, which have grown in concert with the companies’ own investments.

“The exemption amounts are based on the qualifying investments companies make. In some cases, companies ultimately invest more into projects, which can result in a larger exemption than initial estimates,” he said. “Additionally, costs of constructing and equipping large-scale facilities have largely increased.”

Billions in breaks, sparse job creation

In most cases, the promised full-time job creation is sparse. Amazon, which includes a massive retail arm, promised to bring 1,058 jobs to Ohio. But on average, each other facility has pledged about 30 jobs apiece. 

The spreadsheet doesn’t span the full length of the public subsidization of data centers in Ohio. Many receive tax abatements of all or some of their property lasting as long as 15 years. And Amazon also won a job creation tax credit in connection with one of its data centers here. 

Amid an outcry that began after news broke of the $1.6 billion cost of the sales tax exemption last year, DeWine announced a pause on future issuances of the exemption while a newly created, data center-specific legislative committee fields testimony and says it will propose legislation of some form. 

Sen. Brian Chavez, a Washington County Republican and key negotiator on the issue, said Tuesday that the latest proposal would essentially cut all future sales tax exemptions in half. However, officials would be more generous with facilities that build their own power plants or that build on brownfields. It also slashes the maximum value of the facilities’ property tax abatements. 

The bill hasn’t passed the Senate Energy committee as of Tuesday, but it’s scheduled for a series of hearings Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, indicating it could be fast-tracked for passage before lawmakers recess for the summer.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio officials are preparing to once again mail unsolicited absentee ballot applications to all of Ohio’s registered voters ahead of the November election.

The Ohio Controlling Board approved spending $2.5 million on the mailing on Monday. The money will cover sending roughly 8 million ballot application packets, which will include a pre-stamped return envelope. Any voters who fill out the applications and return them to the Board of Elections office in their county will later receive a blank absentee ballot when early voting begins. 

Typically, the ballot application mailing occurs in August, while the blank ballots are mailed in early October. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office said it requested approval for the application mailing now so the state and its printing vendor have time to obtain enough envelopes and print the ballots. 

Ohio has sent absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in every even-year, general election  – when races for statewide and federal offices are held – since 2012. 

More recently, Republican state lawmakers have required funding for the mailings to be approved by the controlling board, a state panel that includes state legislators as well as a representative from Gov. Mike DeWine’s office.

The Republican-controlled board approved the mailing without debate. 

The November election will include high-profile races like governor, the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as state legislative and Ohio Supreme Court races.

Mail voting rates bottom out

State officials are preparing for another universal mail ballot application as mail voting rates hit a modern low in the primary election in May.

In that May 2026 primary election, 144,000 Ohioans cast mail ballots, according to final but not-yet-certified numbers published by the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. That’s lower than the previous record low set in the May 2022 primary election, when 149,413 mail ballots were cast. In the May 2018 primary election, 185,735 voters cast mail ballots.

The result is that mail voting represents a shrinking share of the overall early vote, especially in primary election cycles, when overall voter turnout is much lower than it is in general elections.

In May, 62% of the early vote was cast in person by voters who visited county elections offices. Mail ballots made up the other 38%.

That’s a steep decline from May 2022, when 52% of early votes were cast by mail and 48% cast in person. In May 2018, 67% of the early vote was cast by mail, a percentage that was similar to both the primary and general elections in 2016.

Part of the decline in early voting is due to an increase in early, in-person voting, especially in presidential election years. In November 2024, 1.5 million people voted early and in person, a modern record. About 1 million people voted by mail in November 2024, fewer than the 1.2 million people who voted by mail in November 2016. 

Here’s a chart showing year-by-year early voting numbers since 2016.

The decline of mail voting coincides with the decade President Donald Trump has spent as a dominant figure in American politics.

For years, Trump repeatedly has said mail voting is prone to fraud, a claim that’s been rejected by elections officials, voting rights groups, Democrats and some Republicans. More recently, he’s taken steps to try to restrict it, including successfully pressuring Republican-run states like Ohio last year to stop accepting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. 

Trump also has pushed Congress to ban no-fault absentee voting – which Ohio has allowed since the 2000s – in which voters can vote early without having to demonstrate a reason. A pending new executive order directs the U.S. Postal Service to screen state mail ballots to check for possible ineligible voters. Democrats have viewed the move as a way Trump may try to suppress the vote in a year that Republicans are expected to struggle nationally. 

Most applications go unreturned, elections officials estimate

Republican lawmakers considered ending the universal mail ballot application following Trump’s loss in the November 2020 election. 

Instead, they passed a law requiring each mailing to get controlling board approval. The law also newly required the Secretary of State’s Office to submit a report describing how ballot applications were mailed, how many were filled out and turned in by voters, and how many were returned by the Postal Service as undeliverable.

LaRose’s office included those figures on Monday as part of its official request for the $2.5 million for the ballot application mailing.

The report said the state mailed more than 8.3 million absentee ballot applications ahead of the November 2024 election. Of those, 526,709 were returned as undeliverable.

Elections officials apparently struggled with the requirement to report how many of the state’s ballot applications were filled out and returned by voters. LaRose’s office described the number as an estimate somewhere between 633,928 and 692,036. This would mean voters return roughly 8% of the applications.

One county, Defiance County, was unable to provide any kind of estimate, LaRose’s office said. A few other counties provided widely ranging estimates – Fairfield County reported the number to be somewhere between 153 and 4,580, Hancock said it was between 50 and 1,510, and Hocking County said it was between 22 and 653.

Overall, voters returned nearly 1.1 million absentee ballots that were mailed to them in November 2024, LaRose’s office said. There are many ways these voters could have gotten an application – one common way would be to request one online.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Despite statewide legalization, Ohio officials on Monday once again released tens of thousands of federal funds, allowing the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to patrol the skies in a helicopter seeking illegal marijuana grows.

Ohioans in two-adult households can lawfully grow up to 12 marijuana plants since voters legalized possession and home production of marijuana in 2023. Growing more without a permit is illegal. 

But from 2012 through the coming fiscal year, the Ohio Attorney General’s office will have contracted with the county sheriff’s office for nearly $1.5 million patrolling for cannabis grows from above, state records show.

The state controlling board, at its meeting Monday, released the latest $70,000 in grant funds for the sheriff’s office to lease a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter and pilot for up to $900 per hour, plus another $50 per hour for a spotter. 

Funds come from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, part of a federal government that still recognizes marijuana as a controlled substance despite legalization for adult use in Ohio and about two dozen other states. 

The money flows through the Ohio Attorney General’s office to that of the Butler County sheriff, one of few in the state with an aviation unit. 

Last year, the efforts of the marijuana eradication and suppression program resulted in 271 illegal marijuana plants pulled and 2,186 pounds of processed marijuana seized in Ohio, according to Controlling Board records. 

More detailed data from the DEA show in 2024, Ohio officials seized nearly 15,000 plants from more than 500 growers, making for an average of about 28 plants per illegal grow site. 

Steve Irwin, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said in an email that the program is funded entirely by the federal government, and that the Ohio State Highway Patrol and Ohio Department of Transportation have provided aircraft for the office in the past.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I believe representatives must put people before party and stay present and accountable to their communities,” Shaver said in announcing the tour. “This is in stark contrast to my opponent, who has not held a town hall in well over a decade.”

Latta, a Republican who has represented the district since 2007, declined a constituent-organized town hall request in April 2025, with his office telling Toledo’s WTVG he would not participate in what it characterized as “orchestrated disruptions to create media spectacles.” The station reported that the last event listed on Latta’s congressional website district events page dated to 2015.

Shaver said the sessions are open to residents across the political spectrum.

“I want to hear from constituents from all sides of the aisle,” he said. “An open, civil dialogue is necessary for our democracy to thrive and for us to restore the true meaning of ‘We the People’ to our federal government.”

The tour builds on Shaver’s May campaign kickoff at Mi Tequilas in Fostoria. The first listening session takes place in Crawford County on Tuesday, June 30, at Mi Cerrito, 741 Portland Way S., Galion, from 7 to 9 p.m.

The remaining schedule:

• Lorain County: Tuesday, July 14, 7–9 p.m. — Tacos del Pueblo, North Ridgeville

• Seneca County: Tuesday, July 21, 7–9 p.m. — Xcaret Mexican Restaurant, Tiffin

• Wood County: Tuesday, July 28, 7–9 p.m. — El Zarape, Bowling Green

• Richland County: Tuesday, Aug. 11, 7–9 p.m. — El Campestre, Ontario

• Sandusky County: Tuesday, Aug. 25, 7–9 p.m. — Casa Fiesta, Fremont

• Huron County: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7–9 p.m. — Casa Bravos, Norwalk

• Wyandot County: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 7–9 p.m. — La Fragua, Nevada

• Hancock County: Tuesday, Sept. 29, 6–8 p.m. — Taco Fiesta Hinojosa, Findlay

Shaver, 48, is president of Fostoria City Council and teaches social studies at Fostoria Junior/Senior High School. He won the May 5 Democratic primary, narrowly defeating 3 challengers, and faces Latta in the Nov. 3 general election.

A full schedule of events is available at brianshaverforcongress.com/events.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Justin Salsburey, 43, of Bellefontaine, was arrested Dec. 30, 2025 alongside his wife, Ruthann Rankin, 38, an Urbana City Schools teacher, on charges of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and methamphetamine. According to federal court documents, the couple allegedly received 261 suspected drug parcels through the U.S. mail between August 2024 and December 2025. A search of their home on Dec. 30 turned up 264 grams of fentanyl pills, 938 grams of methamphetamine pills and 19 grams of MDMA, according to the criminal complaint.

Salsburey was employed by ARK Protection Group, a Wayne County-based private security firm contracted to protect the Ramaswamy family. “The private security firm that hired Salsburey, ARK Protection Group, immediately removed him from the Ramaswamy family’s security detail,” campaign spokesperson Connie Luck said in a statement at the time.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, one kilogram of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people. Applied to the 264 grams recovered at Salsburey’s home, that ratio yields an estimated potential death toll of approximately 132,000 — a figure the DEA itself uses as a benchmark for seized quantities of the drug.

Despite the arrest, the Ramaswamy campaign continued paying ARK Protection Group. According to Ohio Secretary of State campaign finance records, the campaign paid ARK $12,000 on Jan. 8, 2026 — 9 days after the arrest and the same day the story became widely reported. The campaign had paid ARK a total of approximately $61,971 since April 2025 prior to that payment.

On Jan. 16, 2026, Luck released a statement confirming the campaign would find new security: “Vivek and Apoorva are parents first and they put the security of their family first. In light of last week’s deeply troubling developments, the Ramaswamy family has begun the process of relieving Ark Protection Group of their responsibilities and transitioning to a new service provider.”

Four days later, on Jan. 20, the campaign made one additional payment to ARK — $2,000, according to the same campaign finance records filed with the state. The total paid to ARK Protection Group between April 2025 and Jan. 20, 2026 was $75,971, per the Ohio Secretary of State records.

ARK Protection Group founder Ron Gazboda issued a statement saying the firm regretted disappointing the Ramaswamy family. “Their safety and protection remain our utmost priority, and we are supporting them as they transition to a new security service provider,” Gazboda said.

According to Cleveland.com, ARK Protection Group closed on Jan. 21, 2026 — one day after the final payment. Owner Gazboda reportedly notified the Ohio Department of Public Safety in writing that he had “ceased providing security services” and was closing the company, following reports that two of ARK’s bodyguards were unregistered in Ohio and a third had been charged with federal drug trafficking.

Ramaswamy is the Republican nominee for Ohio governor and is expected to face Democrat Amy Acton in the November general election. He did not respond to a request for comment on the post-announcement payment.

Ohio recorded 4,452 unintentional drug overdose deaths in 2023, according to the Ohio Department of Health — a 9% decline from 4,915 in 2022. Fentanyl was involved in 78% of those deaths.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump said he was invoking the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, which gives the president authority over domestic industry, to save 13 existing power plants and build two new ones. He said the move would save 14,000 coal jobs and lower energy costs, though the spending will not lower the price of gasoline or diesel fuel, which has spiked since Trump launched a war with Iran in February.

Trump criticized subsidies for wind power championed by Democrats, including his predecessor, Joe Biden, characterizing coal as the most important energy source to cultivate.

“It’s real power,” Trump said. “In terms of power, there’s really nothing like it. We have so many different alternatives. You talk about some, there’s no real alternative.” 

New coal plants would be built in Alaska and West Virginia, Trump said. A defunct plant in Maryland would also be restarted. Those projects would be funded with $200 million in Department of Energy grants.

Coal plants receiving a combined $425 million in Defense Production Act funding are in West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Wisconsin, according to the White House.

Coal mines benefiting from the move are in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wyoming, North Dakota and New Mexico, according to the White House.

The administration would also spend $75 million, authorized by the Defense Production Act, to help open a long-delayed new coal export terminal in Oakland, California, the White House said.

Administration officials said Thursday’s announcement built on a record of the past 18 months in which the administration has saved dozens of coal production facilities.

“It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said. “If you look at our efforts across the whole government, so far 45 coal plants are open today that would not be open.”

Republican approval

Trump Cabinet members, congressional Republicans and two governors, Wyoming’s Mark Gordon and West Virginia’s Patrick Morrissey, joined Trump for the Oval Office announcement, with several extolling the importance of the coal industry after Trump spoke.

Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin praised Trump for intervening to help the industry and refocusing federal energy policy away from renewables.

Wright said Democratic policies were more responsible for high energy costs than the war in Iran, even though Republicans have held unified control of the federal government since January 2025 and the Trump administration has consistently touted its moves to encourage fossil fuel production.

“We wish they were lower, but gasoline prices in the U.S. are a little over $4. They’re $10 in Europe, they’re higher in Asia, they’re very high in California,” Wright said. The national average price for regular gasoline Thursday was $4.24 per gallon. 

“The bigger threat to energy prices in the United States is Democratic green energy policies,” Wright continued. “They have driven up energy prices far more than a conflict in Iran.”

Burgum said the president was perhaps the strongest advocate for coal in the country’s history.

He echoed Trump’s statements that the coal industry needed to be reinvigorated after the Biden administration focused more on renewable energy production.

“The prior administration, under Biden, had gone so far down the path of pursuing the highly subsidized, intermittent, weather-dependent sources of electricity that our grid was at risk. You understood that and you understood how key coal is,” Burgum told Trump. “It’s the backbone of having affordable, reliable and secure American energy to power our country, our electric grid, power our competitiveness in AI, and power all the manufacturing that’s coming back.”

Morrissey said the moves would benefit his state.

“We believe your policies are going to allow America to compete and win,” Morrissey said. “West Virginia is going to supply the coal, the gas, the nuclear to help make that happen. So I’m very excited by everything you’re doing.”

Greens decry ‘polluter handout’

Environmental groups blasted the move, saying it propped up a failing industry and would have little long-term impact on energy prices or reliability.

Jesse Lee, a senior adviser with the advocacy group Climate Power, said the spending on coal projects would not lower utility prices, which he said have climbed 18% during Trump’s second term.

“He’s gaslighting the American people by claiming that this move will lower electricity prices in the middle of an energy affordability crisis that he created,” Lee said. 

Environmental groups noted the coal industry heavily contributed to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Several environmental advocates, including Lena Moffitt, the executive director of the climate group Evergreen Action, suggested that relationship drove Trump to promote coal at the expense of renewable energy sources.

“Spending $700 million to bail out the coal industry is like throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk,” Moffitt wrote. “Trump is handing out taxpayer money to coal barons and leaving us with nothing but higher energy costs. … There’s no coal revival waiting around the corner—just polluters collecting a handout while their friends run the White House and Americans foot the bill.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Many lawmakers on Ohio’s Select Committee on Data Centers seem willing to hear out Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But many ordinary Ohioans have had enough. They’re furious about a string of projects shielded from public view by nondisclosure agreements. They worry about the facilities’ impacts on the environment and the power grid. They argue it’s absurd to hand out tax breaks to trillion-dollar companies.

The rising tide of public animosity and mistrust was on full display early last week. Ohio state Rep. Heidi Workman, R-Rootstown, tried to convey that frustration.

“You’re doing a terrible job actually selling your product,” she told the companies’ representatives. “Respectfully, you’re far behind the narrative on this.”

To put the trust deficit in context, Workman described putting a call out to her constituents the night before.

“Over 90% of the responses I received last night are basically telling me we do not want this, no matter what you say,” she said. “They say that they do not believe anything that the data centers are telling them.”

Although the companies readily acknowledged they could do better a job “telling our story,” it seems doubtful their testimony earned many converts.

Conserve Ohio, a group gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment halting new data centers, certainly wasn’t swayed. In a statement, the organization said the testimony “was tone deaf, empty with generalities, and provided no real answers.”

“We see and hear everything and know who they truly are. They do not fool us,” the group wrote. “Big tech is showing yet again that confidentiality, secrecy, and massive tax breaks are still their top priorities, not Ohio.”

Trying to allay concerns

The hyperscalers did their best to tamp down fears about water contamination, air pollution and rising energy costs.

Google’s Liz Schwab explained “our data centers leave watersheds more resilient, and we’re committed to replenishing 120% of the water we consume globally.”

She acknowledged adding chemicals to their internal water systems but compared it to putting chlorine in your pool to avoid algae. Each company insisted they’re not adding so-called forever chemicals to their systems.

Thor Underdahl from Meta explained the company is aiming to be “water positive” by 2030. Craig Sundstrom from Amazon Web Services said they’re pursuing the same target. Already in Ohio, he added, Amazon uses water for cooling their data centers just 3% of the year — their annual water use amounts to less than two car washes.

As for air quality, Sundstrom said that Amazon has upgraded its backup generators to meet “the most stringent EPA emissions requirements available.” He stressed those generators are also only permitted for emergency use.

“So, under federal EPA and then state implementation regulations, we can only run those for a finite period of hours every year.”

Every one of the companies offered some version of the “pay our own way” pitch Daniel Brown made for Microsoft.

“Our goal is that we do not increase electricity rates for other ratepayers,” he said. “We pay utility rates that are high enough to cover our costs, we pay costs associated with generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades, and we make sure that our costs don’t impact other ratepayers.”

Not quite getting there

As lawmakers began asking questions, though, holes began to appear.

Ohio state Sen. Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, pressed the companies to explain what exactly “covering all the costs” or “we’ll pay our own way” meant to them. Microsoft may not want to raise consumer electricity rates, Wilkin said, but how does that square with the law of supply and demand?

“If there’s 100 megawatts and you need 50,” he said, “and there’s no more (power) brought on, you say, ‘Well, I’m paying for the 50 that I’m getting,’ is that fair to the residential consumers? And how does that not drive up the bills?”

“We don’t always control increases in rates as sometimes people assume,” Brown said, “but anything that we can control, we will pay for our fair share.”

The companies expressed support for a statewide version of the data center tariff recently implemented for AEP Ohio. That pricing agreement requires significant financial commitments on the front end to pay for new infrastructure as well as financial penalties if a data center closes before the end of the agreement.

Still, Sundstrom from Amazon, warned “rate-making is different than energy pricing.” Even with the tariff’s consumer protections in place, he said, outside factors like the COVID-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine can influence prices.

“Those things are going to necessarily be out of, I think, our individual control, certainly out of the control of Amazon,” he said.

In a narrow win for data center skeptics, Brown told the committee Microsoft will no longer use nondisclosure agreements or seek property tax abatements for its development projects. Wilkin asked the other companies if they’d make the same commitment to forgo abatements. He got no takers.

Schwab, from Google, said those agreements are “a great example of how competitive we all are.” The deals are a way for companies to demonstrate their value to local communities, and she said Google has been responsible for some $21.8 billion in economic activity in Ohio.

“The local revenue and jobs are significant, so we’ll continue to push each other, right?” she said. “But at the end of the day, local governments and the local leaders where we operate will make that call.”

Later, Ohio state Sen. Bill Reineke, R-Tiffin, asked about nondisclosure agreements. Sundstrom defended them as “an important economic development tool,” and put the onus on local leaders.

“It’s a tool for local governments to use if they choose to use them or not,” he said, and encouraged the panel to ask local officials about NDAs when they testify.

“From our perspective,” he said, “they see it as a viable tool in order to foster the type of economic development discussions that they’re interested in having.”

The sales tax exemption

The most widely criticized tax break is Ohio’s sales and use tax exemption. Supporters note tax officials award the incentive on a case-by-case basis. But Ohio lawmakers attempted to repeal it as part of the most recent state budget. Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed that provision.

Last month, Signal Ohio reported the exemption cost the state $1.6 billion — or roughly 11 times original projections. Not long after, DeWine paused new exemptions.

Schwab sought to put a positive spin on the ballooning foregone revenue. “It is an indication of how successful Ohio has been at attracting this industry,” she said, and pointed to an Ohio Chamber report suggesting each incentive dollar brings back $2.10 in other tax revenue.

Each companies’ representative acknowledged they take advantage of the same sales tax exemption. Despite DeWine’s pause on new tax agreements, their existing tax breaks will not be affected.

“If Ohio continues to be successful at attracting data centers, or even if Ohio just sees reinvestment in its existing data centers, that dollar amount will go up, right?” Schwab said. “It’s a sign that companies are reinvesting and spending money on chips and servers in the state of Ohio.”

And that dollar amount could keep going up for a while. Sundstrom said Amazon’s exemption runs through 2055.

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.

“I firmly believe he would have killed me at some point, whether accidentally or intentionally,” Frail said.

She had a medication abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2008 while serving in the U.S. Air Force. She was relieved to have the option of using medication instead of a procedure, and it let her take less time off work. It wasn’t an easy decision, she said, but she knew if she hadn’t done it, she never would have been able to get away from that partner.

“I was too wrapped up mentally and emotionally in my life with him that … I needed to be able to leave without giving him a phone number or letting him know where I was,” Frail said. “I still believe that an abortion saved my life.”

Access to telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone, one of two drugs used to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester or to treat miscarriages, is threatened by an ongoing lawsuit in Louisiana. That state government has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, trying to strike down the agency’s 2023 rule allowing the medication to be dispensed without an in-person visit.

Researchers, advocates and survivors of domestic violence say it’s vital to keep telehealth access available for people in abusive relationships who need discreet abortion options. The Louisiana lawsuit, however, argues in part that mifepristone has been weaponized against pregnant women in abusive relationships and shouldn’t be available by telehealth.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the FDA’s 2023 rule in early May, making in-person visits required for mifepristone prescriptions for two days before the U.S. Supreme Court paused that decision on emergency appeal. The court, with the exceptions of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, decided to keep the rule in place while the appeals case proceeds. But the rule could still be struck down again later, and the full case may end up in front of the Supreme Court.

Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey from 2023-24 showed about 34% of women and 17% of men experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner. Those figures could be higher because of hesitance to report incidents of abuse. States with high rates of violence include many with near-total abortion bans, including Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia — meaning residents who are victims of reproductive coercion have less access to abortion medication.

Pregnancy is a time of heightened risk in a relationship with domestic abuse, according to research, and intimate partner violence is a leading non-obstetric related cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women. Those risks are highest among Black and Indigenous people in the United States.

Reproductive coercion 

The lawsuit over mifepristone access includes Louisiana resident Rosalie Markezich as a plaintiff, who says the availability of the drug without an in-clinic visit allowed her boyfriend to order the pills in 2023 and pressure her to take them. In her written statement in the case, Markezich said the pressure caused ongoing trauma, and that if she’d had to see a doctor beforehand, she could have told the provider she didn’t want an abortion and the pills would never have been prescribed.

Anti-abortion groups, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Family Research Council, submitted amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court about the type of coercion Markezich said she experienced. The telehealth option prevents in-person screenings for coercion, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said, and the in-person requirement provided “a line of defense” against reproductive coercion. Family Research Council also argued that because the FDA’s initial approval of the telehealth provision did not include a thorough study of how it could be used for coercion, it should be struck down.

Liz Tobin-Tyler, professor of health services, policy and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, said people in abusive relationships very commonly experience what researchers call reproductive coercion. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that includes situations in which a partner tries to control when and how pregnancy occurs, either by intentionally causing a pregnancy or forcing someone to end it, as with Markezich.

Coercion can also occur when a partner interferes with contraceptive methods, such as trying to force the use of a certain method or intentionally failing to use contraception. Tobin-Tyler said sometimes the abusive partner attends medical appointments to try to influence decisions related to birth control and other medical care discussions.

“It all comes back to that aspect of control,” she said.

Robin Turner, Montana director at gender equity organization Legal Voice, said what happened to Markezich was terrible, but that Louisiana could prosecute Markezich’s partner under existing laws, including harm induced by drugs. She said reinstating the in-person requirement for mifepristone would harm many other people because it would apply nationwide.

“It’s not a reasonable or proportional way to address what happened to the client,” Turner said. “We have to take what happened to the plaintiff seriously — and understand that taking that (access) away is not effective.”

Turner co-authored a brief for Legal Voice submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court during the emergency appeal proceedings that centered on the importance of access to mifepristone for people in relationships marked by domestic violence.

“A lot of what being in these relationships is about is your world getting smaller, and we don’t want our systems to imitate the dynamics of abuse. But that’s what happens when the government takes away the access to the healthcare that they need,” Turner told Stateline.

Safety planning for hotline callers

Kaelah Oberdorf, 24, said she was on birth control when she discovered she was pregnant in 2023 in upstate New York.

She was in an emotionally abusive relationship, struggling financially and still recovering from the postpartum depression she experienced after having her first child when she was 20, despite thinking that she couldn’t get pregnant because of a medical condition. The depression was so severe she had to be hospitalized. She decided that ending the pregnancy was the right thing to do for her mental health and the daughter she already had.

“I didn’t want to be tied to him for life, I didn’t want my daughter, or any of my children, to be tied to him for life,” said Oberdorf, who now lives in Georgia. “I already had a living child who did not need to be kept in that situation, and if I’d had another one, even if I left him, I mentally would not have been able to handle it.”

Research also shows that pregnant and postpartum women in rural areas experience higher rates of intimate partner violence, possibly because they’re farther from in-person medical care, which could contribute to lower rates of preventive screenings for abuse.

Elizabeth Ling, associate director of legal services at nonprofit hotline If/When/How, which offers reproductive legal aid, estimated the hotline receives between five and 10 calls a week from people who talk about experiencing intimate partner violence, whether it’s physical, emotional or some form of coercion. She said callers in rural communities are some of those who need access to medication abortion by telehealth and via mail because they are often the furthest away from a clinic and can’t travel because a partner is actively watching their movements.

If/When/How talks callers through their legal options and counsels them about legal risks, which Ling said is a top concern for people in abusive relationships. It’s common for them to be fearful of their partner reporting them for having an abortion, which can bring unwanted attention from police and investigations even if it doesn’t result in charges.

The hotline also helps people make a safety plan for receiving abortion medication, talking through steps such as where medication will be mailed, who has access to that mailbox and how to navigate a situation with a partner tracking their movements.

“Abortion pills really are a lifeline for those who call and share their experiences with us,” Ling said.

Frail, who still lives in Missouri, now has a daughter and a son who are in their 20s. She has left many voicemail messages recently for Republican U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, who have advocated for the withdrawal of FDA approval for mifepristone and called for federal investigations into drug manufacturers. In her messages, she says that being able to choose when she had her children made her a better parent.

“I know if I had not had an abortion, I would not have ever been able to get away from that abusive partner,” Frail said.

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.

A three-judge panel agreed with a Montana District Court judge who dismissed the lawsuit last fall, saying the plaintiffs did not create a plausible link between alleged injuries and the three Executive Orders. They also said the requested injunction was unlikely to address their concerns, and was overly broad and complicated.

“By effectively challenging hundreds of current and anticipated agency actions in one lawsuit, Plaintiffs seek to circumvent the jurisdictional and procedural rules Congress has established for challenges to agency actions,” the court wrote in an unpublished memorandum. “Such a sweeping injunction against hundreds of agency actions in one lawsuit is unprecedented.”

Lighthiser v. Trump is one of a series of youth-led climate change lawsuits brought by Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based advocacy law firm, which also successfully litigated Held v. Montana in 2023. 

Lighthiser, first argued before a federal judge in Missoula, alleged three executive orders Trump signed early in his second term will accelerate human-caused climate change and cause further harm throughout their lives.

The challenged orders included Trump Executive Orders 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” 14156, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” and 14261, “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.”

Federal District Court Judge Dana Christensen said he had dismissed the case “reluctantly,” but the scope of the request from the 22 young people was “an unworkable request.”

The circuit court agreed, saying granting an injunction rolling back three Executive Orders would require “extensive judicial supervision of executive branch actions related to energy policy.”

“Plaintiffs explicitly seek to undo everything from staffing reductions, to the revocation of research grants, to anticipated rule changes, to the type of language the current administration has used on government websites,” the memorandum states. “…The district court correctly recognized that disputes over such questions would inevitably result in the court ‘spending a lot of time together’ with the parties and holding hearings ‘until the expiration of [their] collective lifetimes.’”

In a statement, Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust Julia Olson panned the circuit court decision, saying it allows the President to direct a fossil fuel agenda with no Congressional approval and no judicial review. 

“This decision …  tells the children harmed by that agenda that they cannot challenge it until it is unconstitutionally implemented piece by piece. That is not how the Constitution works,” Olson said. “The court did not decide whether these Executive Orders are constitutional. It did not decide whether the federal government may knowingly endanger children. Instead, it slammed the courthouse doors on children fighting for their lives and told them to file hundreds of cases against every agency action carrying out the President’s unconstitutional Executive Orders.”

The circuit court panel heard arguments in Lighthiser v. Trump in April.

Several states, including Montana, joined the Justice Department in arguing for the case’s dismissal, saying the plaintiffs lacked the standing to argue issuing executive orders exceeded a president’s constitutional powers, and that the orders’ scope did not contain specific policies for the courts to review. 

Federal attorney John Adams argued that unlike other federal cases challenging executive orders — such as those imposing tariffs — the Lighthiser case was challenging orders far removed from a specific action that could be deemed illegal or harmful. 

In the dismissal memorandum, the court stated “Plaintiffs can only speculate that the Executive Orders are the cause of the many agency actions they allege will exacerbate climate change,” and said the link was “too speculative.”

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, in a statement from his office, praised the court’s decision. 

“We couldn’t have asked for a better outcome, as now two courts have proven that we were right all along — this case was nothing more than an attempt to stop President Trump’s pro-energy policies and push a bad-for-Montana liberal climate agenda,” Knudsen said.

Our Children’s Trust said in a press release they will assess “all legal options available to these young people, whose lives, health, safety and futures are on the line.”

“The court never said we were wrong. They never said the harm isn’t real. They just said they wouldn’t stop the harm,” lead plaintiff Eva Lighthiser of Livingston said. “They had the power to act and they chose not to. By the time we are harmed enough to satisfy them, it will be too late.”

The three-judge panel included one notable name: Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump appointee to the court who previously ran for the Montana Supreme Court and spent time as the Solicitor General of Montana, the Solicitor General of Nevada and an assistant solicitor general of Texas. The other two judges sitting on the case were John Owens, a Barack Obama appointee and Jennifer Sung, who was appointed by Joe Biden. 

This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, 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.

7th District Rep. Max Miller sat down for a lengthy interview with the New York Post on Monday, June 1, to address abuse accusations made by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno — hours after a judge had issued a mutual restraining order blocking both sides from disparaging or harassing one another. Miller also spoke with Spectrum News 1 and other outlets following the Post interview.

In a Friday, June 5 court filing, Moreno’s lawyers argued Miller must explain why he should not be held in contempt and why he should not be required to pay her legal fees.

“To be clear, [Moreno] acknowledges that [Miller] is not restrained from talking to the media, nor is he restrained from defending himself. Those actions, by themselves, are not at issue,” her lawyers wrote in the filing.

“What [Moreno] does object to is that [Miller] uses the media to harass, disparage, and abuse Defendant in contravention of this Court’s Restraining Orders, and does so [in] a very visible, very public manner. It must stop.”

Miller’s spokesperson, Chris Vlasto, defended the interview. “Congressman Miller is defending himself against false allegations that have damaged his reputation and continue to cause harm,” Vlasto told the Post. “He is not going to sit back while Emily Moreno and her attorney make claims he believes are untrue and defamatory.”

Vlasto added: “Any assertion that Congressman Miller violated a non-disparagement agreement is simply the characterization of Ms. Moreno’s counsel, and he strongly disputes it. Congressman Miller will continue to defend himself and pursue the appropriate legal remedies.”

The contempt motion is not the only new legal development. During the Post interview, Miller’s team shared audio they said captured a private conversation between Miller and Moreno that took place weeks after the alleged incident in which Moreno claims Miller threw boiling water on her back on June 9, 2024 — an allegation Miller denies.

In the audio, Miller can be heard saying: “First of all, the water incident — which I have the text messages from that we have, even following up after that, I never thought that — that hurt you, and you know that.”

He continued: “If you want to accuse me of abuse by showing photos and no video evidence of something that I wasn’t even being abusive for, by all means, go ahead and do that.”

Moreno’s lawyers argued in a separate Friday filing that Miller had not disclosed the audio during the discovery process, and that the Post’s published story served as proof. They filed a motion to compel Miller to turn it over. Her legal team also argued that the second statement in the audio — in which Miller appears to give Moreno conditional permission to make the accusations — should be used as grounds to dismiss Miller’s May 2026 defamation lawsuit against her entirely.

Miller, a two-term congressman representing northeast Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, filed that defamation suit against Moreno, her attorney Andrew Zashin, and Zashin’s law firm on May 14 in Cleveland. The suit cited coverage of the abuse allegations in the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast, TMZ, and the New York Post, and alleged the resulting damage “undermines his chances of reelection.” It seeks compensatory damages in excess of $25,000, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees.

Emily Moreno is the daughter of Ohio U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R), who won his Senate seat in 2024 with backing from President Donald Trump. Miller married Emily in 2022, and the couple had a daughter in 2023. Miller filed for divorce in August 2024 as his father-in-law was in the midst of his Senate campaign. The divorce was finalized in June 2025, but the custody dispute over the couple’s now 2-year-old daughter has continued in court.

Moreno has alleged that Miller threw boiling water on her back and has raised questions about a broken collarbone sustained by their daughter. Miller’s office has provided documentation that two child abuse allegations were investigated by the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services and deemed unsubstantiated. Miller has also previously obtained a court-issued restraining order against Moreno after a judge found she had made “proven false allegations.”

The legal battle carries echoes of an earlier dispute. When Miller first ran for Congress in 2021, his then-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, publicly accused him of physical abuse in her memoir and in a Washington Post op-ed. Miller filed a defamation lawsuit against Grisham; he voluntarily dismissed it with prejudice in August 2023, just before the case was set to go to trial.

Moreno’s spokesperson, Stefan Mychajliw, invoked that history in a statement last month. “Mr. Miller is upset because he’s tried to silence Emily Moreno the same way he silenced Stephanie Grisham — and Emily won’t let him,” Mychajliw said, adding that “Mr. Miller will not silence Ms. Moreno.”

Miller is seeking reelection in November. Democrat Brian Poindexter, a five-term local councilman and union ironworker, is challenging him in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That conclusion does not rest on a single study. It is the through-line connecting separate analyses by the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Policy Matters Ohio, and the progressive group Innovation Ohio — each examining a different piece of Ramaswamy’s agenda and each reaching a version of the same finding.

A $10 billion question with no answer

The centerpiece is Ramaswamy’s pledge to eliminate Ohio’s personal income tax. He has said he would phase it out over an eight- to 10-year period beginning with his first budget. The tax raises roughly $10 billion a year — about a quarter of the state’s operating budget — and pays for K–12 schools, Medicaid, public universities, prisons, and services for seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities.

Ramaswamy maintains the gap can be closed through growth and spending discipline rather than service cuts. “It’s going to be a combination of growth and cutting unnecessary expenditures,” he told the Statehouse News Bureau. “It’s not going to be immediate. I haven’t promised that it’s going to be immediate, but what I’ve said is we’re going to bring it down and put us on a path, on a clear, credible, pro-growth path to zero income tax.” He has not specified which programs he would reduce to cover the difference.

A February 2026 Innovation Ohio report put the shortfall at about $9.8 billion a year — roughly 21% of the state’s General Revenue Fund. The group concluded that absent deep cuts, replacing that money would require either a 65% increase in the state sales tax or a 20% increase in property taxes. Both are regressive: a family that spends most of its income on necessities pays a far larger share of that income in sales tax than a household that can save or invest, and renters and fixed-income homeowners feel property tax increases acutely. In other words, the math of “zero income tax” does not erase the bill. It moves it down the income ladder.

Capital gains: a cut that skips most Ohioans

The clearest illustration of who benefits is the proposal to exempt capital gains from Ohio taxes — an idea Ramaswamy has promoted and that Rep. Tom Young (R-Washington Twp.) has introduced as House Bill 617, the Capital Gains Tax Repeal Act. Capital gains are profits from selling assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate; they are income from owning things, not from working.

The Legislative Service Commission estimated the repeal would cost the state between $615 million and $645.6 million in tax year 2027, growing in later years. A separate LSC memo obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau found that 81.6% of the benefit would go to Ohioans earning more than $200,000 a year. Those making under $100,000 — the large majority of the state — would receive 7.3%.

An Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis cited by Policy Matters Ohio sharpened the picture: on average, the lowest-income 20% of Ohioans would see no change at all, while the top 1% — with an average annual income above $1.8 million — would see an average tax cut of $6,424. About 60% of net capital gains in Ohio go to that top 1%.

Young argues the static estimates understate the upside, contending that “dynamic” growth would offset much of the loss, as he says past income tax cuts did. “We cut the income tax. What did we see? Increase in revenue,” he told reporters. Policy Matters Ohio counters that two decades of such cuts since 2005 have drained an estimated $17 billion a year from state coffers while Ohio’s economy and employment rankings lagged.

Property taxes: relief on paper, cuts in practice

Ramaswamy has also proposed rolling property taxes back to where they stood “before the end of the Covid pandemic,” a plan he rolled out in late March. Ohio property taxes climbed from $18.3 billion collected in 2020 to nearly $24 billion in 2024, and the relief pitch is politically potent. His campaign has not specified an exact baseline, pointing instead to the number of local taxing bodies. “Taxpayers can’t afford the path we’re on, and most Ohioans believe our government can do better as a steward of their hard-earned tax dollars,” spokesperson Evan Machan said, noting that Ohio has 88 counties but more than 2,000 taxing jurisdictions.

Because property taxes are local, the consequences would be too. Innovation Ohio estimated the rollback would cut about $6.6 billion a year from local budgets by the time a new governor could implement it, with no replacement revenue identified. Roughly 60% of Ohio property tax dollars fund schools; the group projected a school funding cut of about $4 billion, alongside reductions for fire departments, libraries, and public health agencies. As the report framed it, rolling back the tax base “would mean deep, immediate cuts to schools, fire stations, and services in every county.”

Data centers: corporate breaks, rising bills

The corporate side of Ramaswamy’s agenda runs through his pledge to make the Ohio River Valley “the next Silicon Valley” by aggressively expanding artificial intelligence data centers. Ohio already hosts about 200 such facilities — among the most of any state — and the industry has claimed an estimated $2.5 billion in state and local tax breaks since 2017, including sales tax exemptions and property tax abatements of up to 75% lasting 15 to 30 years. The state’s data center sales tax exemption alone cost about $1.6 billion in 2025.

Those incentives carry costs for residents. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as 80,000 to 100,000 homes, and Ohio residential electric bills have risen roughly $663 a year since 2019, a trend analysts tie in significant part to data center demand. At an August 2025 Ohio Chamber forum, Ramaswamy himself acknowledged electricity costs were about 50% higher and projected to climb another 50% — then argued the answer was to build still more data centers and more fossil fuel generation to power them. The strain has prompted bipartisan scrutiny: the state recently suspended a key data center tax break after Gov. Mike DeWine paused new exemptions, and a citizen-led drive is gathering signatures to restrict large facilities. A Gallup poll found 71% of Americans oppose building data centers locally.

A personal stake in the outcome

The tax agenda also intersects with Ramaswamy’s own finances. His financial disclosure, filed April 6 with the Ohio Ethics Commission, reported more than $1.1 million in dividends and capital gains in 2025, including $768,968 from the sale of BlackBerry stock — the precise category of income his capital gains proposal would exempt. The filing lists holdings across chip makers, cloud operators, industrial real estate trusts, and cryptocurrency, sectors that stand to gain from the data center expansion he champions and that he would help regulate as governor through appointments to JobsOhio, the Tax Credit Authority, the Ohio Power Siting Board, and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

Innovation Ohio has been blunt about what it sees. “It shows exactly who benefits from his agenda: himself,” said Research Director Terra Goodnight, who argued Ramaswamy’s “policies will use our tax dollars to line his own pockets.” The group’s president, Michael McGovern, said running for governor “is just another way for Ramaswamy to cash in on the backs of working people.” A Case Western Reserve University law professor who studies professional ethics, Cassandra Burke Robertson, has offered a more measured read, noting that conflicts of interest depend on context and that broad market holdings differ from a stake in a single company.

The pattern

Taken individually, each proposal can be defended as a growth measure. Taken together, they describe a tax structure that asks less of the Ohioans best positioned to pay and more of those least able to absorb it — through higher sales taxes, higher property taxes, thinner public services, and rising utility bills. Ramaswamy’s wager is that growth will eventually make everyone whole. The independent analyses produced so far suggest that, in the meantime, the wealthy and large corporations would collect the gains while working families covered the difference.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Christopher G. Walter, 52, of Deshler, was booked into the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio on June 2 and arraigned by video on June 3, court records show.

Walter faces one count of sexual battery involving a minor, a third-degree felony, and one count of grooming, a first-degree misdemeanor, according to the Deshler Police Department booking record and Napoleon Municipal Court filings. Grooming — defined as a pattern of conduct intended to entice or prepare a minor for sexual activity — became a criminal offense in Ohio in April 2025.

At the June 3 arraignment, Walter waived a preliminary hearing and both cases were bound over to Henry County Common Pleas Court for further proceedings, according to the dockets. The court set bond at $30,000 with 10% allowed and ordered Walter to wear GPS monitoring, comply with a criminal protection order, check in with probation, and have no direct or indirect contact with anyone under 18. Records show bond was posted.

Walter is listed as lead pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Deshler on the church’s website. The Northwestern Ohio Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said it terminated Walter’s authorization to serve at the church after learning of the arrest. In a June 4 statement, Bishop Daniel Beaudoin said the synod learned of the charges on June 3 and that Walter’s invitation to extended service through the United Methodist Church was ended the same day. Beaudoin called the allegations “very distressing and serious,” according to the statement.

Patrick Henry Local Schools confirmed that Walter is employed as a district bus driver and has been suspended without pay, according to WTVG reporting. In a statement, the district said it is aware of the arrest and charges and would not comment further because the matter involves personnel and legal issues.

Deshler police said officers arrested Walter without incident and that the investigation is ongoing. No additional details about the allegations have been released.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sen. Brian Chavez (R-Marietta), chair of the Ohio Senate Energy Committee, was tapped in May 2026 to co-lead the Ohio Joint Data Center Committee alongside state Rep. Adam Holmes (R-Nashport). The panel — six Republicans and two Democrats — has held multiple public hearings since late May, fielding testimony from community members, environmental researchers, anti-data-center organizers, and lobbyists representing Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima) has said he wants lawmakers to pass “some sort of data center legislation” before the summer recess, and said the committee was created for that purpose.

“This is a fact finding effort,” Chavez said when the committee was announced. “We’re just gathering facts and information on what’s happening out there, what reality is. And we intend to disseminate that out.”

But questions about Chavez’s own financial reality had already been raised months earlier.

Ethics complaint alleged hidden business ties

In January 2026, an environmental advocacy group called Washington County for Safe Drinking Water filed a formal ethics complaint with the Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee, alleging Chavez had failed to disclose ownership stakes in at least five oil and gas companies on his 2023 and 2024 financial disclosure forms — a legal requirement for Ohio state senators. Among the undisclosed entities, the complaint said, was DeepRock Disposal Solutions LLC, on whose legal documents Chavez signed as CEO, despite the company never appearing on his required financial disclosures. Buckeye Environmental Network, Save Ohio Parks, and FaCT Ohio co-signed the complaint.

Separately, the complaint alleged, Chavez’s company Chavez Well Service had bid on five state contracts to plug abandoned oil and gas wells since his appointment to the Ohio Senate in December 2023, winning one contract worth more than $200,000, according to the complaint’s review of public records. Those business interests, the complaint alleged, created a direct conflict when Chavez used his Energy Committee chairmanship to advance Senate Bill 219, legislation introduced by Sen. Al Landis (R-Dover) that would revise Ohio’s orphan well plugging program.

Washington County for Safe Drinking Water said Chavez “co-sponsored the legislation, accelerated its movement, and publicly advocated for it in the Energy Committee, which he chairs” — all without disclosing the financial interests the complaint said he held. The complaint alleged those actions violated Ohio Revised Code section 102.03, which prohibits public officials from using their office for private financial gain or voting on legislation in which they hold conflicts of interest.

The complaint expired without a formal investigation

The Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee took no action within the 14-day review window required under state law. The complaint expired without a formal investigation being opened — a procedural outcome, not a determination that the allegations lacked merit.

Senate Republicans characterized the dismissal as a vindication. “This failed publicity stunt was nothing more than a libelous smear campaign against a respected State Senator that was backed by California special interests dead set on killing the oil and gas industry in Ohio,” said John Fortney, spokesperson for the Ohio Senate Republicans.

Washington County for Safe Drinking Water maintained that the procedural outcome left the underlying conflict unresolved. “A healthy democracy depends on accountability, balance, and a commitment to fairness for all,” the group said. Treasurer Dawn Hewitt told the Marietta Times that regardless of the committee’s inaction, Chavez “should not be sitting as chairman of the committee” while holding financial stakes in the industries he regulates.

Chavez then questioned others’ financial independence

Months later, Chavez was appointed co-chair of the data center committee. At the panel’s June 1 public hearing, he questioned a witness who had testified against data center development, asking whether that person had received payment for appearing before the committee. The witness had not. “Several of the witnesses made it clear that they are not funded by anyone,” Chavez told reporters after the hearing. “And I take them at their word.”

The pattern extends to the top of the Republican ticket

Chavez’s unresolved conflict of interest allegations are not the only financial entanglement shaping the policy environment Ohio’s data center hearings are designed to address.

A May 2026 analysis by progressive policy group Innovation Ohio found that GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s financial disclosure — filed with the Ohio Ethics Commission in April — reveals personal investments spanning every tier of the data center supply chain. The report, titled Vivek Ramaswamy’s Data Center Portfolio: Divided Loyalties, identifies holdings in chip manufacturers, cloud and data center operators, industrial real estate investment trusts, infrastructure funds, and cryptocurrency. As TiffinOhio.net reported, as governor, Ramaswamy would appoint the boards of JobsOhio, the Ohio Power Siting Board, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, and the state Tax Credit Authority — the agencies that permit, regulate, and subsidize the data center industry.

“As governor, Ramaswamy’s policies and investments could ensure that he continues to cash in while the rest of us fall behind,” Innovation Ohio President Michael McGovern said. “Even if a data center project or policy isn’t in Ohioans’ best interest — it will almost always be in his.”

Sen. Bill Reineke (R-Tiffin), widely expected to become the next Ohio Senate president in 2027, is among the members appointed to the data center committee.

The joint committee was formed as the Ohio House had already advanced its own data center legislation. House Bill 646 — co-sponsored by state Reps. Gary Click (R-Vickery) and Kellie Deeter (R-Norwalk) to create a formal data center study commission — passed the House unanimously in March and was referred to a Senate committee. Chavez acknowledged his joint committee could supersede it. “This doesn’t necessarily have to replace it,” he said, “but it seems to be the quicker vehicle that we’re going to pursue right now.”

As legislators weigh next steps, a citizen petition drive organized by Conserve Ohio is pursuing a constitutional amendment that would ban large data centers — defined as those consuming more than 25 megawatts of electricity monthly — from operating in the state. The group needs 413,487 valid signatures from at least half of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The votes took place during a vote-a-rama on S. 2, the Secure America Act, an immigration enforcement reconciliation bill moving through the Republican-controlled Senate. Both measures were offered as motions to commit the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with specific health care instructions.

The votes

The first amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), would have directed the Judiciary Committee to investigate insurance companies that deny or delay medically necessary care. The motion failed 47–50, with Husted voting no. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican to vote in favor.

“Across America, insurance companies continue to deny and delay medically necessary health care,” Ossoff said from the Senate floor. “Let’s ban insurance companies from denying or delaying medically necessary healthcare to Americans.”

The second amendment, sponsored by Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), would have directed the Judiciary Committee to investigate the loss or denial of Medicaid coverage to eligible beneficiaries and required the public release of related data. That motion failed 46–52, with Husted again voting no. Collins was again the only Republican to vote yes.

Insurance donations and rate increases

American Journal News, citing campaign finance disclosures, reported in February that Husted has accepted more than $679,000 from insurance companies and their executives over his political career. The contributors include Anthem (now Elevance Health), Medical Mutual of Ohio, UnitedHealth Group, CareSource, Buckeye Community Health Plan, Summa Health Systems, and Centene. Husted’s year-end 2025 campaign filing added America’s Health Insurance Plans PAC — a trade organization representing insurance companies — to the list.

All of those companies have raised rates on Affordable Care Act plans in Ohio in 2026. Buckeye Community Health Plan raised rates 27.25%. UnitedHealth Group rates increased 30.9%. The sharpest increase came from Paramount Insurance Company, which hiked rates by 37%, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

A Centene spokesperson told the Ohio Capital Journal the rate adjustments reflect higher-than-expected patient demand. “Over the past several months, we have been working closely with Ohio regulators and their third-party actuaries to balance rising health care costs with the needs of Ohio citizens,” the spokesperson said. “Our rate adjustments reflect higher-than-expected care needs than in previous years, including increased hospitalizations, emergency room utilization, and behavioral health services.” Centene reported a gross profit of $16.8 billion in 2024.

ACA subsidy backdrop

The rate increases follow the expiration of enhanced federal tax credits that had held down ACA marketplace premiums. The credits expired at the end of 2025. The Health Policy Institute of Ohio found that approximately 513,000 Ohioans — about 88% of the state’s ACA enrollees — had benefited from the credits. On Jan. 13, Husted told ABC6 that he opposed a bipartisan proposal to reinstate the credits for three years.

Husted proposed his own alternative in December 2025 — the Accountability for Better Care (ABC) Act — which would have extended the credits for two years, with conditions including limiting eligibility to U.S. citizens. The bill did not advance.

Democratic response

Ohio Democratic Party Senior Communications Advisor Tony Wen released the following statement Friday: “Last night, Jon Husted refused to ban insurance companies from denying or delaying critical health care to Ohioans. It’s no surprise — Husted voted nine times against lowering premium costs and now 120,000 fewer Ohioans have access to health care. Jon Husted couldn’t be more out of touch with what families in this state are going through, and they will send him packing in November.”

Husted was appointed to the Senate in early 2025 after Vice President J.D. Vance vacated the seat. He is seeking his first full elected term and faces Democratic former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown in the November 2026 special election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Senators voted 48-50 against advancing an amendment that would have incorporated Trump’s top legislative priority into an immigration-focused spending bill. The vote offered the clearest sign yet that despite pressure from the president, a handful of Republican senators continue to resist advancing the bill, which critics say would unleash immense chaos ahead of elections this fall.

The SAVE America Act would require voters to offer documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship when registering to vote. It would also mandate voters show photo ID when casting a ballot and restrict where voters can register, effectively eliminating voter registration drives.

Democrats and voting rights groups have assailed the bill, saying it would disenfranchise voters and upend the midterms because the new rules would take effect immediately. Trump and the bill’s GOP supporters say it’s needed to combat noncitizen voting, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Since taking office last year, Trump has made a series of attempts to shape how elections are run. An executive order that would limit voting by mail remains in effect for now as opponents challenge it in federal court, and the Department of Justice continues to seek to force states to hand over sensitive voter data, so far unsuccessfully.

The Senate amendment, offered by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also included restrictions on sports participation by transgender athletes. On social media after the vote, Graham called the SAVE America Act “one of the most consequential” pieces of legislation developed by Trump and his team.

“All Democrats voted no, and they will eventually pay a price,” Graham wrote.

Republicans also vote no

But the proposal fell short among a small group of Republicans, too. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democrats in voting no.

Collins is seeking reelection in what is one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. McConnell and Tillis have both opted against seeking reelection, while Murkowski has said the bill would set up barriers for voters in her large, rural state.

Sixty votes would have been needed to advance the amendment — the same threshold to overcome a filibuster. 

The vote came after the Senate spent weeks debating the SAVE America Act earlier this year before moving on to other business without a vote. Trump has urged Republicans to abandon the filibuster to pass the bill, without success.

“We will squash this blatant attempt at voter suppression,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, wrote on social media after the vote.

The Senate also rejected, 50-49, a separate amendment offered by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, that included a different version of the SAVE America Act. According to Lee, the amendment was the version of the bill passed by the House, which didn’t include provisions on transgender athletes. 

Collins voted in favor of the amendment after earlier opposing Graham’s amendment.

California

Both amendments failed hours after Trump asserted, without evidence, that Democrats were stealing “the vote” in California. The state held primary elections earlier this week, but vote counting is often slow in the state, meaning vote totals reported on election night don’t always reflect the final outcome of a race.

Trump linked California’s elections to his push for the SAVE America Act, writing on social media that “I hope Republicans are watching” so they could pass the legislation.

“They found a lot of mail-in ballots last night, shockingly,” Trump said at an unrelated Oval Office event on Thursday. “So we don’t want that.”

With the Senate unwilling to advance the SAVE America Act, some GOP lawmakers have begun offering alternative election-related bills.

Republican Reps. Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota and Laurel Lee of Florida on Thursday introduced the SAVE America Through REAL ID Act, which would create a grant program to help states provide REAL ID-compliant driver’s license and identification cards to residents for free to low-income Americans.

On Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Graham introduced the Election Security Partnership Act, designed to encourage states to submit their voter rolls to a computer program operated by the Department of Homeland Security that can identify possible noncitizens. 

States can already upload voter data to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE, but the legislation would provide $20 million in grants for states to offset any costs related to using SAVE.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a searing opinion, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. said the Trump administration “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo” when it directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause asylum applications and green card paperwork for immigrants hailing from 39 African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries subject to the president’s travel ban. 

The policy was announced in November after the two National Guard members were shot. Authorities later charged Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who was granted asylum, with the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court. A status conference is set for June 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

McConnell, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, said the policy “violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering.”

USCIS is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that oversees processing of legal immigration, ranging from asylum seekers to work authorization forms.

“USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth,” McConnell wrote.

He added that “the Court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy: If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to ‘follow the law’ and ‘do things the right way.’ This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.”

New policy paused processing 

Labor unions and immigration advocacy groups in Rhode Island sued the Trump administration over the policies. They brought the suit on behalf of their members, immigrants who had the processing of their work visas and travel documents paused after the new policy following last year’s shooting in Washington, D.C.

After the November shooting, on the eve of Thanksgiving, one guard member, U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died, and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded, but recovered. 

One of the groups that sued, Democracy Forward, praised the decision. 

“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement. “These unlawful policies caused enormous harm to families, workers, asylum seekers, and communities across the country who were left in limbo, unable to work, access protections, or move forward with their lives.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Water activities in the RTA parking lot will be available for families, alongside the splash pad at National Corner. Court Street will host local businesses, community organizations, and food trucks, with participating downtown businesses offering special promotions, sales, and grab-and-go food options.

Visitors can complete an online “Chill Out Checklist” passport by stopping at participating businesses during the event. Completed checklists will be entered for a chance to win Chamber Cash.

“There’s truly something for everyone to enjoy downtown,” said Cheyane Thacker, Marketing Committee Chair.

The City of Tiffin Parks and Recreation Department will open the first Thursday Night Tunes concert of the season at the East Green Amphitheater at 7 p.m. Musician Paul Grover is scheduled to perform. Attendees are encouraged to bring lawn chairs.

The event is sponsored by Reineke Family Dealerships and UIS Insurance and Investments.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A citizen group seeking to abolish property taxes in Ohio is giving up on getting its amendment on the November 2026 ballot, and is pivoting toward the November 2027 election instead, the group’s leader said Friday.

Brian Massie said the Committee to Abolish Ohio Property Taxes made the announcement in a podcast interview on Friday, about four weeks before a July 1 legal deadline by which the group would have had to submit hundreds of thousands of voter signatures to qualify for the November 2026 ballot.

Explaining the decision, Massie said the group fell short of its goal to collect 620,000 voter signatures – significantly more than the 413,488 legal minimum. The group had sought to collect extra signatures to make up for a significant number they expected to be rejected as invalid.

Since the group is now working toward the November 2027 election, it will have another year to collect signatures. The existing signatures the group collected can still count if and when it submits amendment paperwork next year. But more signatures are likely to be found invalid as they grow outdated, since a signature only counts if it includes the voter’s current registered address.

In an interview on Friday, Massie said the group now plans to try to collect more than 620,000 signatures.

“Our track that we’re on right now seems to indicate that we will,” he said. “I can’t be sure until I actually see them.”

Massie wouldn’t say how many signatures his group has collected. The group announced in April it had collected 320,000, a move it had hoped would spur additional public support.

“We the people have declared war on our politicians at the state level,” Massie said during the Friday podcast, called Ohio Political News, where he announced the group had given up on the 2026 election. “When you are at war, you never give the enemy any intel.”

The amendment campaign so far seems to lack the resources that a ballot issue typically requires to qualify for the ballot. But amendment backers’ progress nonetheless has alarmed state leaders in government, business and organized labor, who worried that eliminating $21 billion in tax revenue overnight would devastate schools and other local government services.

A coalition of groups organizing to oppose the amendment issued a statement on Friday reacting to the news.

“As a petition drive continues for a reckless property tax abolishment amendment, our non-partisan, broad-based coalition will sustain our public education campaign on the serious consequences that are at stake,” said Ohioans to Protect Public Services spokesperson Jen Detwiler. “Ohioans deserve real property tax reform, not a constitutional amendment that wipes out more than $21 billion in local funding with no plan for what comes next.”

The political fallout

A property tax abolition amendment likely would have attracted intense voter interest. The fact that it won’t be on the November 2026 ballot, when Ohioans will decide races for governor, U.S. Senate, the state legislature and other key offices, removes an X-factor that could have loomed large over the midterm elections.

Instead, the amendment now could appear on the November 2027 ballot, when there aren’t any statewide candidate elections. Typically, issues-only elections see much lower voter turnout, although that’s not always the case – see the November 2023 election, when voters approved an abortion-rights amendment.

State Democrats have signaled they are targeting the November 2027 ballot for a potential redistricting reform amendment, which could drive its own set of political conditions.

Massie said supporters have already begun debating whether the property tax abolition amendment’s chances of passage will be helped or hurt by waiting for a year.

“I can’t worry about things that I can’t control,” Massie said. “[We’re] just messengers for the people, what’s in their best interest.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Patrol confirmed Cain’s termination in a written statement to TiffinOhio.net. The agency had initially placed him on unpaid administrative leave after learning of the allegations before moving to fire him. “The Patrol took immediate action upon learning of the allegations, the employee has since been terminated,” the agency said. “The conduct alleged does not reflect the values of this agency.”

Nathaniel H. Cain, 23, faces one count of strangulation, a third-degree felony, in Seneca County Common Pleas Court.

In a recorded interview after his arrest, Cain acknowledged that he and his girlfriend argued and that he said “nasty” things to her, but denied harming her, according to a report written by Tiffin Police Sgt. Joseph P. Feld.

“I didn’t put my hands on her,” Cain told the sergeant, the report states. When Feld described the injuries to the woman’s neck, Cain asked, “And that’s from me?”

The woman, whom TiffinOhio.net is not naming, reported the assault in person at the police station on Tuesday, May 19, the report says.

In a sworn written statement, she said an argument escalated quickly after a night out and that Cain “grabbed my face and squeezed it, breaking my tooth,” then “grabbed my neck and strangled me for about 7 seconds.” She wrote that she did not lose consciousness but “couldn’t breathe.”

Feld wrote that he saw red marks down the center of the front of her neck, a damaged tooth and an injury to her lower lip, and that he photographed the injuries.

The records also clarify how Cain was arrested — a question left open in earlier accounts. After consulting a supervisor and the Seneca County Prosecutor’s Office, Feld learned that Cain was a trooper assigned to the Patrol’s Norwalk Post and was driving there to begin his shift.

Out of safety concerns — the woman told police that Cain owns multiple firearms — Feld notified the commander of the Norwalk Post, who intercepted Cain and drove him to the Tiffin Police Department. After the interview, Cain was taken into custody and booked into the Seneca County Jail, still wearing his uniform pants and boots, the report says.

Feld wrote that he filed the strangulation charge after his lieutenant consulted the prosecutor’s office. Strangulation became a stand-alone felony in Ohio in 2023; before the change, such allegations were typically charged as misdemeanor assault or domestic violence.

Not all records in the case will be released. The Tiffin Police Department said it is withholding the call to dispatch that brought officers into the case, citing Marsy’s Law, the state’s victim-rights amendment. The department said the recording would identify the victim and her location and that it cannot redact the audio.

Cain was held without bond until a judge set bond at $75,000 with conditions on Wednesday, May 20, court records show. He waived a preliminary hearing on May 28 and posted bond the same day. The case, before Common Pleas Judge Damon D. Alt, is being prosecuted by the office of Seneca County Prosecutor Derek W. DeVine and remains pending.

A criminal charge is an allegation. Cain is presumed innocent unless and until he is convicted in court.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and Vice President Michael Dowling were indicted by a Summit County Grand Jury on numerous counts, including bribery, conspiracy and fraud. An earlier trial of the two men ended in a hung jury at the end of March.

Outgoing Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Summit County Prosecutor Elliott Kolkovich issued a joint statement announcing the executives’ reindictment.

“The roots of this complex case haven’t changed – FirstEnergy was hijacked by two scheming executives who sought to control the regulator that influenced the company’s stock prices,” the statement quoted Yost as saying. “I’m confident that Ohio’s ratepayers will get justice when the facts are unearthed in the courtroom.”

In a 2023 federal court trial in Cincinnati, federal prosecutors laid out a scheme in which Akron-based FirstEnergy funneled more than $60 million through 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups. 

They said the scheme was to elect a Republican majority to the Ohio House of Representatives and make Larry Householder of Glenford speaker in 2019, so he could pass and protect a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout. Householder is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the conspiracy.

Even after being convicted on federal charges, Householder maintained his innocence. In January, however, the former House speaker’s attorneys said he is open to a plea deal related to his state corruption trial, set to take place in Cuyahoga County this year.

Jones and Dowling ran FirstEnergy during the time of the conspiracy of which Householder was convicted. 

In 2021 — after Householder and others were arrested and Jones and Dowling were fired — FirstEnergy paid a $230 million fine and signed a deferred prosecution agreement. The company admitted to paying millions through dark-money groups to Householder in return for Householder  “pursuing nuclear legislation for FirstEnergy Corp.’s benefit.”

FirstEnergy also admitted paying a $4.3 million bribe to Sam Randazzo, Gov. Mike DeWine’s first pick to be the state’s top utility regulator. In 2024, Randazzo died by suicide.

The feds didn’t indict Jones and Dowling until Jan. 15, 2025 — after the men had already been indicted on state charges.

No trial date has been set in the federal case. The case seems to be waiting on the state retrial, for which jury selection is expected to start on Sept. 18, according to a May 28 entry in the federal courts record system.

After eight days of deliberation, the jury in the earlier state trial couldn’t agree on whether Jones and Dowling bribed Randazzo. 

Yost said 10 of 12 jurors agreed on the former executives’ guilt. But he explained that criminal cases require a unanimous verdict.

The new indictment contains new information, Yost said in a YouTube video linked to in the statement announcing the new indictment.

“This new indictment includes some additional facts that were not known to us at the time of the first indictment that we became aware of as a result of a civil lawsuit against FirstEnergy,” it said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 52-47 mostly party-line vote sends the measure to the House, where GOP lawmakers could send it to President Donald Trump for his signature as soon as next week. 

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote no. Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, who participated in a debate in his bid to become his state’s next governor, did not vote. 

Murkowski said in a statement she opposed the legislation because it bypassed the annual government funding process that forces the two political parties to debate issues and find compromise. 

“By choosing to appropriate funding for three fiscal years instead of one, this measure weakens the normal budgeting process and sets another precedent for avoiding it when we find ourselves in disagreement,” she said. “In doing so, it reduces Congress’ ability to apply reasonable checks on immigration policy for the remainder of this administration and into the next.”

Murkowski added that she would have voted for the package had it “provided immigration funding for one year, included clear restrictions on what those funds can be used for, and eliminated any potential for taxpayer dollars to be allocated to the administration’s brazen ‘anti-weaponization’ fund.”

Majority Leader John Thune said during floor debate GOP leaders were forced to draft the package after Democrats “walked away” from negotiations that could have placed restrictions on federal immigration agents.  

“Republicans are going to continue to ensure that these agencies have the funding that they need to fulfill their national security responsibilities,” the South Dakota Republican said. 

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued the measure shows that Republicans are more focused on funding deportations than lowering the cost of living. 

“Apparently, Republicans think we cannot afford a single penny to help Americans cover the skyrocketing costs of gasoline, of healthcare, of housing, of food, of energy, you name it,” he said. “But somehow we can afford to give another $70 billion to Trump’s rogue agencies.”

Senate approval followed a marathon amendment voting session that stretched throughout Thursday and overnight as Democrats sought to challenge Republican senators on policy differences just months before the November midterm elections. No amendments were approved. 

Building on “big, beautiful” law

The bill would provide a second hefty cash infusion to the agencies carrying out the president’s immigration crackdown, building on the $170 billion Republicans included in their “big, beautiful” law. 

This legislation would appropriate: 

• $38.53 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement

• $26.02 billion for Customs and Border Protection

• $5 billion for the secretary of Homeland Security.

The money would be available through Sept. 30, 2029, the end of the fiscal year. Republicans decided not to place any new guardrails on immigration agents. 

The measure Republican senators approved was somewhat different from the original version released in early May, which included $1 billion for the Secret Service to make security upgrades associated with the president’s ballroom, dubbed the East Wing Modernization Project.

Republicans also removed $1.46 billion that would have increased funding for several Justice Department programs.

Additionally, GOP lawmakers bolstered ICE funding by $350 million compared to the earlier version of the bill. 

Republican leaders are moving the package through the complex budget reconciliation process, avoiding the need to secure Democratic votes in the Senate that would otherwise be required to end debate on the measure. 

GOP leaders opted to use the special legislative maneuver after they were unable to broker agreement with Democrats to place constraints on immigration officers. 

Democratic lawmakers said new guardrails, including body cameras and preventing the use of masks, were necessary after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. 

The impasse led to a 76-day shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security that didn’t end until late April, when Congress approved the annual spending bill without funding for ICE or the Border Patrol. 

June 1 deadline missed

The reconciliation process comes with several strict rules that require each section of the legislation to address revenue, spending, or the debt limit. Proposals also cannot be deemed “merely incidental” to the federal budget. 

Trump wanted Congress to approve the funding package ahead of a self-imposed June 1 deadline. But work on the measure ground to a halt after the administration announced plans to establish a $1.776 billion fund to pay people who believe they were wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. 

Floor debate on the bill resumed again this week after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before a House subcommittee Tuesday the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”

Trump, however, muddied the waters a bit Wednesday when asked during an Oval Office event whether the fund was “dead or on hold.”

“I’d have to ask my lawyers. I don’t know,” he said. “Are you talking about the weaponization fund? The weaponization fund, as far as I’m concerned, was a beautiful thing.”

Tough amendment votes

The Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” account was one of many issues senators sought to address during a marathon voting session that began Thursday morning and lasted until just before sunrise Friday.  

Several Republicans, including those facing tough reelection bids, sided with Democrats on proposals and offered changes of their own, though none were added. 

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tried unsuccessfully to include language that would have required people registering to vote provide proof of U.S. citizenship and later present a photo ID to cast a ballot. 

Senators voted 48-50 to reject Graham’s attempt to add the SAVE America Act, showing the legislation doesn’t have the votes to clear Congress, despite pressure from the president.  

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Murkowski and Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted with Democrats. 

A majority of senators backed an attempt by Delaware’s Chris Coons that would have barred the DOJ from paying anyone convicted of assaulting police on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. 

The 54-45 vote, however, wasn’t enough to add the provision to the package. It needed the support of at least 60 senators to move past a procedural hurdle since it didn’t address language in the immigration bill. Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Collins, Jon Husted of Ohio, Ashley Moody of Florida, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Murkowski, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Tillis voted with Democrats. 

An amendment from Cassidy to compensate “law enforcement officers who defended the United States Capitol” on Jan. 6 was unable to reach the 60 votes it needed following a 52-47 vote. Cassidy as well as Collins, Husted, Murkowski, Sullivan and Tillis voted along with Democrats.

Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley proposed an amendment that would have required congressional authorization before construction could continue on the White House ballroom, but it wasn’t adopted following a 53-46 vote. 

Cassidy, Collins, Husted, Moran, Murkowski, Sullivan and Tillis voted with Democrats, but it needed at least 60 votes to move past an objection. 

Health insurance 

Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff tried to use a maneuver that would have sent the bill back to the Judiciary Committee in order to create “a task force to conduct investigations into health insurance companies that are found to routinely deny and delay patients’ access to medically necessary care.”

Ossoff told the story of a woman named Ellen from Atlanta who struggled with her insurance company after being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as multiple myeloma.

“As Ellen told me, quote, ‘for a corporation to have a finger on the button of your life is ridiculous. They have their minds on profit margins. I just want to be healthy and alive,’” he said. “Thankfully, Ellen’s cancer is now in remission. But across America, insurance companies continue to deny and delay medically necessary healthcare.”

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said the issue was “worthy of review” but disagreed with addressing it during debate on the immigration and deportation bill. 

“The Justice Department already performs investigations into healthcare insurance fraud. The Senate also confirmed a new assistant attorney general to fight fraud,” he said. “Further, sending the reconciliation bill back to the Judiciary Committee would essentially kill it.”

The Senate did not agree with Ossoff’s motion following a 47-50 vote. Collins was the sole Republican to vote with Democrats. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Former Gov. John Kasich structured the economic development agency as a nonprofit private corporation. JobsOhio holds the state’s liquor franchise and uses the proceeds to fund job creation efforts. But because it’s a private entity, JobsOhio isn’t subject to state sunshine laws.

There has always been grumbling about that lack of oversight. But until recently, Republican officials had largely defended the secrecy as crucial to landing deals with prospective companies.

Cracks began showing early last year. The Ohio Controlling Board considered an early extension of JobsOhio’s liquor franchise that would grant it control through 2053. The deal would cost the corporation nothing, and Attorney General Dave Yost publicly called on JobsOhio leaders to table the effort until they could provide Ohioans “proper consideration and a full explanation.”

The Controlling Board approved the extension in Feb. 2025.

Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, was sitting on the controlling board at the time, and the motion was approved over his objection. He’s now one of the sponsors backing the JobsOhio Transparency Act.

Rader stressed that he and his co-sponsor, Ohio state Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County, aren’t trying to hobble the corporation.

“JobsOhio can operate how they operate today under this bill,” Rader said. “It just after the fact, it allows us to see better how these things are being done, and what outcomes there are, and better tracking, better transparency, better accountability.”

“The bottom line here is this,” he added. “This bill is not about whether JobsOhio is successful or unsuccessful, it’s about whether Ohioans can evaluate that success for themselves.”

In a statement, JobsOhio Press Secretary Matt Engelhart said “JobsOhio appreciates our strong working relationship with state legislative leaders. We are committed to maintain our best-in-class transparency while ensuring Ohio remains competitive for economic development opportunities.”

New oversight

JobsOhio already faces regular auditing and produces annual reports. But critics complain the audits don’t reveal enough about JobsOhio’s inner workings, and the reports only describe outcomes in the aggregate.

Ohio House Bill 779 would replace that oversight with the standard two-year audits any other state agency or public entity receives from the Ohio Auditor. In addition, JobsOhio officials would testify annually before state lawmakers to detail the projects that received funding, how much they got, and where they’re located.

In an apparent response to the podcast scandal, the bill also requires JobsOhio to disclose information about any corporate sponsorships or media partners.

“If we can shine light on an organization,” Pizzulli said, “it gives public trust and transparency. I truly believe that had this bill been passed, we wouldn’t have seen such an embarrassment happen to our state.”

He explained he represents one of the poorest districts in the state and his constituents feel “a little offended” at the waste of money.

“Imagine what could have been done to a place like Scioto County and our local economic development had we been given $50,000 to help a few good paying jobs to lift people up out of poverty,” Pizzulli said.

The measure makes changes to future extensions of the liquor franchise as well. Rader explained legislative researchers estimated the most recent extension was worth roughly $16 billion. The proposal would require JobsOhio to pay fair market value for any future franchise rights.

Why it’s needed

Ohio state Rep. Phil Plummer, R-Dayton, wasn’t buying Pizzulli and Raders’ skepticism. He put it bluntly: have we increased jobs or had a net loss of jobs since JobsOhio began?

Rader and Pizzulli acknowledged there are more jobs now, but said JobsOhio’s role in creating them is murky. Rader described how a company in his district was getting ready to buy a $1.2 million piece of equipment. JobsOhio cut a check for a couple thousand dollars and then claimed credit for creating jobs.

The company is “very appreciative” Rader said, but the public deserves “a much more detailed, granular understanding of how these public dollars are being spent.”

Plummer seemed fine with a bit more transparency — “I don’t mind tweaking some things and flipping over a few rocks.” But he seemed unmoved by the sponsors’ doubts.

“They’ve been very successful in my opinion,” Plummer said.

Pizzulli and Rader contend there’s nothing wrong with JobsOhio’s mission, and if it’s doing as well as it claims, greater oversight will only bolster its reputation.

But the sponsors worry it’s not actually providing an adequate return on investment. Pizzulli described pitching JobsOhio to help with his local economic development agency, a major employer in his district, and a regional infrastructure strategy. Each time they turned him down.

“At some point, after enough conversations lead to nowhere, you begin asking a simple question,” he said. “Who exactly is Jobs Ohio accountable to?”

The information JobsOhio does share, “looks great on paper,” Pizzulli admitted, but he’s not sure it bears scrutiny.

“When you look closer, many of these projects were already happening independently before JobsOhio became involved,” he said. “In several cases, it appeared that a check was written after the fact, and the project was then counted as a JobsOhio success.”

People all over the state buy alcohol. But when Pizzulli sees his community continuing to lag behind others, he wonders whether JobsOhio “is truly serving all regions of Ohio equally or primarily concentrating resources in areas already experiencing growth and momentum.”

“My constituents are not asking for special treatment,” he said. “We’re just asking to not be forgotten.”

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.

But while Ohioans share in the nation’s affordability crises, most economists in a recent survey think a suspension wouldn’t provide meaningful relief. An even stronger consensus said the benefits of a suspension would not outweigh the costs. 

Average gas prices have shot up 34% since President Donald Trump launched a war against Iran at the end of February. Iran retaliated by choking off the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and gas transits. Passage remains restricted as Trump fluctuates between saying a deal with Iran is imminent and threatening another all-out attack. 

While some Ohio lawmakers are floating a three-month tax suspension, economists are skeptical that it would do much for Ohio motorists.

Scioto Analysis asked a panel of 19 economists if they agreed that, “A three-month gas tax suspension would provide meaningful financial relief to Ohio residents.”

Eleven disagreed, six said it would, and two were uncertain.

Bob Gitter of Ohio Wesleyan University said that the savings wouldn’t amount to much for the average motorist.

“If you buy a tank of gas every week you would save $6,” he wrote in the comment section of the survey. “Over a three month period that would be about $80. Low-income people could use a break but $80 would not, in my view, by meaningful financial relief.”

Kevin Egan of the University of Toledo said they wouldn’t even save that much.

“Consumers would not see a 38.5-cent reduction in gasoline prices; probably more like half that,” he wrote. “Saving 16 cents a gallon for a vehicle that averages 30 mpg and is driven 16,000 miles a year… so 4,000 miles in 3 months would save (4000/30)*.16=$21.33. $21 is not ‘meaningful.’”

However, Bill LaFayette of Regionomics argued that for low-income drivers, every little bit helps.

“A suspension of the gas tax would amount to something like a 10.5% price cut — less if gas prices continue to rise,” he wrote. “But that could be meaningful to lower-income households and those who have to drive far.”

Revenue from the state gas tax largely goes to infrastructure projects. The economists said there is a cost to pausing that revenue.

They were asked whether they agreed that, “The long-term economic benefits of a three-month gas tax suspension would outweigh the long-term economic costs of reduced state infrastructure funding.”

Fifteen disagreed and three were uncertain. Only one agreed.

Most who disagreed gave reasons similar to that of David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati.

“Gas tax holidays usually end up causing deferred maintenance, which makes roads more expensive to repair than if normal maintenance had been done,” he wrote. “It’s like skipping a few dentist visits: it will save you some money upfront, but the resulting cavities will be more expensive to repair.”

Jonathan Andreas said gas taxes are already too low to cover “externalities” created by gasoline consumption.

By that, he was referring to environmental costs and other harms inflicted on society as a whole that energy providers don’t pay for.

“There is an enormous consensus about the negative externalities of gas consumption among economists on both the left and the right (except those few who are funded by the fossil-fuel industry),” he wrote.

“Even (Harvard economist) Greg Mankiw thinks taxes on gas are inefficiently low which lead to distortions in the economy. This would make those distortions worse.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He gave a lecture in early 1895 in which he “linked climatic change to long-term variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, CO2.”

He deduced that carbon dioxide emissions from combustion of fossil fuels would have an impact on warming of the Earth’s surface.

Eunice Foote, another scientist of those times, discovered that a glass tube of CO2 absorbed infrared heat whereas a tube of oxygen did not.

This experiment helps us to understand that some gases, like methane, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and fluorinated gases, are indeed climate changing gases as they absorb infrared energy and heat up Earth’s atmosphere.  

These early discoveries led to what is known as climate science.

This field of research is rooted in studies, experiments, and facts collected during the past 120 years.

Yet a majority of Republicans, including the current president, insist that climate change is a hoax, going as far as reversing the 2009 Endangerment Finding (the finding that greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and they contribute to pollution that endangers public health or welfare).

Even ExxonMobil scientists concluded decades ago (late 1980s and early 1990s) that CO2 absorbs heat and increases atmospheric temperatures, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science.

Elected officials who deny climate change get an F in physics.

For over three years, Ohio citizens have tried in vain to stop the leasing of Ohio’s State parks and wildlife areas to out-of-state oil and gas companies.

If Ohioans had been able to submit public comments for H.B. 507, the bill that opened up the public lands to fracking, they would have said NO to fracking of our public lands. But H.B. 507 was passed during a lame duck session in December 2022, with no public input. 

The Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC), a five-membered commission appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine, are responsible for approving state lands for fracking.

The OGLMC is primarily made up of lawyers. No one on the OGLMC has any significant background in health or science. Science is not guiding the decisions to frack our parks; money is.  

On March 31, 2026, the OGLMC decided to lease more than 8,000 acres at Egypt Valley Wildlife Area and more than 500 additional acres at Salt Fork State Park, during a meeting that lasted less than twenty minutes.

They ignored that facts that fracking results in: billions of gallons of water use, excessive noise, truck traffic, light pollution, radioactive brine wastes, habitat fragmentation, and air and water pollution. All will negatively impact our parks. 

The OGLMC are supposedly guided by the statute ORC 155.33, which says the commission can “approve or disapprove” lease nominations on the basis of nine considerations, including economic benefit, environmental impact, geological impact, impact on visitors, and public comments and objections.

Considering the number of leases “rubber stamped” since this process began, it raises the question of what is really considered behind closed doors.

During a January meeting this year, Theresa White, head of the commission, said nothing legally requires the commission to explain its decisions.

The OGLMC and Gov. DeWine deserve an F in ecology and health.

Since the passage of S.B. 52, many Ohio counties are vetoing utility-scale renewable projects.

Unfortunately, they are being misled by anonymously funded groups spreading misinformation about rural renewable energy projects.

A recent report claimed these groups have ties to fossil fuel proponents. The much needed economic benefits renewable projects could bring to communities and farmers are lost. 

Wind power occupies very little land and these leases help the farmers maintain a viable economic plan for their families. The blades extend vertically and the size at the base is almost negligible, which makes wind power compatible with other uses of the land at the same time.

I have stood beside wind turbines in Iowa and West Virginia and the noise is negligible. 

According to the Department of Energy, wind power is one of the lowest-priced energy sources, with land-based utility-scale costs often under $30/MWh.

It stimulates rural economies through tax revenue, job creation (over 125,000 in the U.S. in manufacturing and maintenance), and stable, long-term land-lease payments to farmers and ranchers.

The Nottingham Solar project (a 120-megawatt (MW) solar energy farm located in Athens Township, Harrison County) will pay the county approximately $800,000 yearly in tax revenue.

Over the 35-year life span of the project, it is expected to generate over $29 million, replacing property that previously generated only about $400 a year.

Solar installation leases are lucrative and bring steady revenue to landowners and families with long-term leases that are usually three to five times greater than the income earned from traditional crops.

These leases provide rural families revenue, stability and the ability to retain ownership for generations to come.

The Ohio Department of Health did their own study on solar farms and photovoltaics in 2022 which showed that there are “no public health burdens” from solar materials, heat, glare, end of life disposal, noise, electromagnetic fields and crystalline silicon. 

According to the Great Plains Institute, in no area of the United States does the amount of both existing and potential solar in a county surpass 0.5% of the county’s total land.

Why are township trustees and county commissioners with little to no science education permitted to make decisions for entire counties by banning solar and wind power and infringing on private property rights?

Local officials get an F in renewable energy education.

Communities all around the state of Ohio are expressing their concerns over the exponential expansion of data centers into their communities.

Some of the concerns expressed by communities located close to data centers include: the noise, water usage, acres of land transformed into industrial centers, exposure to air pollution from power generation, high voltage transmission lines cutting through communities and farmlands, and probable increases in their utility bills due to the increases in power consumption. 

Data centers require large quantities of water for cooling purposes.

A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day and operate 24/7/365.

Yet, from “2017 to 2024, Ohio provided $2.5 billion in tax incentives to attract and expand data-center projects, according to estimates included in a September report produced for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation.”

Most data centers will only employ a handful of people.

Ohio elected officials get an F in cost/benefit analysis when it comes to data centers. 

The same elected officials that do not believe in climate change want citizens to pay ethanol plants, power plants and other polluting industries $85/ton for carbon dioxide emissions they capture from their processes.

This procedure is called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and it is very energy and water intensive as well as expensive.

Ohio’s elected officials are considering H.B. 170, a bill that will push Ohio to take over the regulations of carbon capture wells (Class VI wells) from the United States EPA. 

The wells will be used to inject dangerous CO2 gas at 1000 psi into the bedrock under our farms, forests, and communities.

Once again, the ODNR would be the sole authority in permitting and regulating these wells.

Currently the proposed sites for the wells are in areas where there is ongoing fracking and an abundance of old mines and orphan oil and gas wells. These activities can result in a fracturing of the caprock, resulting in possible pathways for CO2, a known asphyxiant, to escape. 

To date, all CCS projects globally can capture only 0.17 percent of industry emissions. Carbon dioxide pipelines will be required to transport the pollutant across the state.

This will put our communities at risk, and the state legislators may use eminent domain to run pipelines across private lands.

Our local fire departments lack the training and equipment needed to address any accidents like the one which occurred in Satartia, Mississippi. 

Carbon capture is a give-away for the fossil fuel industry.

Once again, Ohio’s elected officials get an F in environmental economics and health. 

Last but not least we must give all elected officials, including federal, state, and local, a big red F for allowing the oil and gas industry to spread oilfield brine wastes across Ohio’s roads and inject it into our communities via Class II wells. 

This waste is not only radioactive but contains other toxic components like carcinogenic hydrocarbon liquids and bromine salts. 

Elected officials in Ohio are ignoring science and technology as they do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. They are failing to keep the citizens of the state safe.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Longmire, now 31, exchanged a look with his mother-in-law. “We were like, ‘I’d be OK living with you after that sermon,’ and the ball rolled downhill from there,” Longmire said.

Both families are now living in a house they bought together in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a two-year nationwide search. Their partnership is an example of the lengths first-time homebuyers have gone to this year amid stubbornly high home prices and interest rates.

“I make $200,000 and I wouldn’t have been able to buy a house by myself. That’s ridiculous,” Longmire said. His wife’s parents contributed $200,000 from selling their own home in Utah and retired to live with them in a 3,500-square-foot house that cost $585,000.

Home prices rose this year, though not as much as inflation, so affordability increased in all regions as of April compared with a year before, according to the National Association of Realtors.

But prices are settling at a high level. After inflation adjustment, they’re still less than 4% below the 2022 peak, though some areas with large-scale building, mostly in Florida and Texas, have seen prices drop, according to real estate analyst Bill McBride’s CalculatedRisk newsletter.

Help from family and even shared living arrangements are becoming the norm in higher-priced areas.

“The family now has accumulated so much equity that they’re able to help their kids make these downpayments. Many people like to live in multi-generational households for reasons of culture and also cost,” said Nadia Evangelou, senior economist for the National Association of Realtors.

Nationally a typical single-family home cost $422,300 in April, up $4,300 from a year before, according to the National Association of Realtors. But the typical family made about $6,000 more in that time, and mortgage rates came down a little, so affordability improved.

But a shortage of affordable starter homes is slowing the market and keeping it hard to buy for first-timers. Last year the median age of first-time buyers reached a record 40 years old, while the median repeat buyer was 62, as the housing market became dominated by repeat buyers who could sell a house at today’s high prices.

“Affordability today is still nowhere near what it was for much of the last decade,” Evangelou said. Between 2009 and 2016, the typical family had about 70% more income than it needed to buy the typical median-priced house, while today it’s a much smaller margin of about 11% as of April.

San Francisco is an extreme example: The artificial intelligence boom has driven median home prices to a record $2.15 million, according to the real estate brokerage firm Compass. So Charlie and Nettie Culp felt lucky to get a 1,500-square-foot condo for $1.5 million. The couple, both 32, work in finance and tech and saved for years with some family help, putting down $500,000 and taking a $1 million mortgage in May.

“That’s a lot of money for what you get, but that’s the market and it’s a beautiful city,” Charlie Culp said. He has lived in the city since 2015, at times sharing rent among as many as four people while saving money.

“I saw the AI boom coming in San Francisco, so we decided to reach out to our landlord and ask if she was willing to sell,” he said.

First-time buyers are particularly hard-pressed: They lack profits from a previous house, and the smaller houses they can buy are in short supply.  The number of houses on the market is rising, but mostly at the high-priced end.

“Many young households still face the most challenging homebuying environment in decades,” Evangelou said. “The question isn’t simply whether more homes are coming into the market, the question is whether those homes that are available for sale are at price points that local households can actually afford.”

The nation needs another 311,000 houses selling for less than $261,000 to meet the needs of middle-income families — buyers earning around $75,000 — according to a May report that Evangelou co-authored. Several states considered legislation this year aimed specifically at creating more starter homes.

A New Mexico law signed in March by Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham creates no-interest loans of up to $75,000 for down payments to first-time buyers with moderate income. The loans are meant as an incentive for builders to create smaller houses.

Several states moved to curb minimum lot sizes, seen as an impediment to starter homes and other affordable housing, often drawing opposition from cities.

Colorado considered a measure this year allowing smaller lots for building, hoping to “expand attainable homeownership opportunities for first-time homebuyers.” It was opposed by the Colorado Municipal League, which said it “removes community planning and public input from the decision-making process.” The bill passed the state House but was killed in a state Senate committee.

Florida also considered smaller lots and other incentives for starter homes in a bill this year that died in committee after opposition from the Florida League of Cities.

A similar bill that would limit minimum lot sizes, aimed at creating more starter homes and other affordable housing, was under consideration this year in Hawaii but did not pass after clearing a state Senate committee. Democratic state Sen. Stanley Chang, the bill’s sponsor, told Stateline that “some version of the concept” will be considered in future sessions.

The Midwest continues to have the highest affordability, according to the National Association of Realtors report.

Ty Setty, 29, and his wife, Allisha, 32, had been renting for six years near Cincinnati, but they needed no family help to buy their new $170,000 house, a two-bedroom in suburban Delhi Township, Ohio.

“We had been looking at houses for a few years and just couldn’t afford them, or we let ourselves think that,” Ty Setty said.

After two weeks of looking on Zillow and touring nine houses, they saw this house as a new listing and “fell in love. We put an offer on it that night,” Ty Setty said. “They accepted the next morning. That was a long 12 hours.”

For the Longmire family in Chattanooga, the partnership between parents raising children and grandparents needing their own affordable housing has worked out well.

“Grandparents want to live with their grandchildren, and you know parents need a babysitter on date night,” Micah Longmire said. “The story that we’re telling through our life right now is, that if you can work with your family, don’t give in to the pressure of the world to go it alone.”

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.

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Speaking on conservative host Bill Cunningham’s program on Cincinnati’s 700 WLW on June 3, Husted described Iran’s leadership as opaque and divided. He said the country’s leaders are “in bunkers” and that “you don’t really know who is actually making the decisions,” pointing to “the political clerics and then the military that are all sort of doing their own thing.”

“It is not clear to me how this comes to an end at this point in time, but it needs to,” Husted said. “Iran needs to open up the strait [of Hormuz].”

The comments come a little more than three months after the United States and Israel launched air strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, opening a conflict that included the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In response, Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil — and the closure has driven up global crude prices and the cost of gas at Ohio pumps. A U.S.-led naval blockade of Iran began in April, and an effort to reopen the waterway is ongoing.

A shift from ‘brief and successful’

Husted’s acknowledgment that he does not know how the war ends marks a more cautious tone than his earlier public statements. Shortly after the fighting began, he described the U.S. military operation as going “much better than anybody thought it would,” and for months he has said he expects the war to be “brief and successful,” a view he has said he shares regularly with the Trump administration.

In a separate interview with Signal Statewide this week, Husted used nearly identical language about Iran’s leadership, saying its leaders “are hiding in bunkers underground” and that “it’s not easy to have negotiations with people like that.” He framed the U.S. goals as twofold — preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon while reopening Gulf oil shipments — and said voters “want us to do both.” Asked when the war will have gone on too long, or whether its end is near, Husted declined to say.

Brown runs against the war

The exchange lands in the middle of Husted’s November race against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is making opposition to the war a centerpiece of his campaign. At a recent stop near Columbus, Brown said Ohio taxpayers “have already spent a billion dollars on this war” — money he argued is not going to schools, roads or public health — and has tied the conflict to higher gas, diesel and fertilizer costs hitting Ohio farmers.

National polling has shown the war is unpopular. A YouGov survey conducted May 29 to June 1 found 29% support for President Donald Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, a figure comparable to public sentiment on the Iraq War late in the 2006 campaign that first sent Brown to the Senate.

Husted, for his part, has pushed back on Brown, arguing that his long record in Congress contributed to Iran’s rise as a state sponsor of terrorism and that his energy positions raised electricity prices. “I believe that Ohioans understand all that,” Husted said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.