The Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected a lawsuit Wednesday from a fracking waste disposal company seeking millions from the state after its operations caused two earthquakes in Trumbull County, not far from an aging dam. 

As a result of the tremors – a comparatively modest 1.7 and 2.1 magnitude – the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 2014 suspended injections into the company’s two wells. The more problematic silo of the two reaches more than 8,000 feet underground and was built to store the millions of gallons of hazardous wastes of spent fracking brine at high pressure in rock formations deep underfoot. 

The quakes and ensuing suspensions set into motion 12 years of litigation that finally ended Wednesday. 

American Waste Management Services, the disposal company, said the suspension amounted to an unconstitutional government “taking” of its property. As compensation, it wanted $20.5 million from the state. 

But the justices unanimously rejected the idea, emphasising the reasonable interest in public safety from the regulators and foreseeability from company officials of the tendency of injection wells to rattle the earth. 

The opinion, authored by Justice Pat DeWine, leans heavily on a confidential memorandum the company circulated among potential investors. The memo is explicit: fracking waste injections can cause earthquakes, which can cause regulatory actions. 

“Thus, AWMS anticipated the very occurrence that happened here: a shutdown of its operations because one of its wells caused an earthquake,” Justice DeWine wrote. 

Plus, the company opted against underground testing that could have detected the fault line near the drilling site. 

AWMS previously argued that because the earthquakes were small and didn’t damage any persons or property, the shutdown was in some ways speculative about a harm that might happen down the line.

In a news release, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said the ruling is a victory for taxpayers, “who don’t have to open their pocketbooks every time the state enforces the law.”

ODNR previously argued that Ohioans have a right to be free from manmade earthquakes powerful enough to be felt. 

“The dispute between AWMS and the division isn’t about whether AWMS should be able to cause earthquakes or not – everyone acknowledges that AWMS will cause some earthquakes,” state attorneys wrote. “AWMS just wants to cause bigger earthquakes.”

AMWS and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources didn’t respond to inquiries.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Tischler was called as a witness during the May 2025 disciplinary hearing for Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge Jon Ickes before the Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Conduct. Under cross-examination by Ickes’ attorney, she was asked to rate Ickes as a trial judge. “Since I was taught by somebody you don’t give anybody a perfect score, I’ll go with nine,” Tischler said, according to the hearing transcript. When asked to confirm — “Nine out of 10?” — she nodded. Tischler also testified that during her frequent visits to Ickes’ chambers, she had not observed court employees appearing demonstrably offended by anything Ickes said or did.

The disciplinary proceedings, documented in the formal amended complaint filed January 23, 2025, detail a pattern of misconduct the Board found violated multiple judicial conduct rules. Among the findings: for the eight months that a child rape case involving an 18-month-old victim was on his docket, Ickes repeatedly referred to it as the “baby cocksucker case” when discussing it with court staff, according to the amended complaint. During jury selection and trial in that same case, Ickes participated in a group text message thread with three staff members who were present in the courtroom, exchanging sexual and joking messages while presiding over the proceedings, the complaint states.

In a separate incident, Ickes used the n-word in the courthouse in front of a group that included Judge Jeremiah Ray, court staff, and a defense attorney, according to the complaint. The conversation began when Judge Ray mentioned he had watched the film Blazing Saddles the night before. Ickes loudly recited quotes from the film in a southern accent and sang a portion of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” He then stated his favorite part of the film is when a character tips his hat and says, “Good morning,” followed by the slur — which Ickes spoke aloud. A Black criminal defendant, Nathaniel Simmons, was seated on a hallway bench just outside the open office door and heard Ickes use the word. Simmons’s attorney immediately left to speak with him. “So I’m not supposed to be pissed off about what I just heard?” Simmons said, according to the complaint. When Simmons learned it was the judge presiding over his own case, he asked to file a complaint. Ickes subsequently recused himself.

Ickes acknowledged using the n-word but argued to disciplinary counsel that it was intended as satire, saying there was “a distinction between using and saying something,” according to WTOL’s reporting on the disciplinary brief.

The amended complaint also alleges Ickes harassed a pregnant 20-year-old staff member with repeated sexual comments, created courthouse nicknames of a sexual and demeaning nature for court and probation staff, showed staff photographs he had taken of women, and kept a firearm in his chambers — on one occasion accidentally grabbing it instead of a Nerf gun while attempting to “shoot” a staff member, then joking, “that would not have been good.”

The Office of Disciplinary Counsel recommended a two-year suspension of Ickes’ law license, with one year stayed. The Board adopted Ickes’ own proposed sanction — a one-year suspension, fully stayed — meaning Ickes would serve no time off the bench absent further misconduct. During the proceedings, the hearing panel separately dismissed two categories of add-on professional conduct charges related to the racial slur, the child rape case conduct, and the failure to disqualify counts; the underlying judicial conduct rule violations on those counts were not dismissed. The Board’s recommendation is before the Ohio Supreme Court as Case No. 2025-1323. As of late April 2026, no final ruling has been issued.

Tischler’s connection to the Ickes proceedings predates her testimony. It was Judge Jeremiah Ray — the same judge Tischler is now challenging in Tuesday’s primary — who first brought the underlying allegations against Ickes to Tischler on April 29, 2024, contacting her in her capacity as the court’s statutory counsel, according to the amended complaint. Tischler then reported those allegations to Sandusky County Administrator Theresa Garcia, helping set the formal accountability process in motion.

Sandusky County Judge Brad Smith, who also testified favorably for Ickes during the disciplinary proceedings — calling him “a solid human being and a good judge” — has publicly backed Tischler’s campaign. Campaign signs for both candidates have been displayed together, and Smith has solicited yard sign hosts for both races on social media. Smith is also seeking re-election on Tuesday’s ballot. TiffinOhio.net previously reported that Tischler formally abated a $33,300 state audit finding against Smith with no repayment required before publicly backing his campaign.

Tischler responded to a request for comment shortly before publication. Tischler confirmed she was subpoenaed to testify by disciplinary counsel — the office that brought the case against Ickes — and said readers should review the full transcript for context. She did not address her 9-out-of-10 rating of Ickes or her testimony that she had not observed court employees appearing demonstrably offended by his conduct.

“Judge Ray was correct in reporting the allegation raised by J.D. to discipline,” Tischler wrote. On the question of her campaign against Ray, she wrote: “My decision to run against Judge Ray, and the fractured relationship between Judge Ray and my office have nothing to do with him reporting Judge Ickes to discipline.”

Tischler did not elaborate on the nature of the fractured relationship she described. The primary election is Tuesday, May 5.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The proposed constitutional amendment would prohibit building data centers with a peak load of more than 25 megawatts per month, but the amendment will need more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1. 

“I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think it was a doable task,” said Austin Baurichter, a Brown County resident who was part of the group that submitted the petition. 

The Ohio Ballot Board gave the petitioners the go ahead to start collecting signatures about a month ago. 

“I feel completely confident that we’re going to get enough signatures,” said Nikki Gerber, an Adams County resident who was part of the group who submitted the proposal. 

They don’t know how many signatures they have collected so far, but hope to get an idea in the next couple of weeks, Baurichter said. 

They are only using volunteers to collect signatures. 

“That was an intentional choice to make it widely accessible, because, in our opinion, that was the only way that we can get these signatures in the time that we need,” Baurichter said. 

Ohio has about 200 data centers, the fifth-highest state in the country. Most of the data centers are in central Ohio. Cincinnati has 26 and Cleveland has 23, according to the Data Center Map. 

“The push and the urgency to build data centers are coming from a national level, but much of the decision making on data centers take place locally, and the impacts are also felt locally,” said Kate Stoll, the project director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues.

More than a dozen Ohio cities have enacted temporary moratoriums on data centers. 

“There exist all these communities already that have been resisting these data centers and being concerned about it,” Baurichter said.

“So in some sense, the grassroots network that sprung up was already in existence because of how many of these data centers were already springing up.” 

A large data center can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the Office of Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.

Data centers used 4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023 and that is expected to grow to 9% by 2030, according to the counsel. 

Virginia has a high concentration of data centers and electricity prices there have increased by up to 267% in recent years, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. 

A large data center can use up to five million gallons of water per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. 

“A lot of the water used to cool data centers comes from municipal taps,” Stoll said.

The Ohio House unanimously passed a bill that would create a new data center study commission. The bill now heads to the Ohio Senate. 

Lawmakers in at least 11 states — Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin — have introduced legislation that would temporarily ban data centers. 

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.

Acton sat down with seven community members inside Bond Hill restaurant Brunch de Lux as she fielded questions from college students, parents, and business owners about rising costs of living. 

Affordability is one of the most pressing issues coming into this year’s midterm election, where 45% of Ohio’s renters are paying more than they can afford on rent, according to the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

Acton began by mentioning the rollout of her affordability agenda, titled ActOn, which she said will be informed by the experiences of Ohioans like those participating in the discussion.

Acton said she plans to introduce a tax cut for lower and middle income individuals as a part of her plan. 

“We have had tax breaks for people at a million plus, and we are trying to do something for everyone else,” Acton said. 

Paul McMillan, a roundtable participant and owner of Brunch de Lux, said the rising cost of living not only puts a strain on the restaurant’s customers but also makes it more difficult to pay their employees a livable wage. 

“We want our employees to make more, we see what we are paying them and we know that those wages are not necessarily liveable wages,” McMillan said.

“Put something in place for us to be able to, as small business owners, be able to pay our employees more and it be sustainable.”

McMillan also emphasized the inaccessibility of health care, citing his own experience with being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

He said he thought his insurance would take care of his medical costs, until he was rejected for showing prior signs of arthritis five years ago. 

He asked Acton to put a plan in place that will lower health care costs and ensure people with preexisting conditions are still covered. 

Acton said access to quality health care is getting harder and harder, especially since Americans pay twice as much for health care as other countries. 

“That is why in our affordability rollout, we’re working on some of the issues we can grab right away,” Acton said. “One of the big things we are very passionate about is helping forgive medical debt. 

According to Acton’s website, she also plans lower health care premiums and prescription drug prices.  

Dr. Amy Acton, Democratic governor candidate, addresses a roundtable on affordability concerns at Brunch de Lux in Cincinnati April 23. (Photo by Reilly Ackermann, Ohio Capital Journal.)

“We have a lot to do in health care,” Acton said. “We have to leverage the buying power of the state. Medicaid is a huge part of our budget to affect our private insurers. So we are going to be using every lever we can within a state, and we are going to be advocating federally to get the right thing for Ohioans.”

Sausha Parma, a roundtable participant and new mother, said she feels as though she has done everything right in terms of finances, and still experiences the strain that comes with rising costs of living. 

“I still feel the brunt of rising costs,” Parma said. “My mortgage is paid off, my car is paid off, I don’t have a lot of these expenses that most people do. So we would think that I could potentially be ahead, savings should be up, but it’s not because our wages aren’t rising at the same rate inflation is.” 

Energy bills and child care costs were a large part of the discussion, which Acton said she will fight hard to address as it is a part of everyday life. 

Acton pointed to her data center policy in ActOn, another hot button issue for Ohio voters in the midterm.

Data center growth within the state is raising concerns from critics about potential increases to energy bills due to the massive wattage and power investment needed to run the plants. 

“Data centers that are coming as a part of the AI battle, we know they are here,” Acton said. “We know they are here, but there are ways to do it.” 

She said there are ways to “make data centers work for Ohio and not the other way around,” and pointed to her commitment to have the centers pay for their own energy usage. 

“We have to be bold and forward about how we want to do energy in Ohio,” Acton said. 

Acton’s opponent, Republican front runner Vivek Ramaswamy, posted on X that data centers were “good,” despite the strain they will put onto the state’s electric grid. 

“I’ll unshackle energy production in Ohio, from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, without apology,” Ramaswamy posted. 

According to his website, Ramaswamy plans to “streamline” energy project permits and slash regulations so projects continue to be built.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

RICHLAND COUNTY, Ohio — In a mostly rural stretch of Ohio nestled between Cleveland and Columbus, residents now have a rare opportunity: They get to vote directly on the future of renewable energy in their area.

Last July, Richland County banned large-scale wind and solar projects in 11 of its 18 townships. The decision not only caught many locals by surprise; it also struck them as bad for economic development and as encroaching on individual property rights.

Almost immediately after the county’s three commissioners made their decision, dozens of residents formed a group, called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, to fight what they saw as an unjust restriction on renewable energy.

Their initial goal was clear but daunting: Collect thousands of in-person signatures within 30 days in order to put the clean energy ban on the ballot during the 2026 primary election. They succeeded.

Before early voting opened last week, the group held several town halls and spent months educating and canvassing voters. Now, their efforts face the final test. By May 5 at 7:30 p.m., every voter in Richland County will be able to weigh in on the question: Should the county keep its ban on most solar and wind farms — or scrap it and give clean energy a chance to be part of the area’s energy mix?

A majority of ​“yes” votes on the referendum will mean the ban remains. A majority of ​“no” votes will overturn it. The referendum comes as local restrictions on solar and wind energy have proliferated nationwide, rising by 16% from June 2024 to June 2025. More than 450 counties and municipalities across 44 states now severely limit whether renewables can be built, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

In recent years, these rules have been a stumbling block for renewable energy projects, which are needed both to decarbonize the energy system and to meet the nation’s soaring electricity demand. New solar and wind are also among the cheapest forms of energy — a crucial distinction as utility bills rise nationwide.

Restrictions on renewable energy are especially common in rural areas, where the vast majority of the nation’s utility-scale solar and wind projects are located.

Ohio, in particular, is a hot spot for efforts to stymie renewable energy. A 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, gave counties the right to ban new large solar farms and wind farms of 5 megawatts and up. Roughly three dozen counties now have such restrictions in one or more of their townships.

The Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development and its supporters would like to see their county removed from that list.

The group reflects the composition of Richland County, with a range of ages, income levels, and professions; many members hadn’t known each other or worked together before last summer. And while some are concerned about climate change and air pollution, the group’s main arguments — evidenced by its name — echo familiar American issues: property rights and job creation.

“I just don’t think it’s right for the county commissioners to tell other property owners that they can’t do what they want with their land,” said Emily Adams, the group’s treasurer. ​“I have what I want on my roof. And I think farmers and landowners should be able to do what they want with their property, too.”

No Ban on Property Rights flyers, shirts, brochures, magnets, and tote bags were on display at a town hall information session sponsored by the campaign calling for a “no” vote to overturn Richland County’s ban on large-scale solar in 11 of its 18 townships. (Kathiann M. Kowalski/Canary Media)

The effort to overturn Richland County’s ban could empower other communities to push back on similar restrictions, said Shayna Fritz, executive director of the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum, which favors an all-of-the-above energy policy.

“If you gather enough people and you really voice your concerns to them, you have a chance to walk it back,” Fritz said. ​“This does not have to be permanent.”

Coalition member Brian McPeek, who is the group’s deputy treasurer and also the business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 688, hopes that’s the case. Union workers stand to get jobs from both renewable energy projects and from other businesses that may move nearby to take advantage of their clean energy.

“I think it’s very important for the nation to see what we’re doing here,” said McPeek, who was among the dozens of local citizens who attended and spoke out at the Richland County Board of Commissioners’ meeting last July, when it voted in favor of the restrictions. ​“I feel like it kind of flipped the blueprint for what others can do if their commissioners do the same thing. We needn’t close off the county for development.”

Richland County’s ban originated in Sharon Township, an area of approximately 9,000 people in the northwestern part of the county.

In January 2025, the township’s zoning board members requested that the commissioners impose a ban there. The following month, the commissioners asked all 18 townships in Richland County if they also wanted to prohibit renewables. (The county’s authority under SB 52 doesn’t extend to its nearly half dozen villages and cities.)

More specifically, the commissioners sent a fill-in-the-blanks resolution to ban solar and wind development to the township trustees. Trustees simply had to add names and dates and put marks on a few lines to sign on to the restriction.

Eleven townships’ trustees ultimately sent back filled-out resolutions asking the board of county commissioners to institute a blanket prohibition in their townships.

So, ​“that’s exactly what we did,” Commissioner Darrell Banks said.

The three county commissioners did not consult with the general public during this time, according to opponents of the ban. Few people knew their township trustees had even considered the issue until last summer, when it appeared on the agenda of the July 17 commissioners’ meeting.

Dozens opposing the ban showed up to that meeting, held on a weekday morning, to speak out. Still, the commissioners voted unanimously to adopt the ban for those 11 townships. Rose Feagin, a council member for the city of Ontario who opposes the ban, expressed disappointment with the way the commissioners went about the process.

“Other avenues would have been a better way to get input from people, and from across the board, not just a couple of people in a bubble or in a boardroom somewhere making decisions for other people’s lives,” Feagin said.

Under SB 52, county-level bans on renewable energy can be challenged via referendum — so long as enough local residents support a ballot measure. But the law gives groups only 30 days to get enough signatures on petitions.

By the Aug. 18, 2025, deadline, the coalition had managed to collect thousands of signatures, and on Sept. 3 the Richland County Board of Elections ruled that they had cleared the threshold required to put it on the ballot.

Bella Bogin helms the sign-in table at a Feb. 24 town hall meeting held at the Ontario Public Library. Bogin is director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which has been helping the No Ban on Property Rights campaign with organizing and volunteer support to raise awareness about the referendum. (Kathiann M. Kowalski/Canary Media)

It’s only the second time a county-level restriction on renewable energy has been challenged via referendum under SB 52.

In 2022, Crawford County commissioners blocked Apex Clean Energy from developing the 300-MW project Honey Creek Wind. A field manager for the company then helped lead the campaign to put it before voters, but ultimately that referendum failed.

At this time, no company is looking to develop a large solar or wind project in Richland County, noted Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council.

So, the Richland County ballot measure isn’t spearheaded by a company looking to profit from a particular project. Rather, it’s the work of citizens who want to preserve possibilities for the future — and restore the right to consider opportunities on a case-by-case basis.

In the lead-up to the election, the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development has been using a slogan meant to win over their neighbors: ​“No Ban on Property Rights.”

Dan Fletcher, a Madison Township trustee who isn’t actively involved in the referendum campaign, said he knows how he plans to vote: ​“Taking the rights away from the property owner? That’s wrong in my opinion.”

Richland County is a farming powerhouse. More than 120,000 acres of cropland stretch across nearly 500 square miles. Farmers here mostly grow soybeans and corn, and to a lesser degree, forage, wheat, and other crops. The county also ranks among the top fifth of the nation’s leading producers of poultry, livestock, and other animal products.

The region’s agricultural character is the main focus of the campaign to keep the ban in place, run by a group named Richland Farmland Preservation.

The group’s website calls for farmland preservation and ​“commonsense limits” on solar and wind. It also includes a badge of endorsement from the Richland County Republican Party, which might go a long way in a county that went heavily for Trump in the last presidential election.

Banks, the county commissioner, is on the advisory committee for Richland Farmland Preservation. Other members include Richland County Prosecutor Jodie Schumacher and a trustee from each of the townships of Sharon, Blooming Grove, and Jefferson.

The group may have links to The Empowerment Alliance, a nationwide pro–natural gas organization that has been an impetus behind bills and resolutions labeling the fossil fuel as ​“green energy.”

A filing with the Richland County Board of Elections identifies the treasurer for Richland Farmland Preservation as Dustin McIntyre, with an address for a building with several offices in Bellville. But VoterRecords.com does not note any Dustin McIntyre in Richland County, nor does Whitepages.com show him living there.

Federal Elections Committee data does list a Dustin McIntyre with an address in Virginia as treasurer for multiple super PACs, including the Affordable Energy Fund PAC. That group was set up by The Empowerment Alliance in 2021.

The alliance began as a project of former Ariel Corp. chair Karen Buchwald Wright and her husband, Tom Rastin, who was also an executive there. Headquartered in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Ariel makes compressors for the oil and gas industry.

The Richland Farmland Preservation website also features anti–renewable energy talking points espoused by The Empowerment Alliance and other groups, including a variation of a graphic used by The Empowerment Alliance that implies gas-fired power plants should be favored over solar because of their smaller land footprint. (The illustration ignores the large swaths of land needed for drilling and pipelines, as well as pollution.)

Neither McIntyre nor Richland Farmland Preservation responded to Canary Media’s emails or calls.

The No Ban on Property Rights campaign held a fundraiser in February, and its volunteers have been distributing lawn signs, door hangers, and brochures. Volunteers with the nonprofit Ohio Citizen Action have also been helping with efforts to raise awareness and get out the vote.

As to whether the Richland Farmland Preservation group was mobilizing in a similar way, Banks told Canary Media he didn’t expect it to hold a general fundraiser. Instead, he noted that they planned to ​“call a few people.” Without saying who, he said, ​“There’s some people who will put some money towards this.”

Farmland in Richland County’s Butler Township on a cold winter day (Kathiann M. Kowalski/Canary Media)

Nonetheless, the push to preserve the renewable energy ban is tapping into real anxieties about ceding land to non-farming uses.

“We’re seeing more and more farmlands being used up for developments, and we want to keep them as farmlands,” said John Jaholnycky, who previously worked for natural gas and electric companies and is now a trustee for Mifflin Township, which opted for the ban.

In Jaholnycky’s view, solar should go on buildings and over parking lots. ​“I think it’s kind of shortsighted that we want to use up all of this farmland to put these solar panels up.”

Richland County Commissioner Cliff Mears pointed out that the city of Mansfield plans to add a solar farm at the site of a former landfill. But he added, ​“We feel that farmland overall should remain farmland.”

Still, blocking renewables won’t necessarily preserve farmland. In fact, urban and suburban development has been the major threat over the past several decades.

From 2002 through 2022, Ohio lost over 930,000 acres of farmland. Researchers at The Ohio State University reported last year that most of that loss occurred around metropolitan areas, where urban and suburban sprawl was extending into formerly rural areas. The number of acres for certified and planned utility-scale solar projects, meanwhile, is about one-tenth that amount.

Data centers are also a growing concern, with roughly 200 already in the state, and plans for another 100 or so.

For farmers, leasing their land for renewable energy can supplement income and actually let them keep the land in their families.

“The alternative is that [landowners] will sell it for development or data centers or something,” said Annette McCormick, a county resident and opponent of the prohibition.

Nor are renewables necessarily incompatible with farmland preservation.

Agrivoltaics uses land under and around solar panels for grazing sheep or growing forage or other crops. ​“There’s a lot of opportunities for farming” amid clean energy installations, McCormick said. ​“Maybe just not think about corn and soybeans all the time” as the only farming options.

Permit restrictions also generally require renewable energy companies to restore agricultural land when projects finish using it.

Both Banks and Mears criticized SB 52’s provision that lets all voters in the county — not just those in the relevant townships — sign a referendum petition and then vote on the issue. ​“It has nothing to do with anybody in the cities or villages,” Mears said. In his view, voters ​“should have some skin in the game.”

That arrangement was once on the table. An earlier version of SB 52 would have given each township the authority to ban solar and wind and then left any decisions on referendums solely up to its own voters. Ultimately, however, the law put the decision to enact prohibitions — and the rights of voters to seek their reversal — at the county level.

“Every voter in Richland County should have a voice on this important issue because it’s a countywide policy,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, who grew up in Richland County. Although the commissioners chose to defer to trustees in individual townships, ​“it is the role of county commissioners to represent every voter and to hear from every voter.”

Supporters of the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development group campaign outside the Richland County Board of Elections. (Photo from Tracy Sabetta.)

Former Richland County Commissioner Gary Utt agreed: ​“It’s a county issue. Let the people decide.”

Energy costs are also a big issue this year, not just in Richland County but across the state. Utility bills are rising for all customers as electricity demand surges in Ohio, especially with the proliferation of data centers and growth in electrification. Solar power can come onto the grid faster than other sources. Adding more generation quickly could ease the supply crunch, and clean energy could help protect residents from the volatility of fossil fuel prices.

“That affects all of us — not just countywide, but statewide also,” said Christina O’Millian, a volunteer who worked on last year’s campaign to get the issue on the ballot.

Because SB 52’s hurdles apply only to solar and wind farms, it’s ​“picking winners and losers in what should be a free market,” said Fritz of the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum.

For McPeek, the electrical union business manager, blocking renewables also means fewer jobs for himself and other IBEW members throughout the county.

“Historically, communities that sort of close themselves off often see investment and innovation going elsewhere,” he said.

Even if residents defeat the ban, it doesn’t mean that any large solar or wind projects will be built in Richland County.

“It just restores the right of a project to be considered,” McPeek said. ​“There are a lot of hurdles that they have to jump through.”

Brian McPeek, a member of the “no” vote coalition and a union electrician, speaks at a Feb. 21 fundraiser held at the IBEW 688 headquarters in Mansfield, Ohio. (Jo Baldwin)

In unincorporated areas without any ban, SB 52 still lets county commissioners review almost all new large-scale solar and wind farms of 5 MW or more before developers can even file a permit application with the Ohio Power Siting Board.

The law gives commissioners 90 days in which they can prohibit a project, change its footprint, or do nothing. No action means a company can then file its application with the siting board, provided the developer also complied with additional notice and public meeting requirements.

If a company does get to file an application for a solar or wind farm with the siting board, SB 52 then calls for two ad hoc representatives of counties and townships where the development would be located. Those individuals take part in the case as voting members. Any project also must satisfy a long list of other requirements before the siting board grants its approval to move ahead.

Even for projects that have otherwise met all legal criteria, the siting board sometimes simply defers to local government opposition to conclude they are not in the ​“public interest” — a stance that is currently under review by the Ohio Supreme Court.

Ultimately, it may take a repeal of SB 52 and some other legal changes to put all types of energy generation on an equal footing when it comes to siting and permitting.

But for now, advocates for a ​“no” vote on Richland County’s ballot issue are focused on what they can most immediately control: defeating a ban that makes solar and wind a nonstarter from the get-go.

“I want to make my children proud,” said Morgan Carroll, a Shelby resident who urges people to vote no. ​“I want to say that we tried to help them with their energy costs in the future, help the future of clean energy in the county.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sponsored by Indivisible Central Ohio and Common Cause Ohio, the Columbus event will take place in Bicentennial Park starting at 4:30 p.m. Friday.

The “We the People of Ohio” project follows events in numerous other American cities, including Cleveland, Dayton, Marietta and Gambier in Ohio.

“It is both a stunning visual and a participatory experience: community members sign the scroll with oversized feather markers, adding their names as a visible commitment to democratic values and civic participation,” organizers said in a written statement.

“The signature section has already grown hundreds of feet long across the country — and Ohio will contribute to that growing national testament.”

When and where the document will appear in other Ohio cities:

• Youngstown — 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday, May 3, Calvin Civic Center, 755 Mahoning Ave.
• Peninsula — 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, May 9, Boston Township Hall, 1775 Main St.
• Akron — 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Monday, May 11, First Congregational Church of Akron, 292 E. Market St.
• Mentor 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Sunday, May 17, Eleanor B. Garfield Park Pavilion, 7967 Mentor Ave.
• Toledo, Sandusky, Hamilton, Norwalk, Lima and Springfield — times, dates and locations to be announced.

Organizers said the Constitution prescribes a democracy that depends on citizen participation. The “We the People” project is meant to underline that.

“Democracy is strongest when people see themselves reflected in it,” they said. “’We The People’ is not abstract — it is a call to participation. This project offers Ohioans a chance to visibly affirm their role in shaping our shared future.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

They haven’t learned. In their phenomenal arrogance, Ohio Republican lawmakers once again want to spit in the face of Ohio voters and try to convince us it’s raining.

After cheating voters with flagrant gerrymandering, making it harder and harder to vote with law after law, and overriding voters on the 2023 legal weed law, they want to try to kneecap Ohio voters’ fundamental Constitutional power, again.

They tried to do this in 2023 and failed spectacularly.

As Ohio voters were gearing up to consider a reproductive rights amendment that year, gerrymandered Ohio Republican lawmakers proposed raising the threshold to pass amendments to the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to a 60% threshold.

The gerrymandered Republican lawmaker sponsoring the 2023 effort openly advocated to his colleagues that his proposal was intended to stop the reproductive rights amendment, as well as any further anti-gerrymandering reform.

Voters easily saw through their charade and rejected them in humiliating fashion.

Now, as voters have launched efforts to ban data centers and eliminate property taxes, the same legislature that has made a mess of things with data centers and property taxes wants voters to give up significant power to do anything about it.

Ohio Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino of Kirtland wants to give it another try at convincing Ohio voters to lie down and roll over for politicians who have obnoxiously demonstrated over and over again that they have zero respect for voters.

In a personal demonstration of his absolute disregard for the opinions of voters, Cirino was the lawmaker who ignored the heartfelt testimony of 700 Ohioans and thousands of protesters across college campuses throughout Ohio, to force through a new higher education law to gut academic freedom, regulate classroom discussion, destroy diversity efforts, and dismantle the power of unions.

The result? Ohio’s college campuses are suffering. High school students said they are leaving the state. Students who’ve stayed say they feel the “bleak” chill of stifled campus speech and classroom discussion. Professors have been robbed of both their academic freedom and their job security, also noting the frigid air in classrooms subjected to the menace of government censorship.

Minority students on campus have had their spaces for acceptance and understanding stripped away from them. And 90 programs including economics, physics, and mathematics, have been eliminated from campuses across the state, as Cirino’s generation pulls the ladder up behind them.

As voters across the country question the wisdom of data centers, in Ohio, our politicians have showered them with state government candy.

While cutting billions from Ohio pubic schools, state lawmakers have handed out billions worth of incentives to data centers. In one notorious case, Ohio gave $4.5 million to a data center project to create just 10 jobs.

Regarding property taxes, gerrymandered Ohio lawmakers have repeatedly abused our local communities by making massive cuts to funding for public schools and the local government fund that helps pay for public works jobs and emergency personnel like police officers, paramedics, and firefighters.

Facing the devastating loss of local jobs and services, some Ohio communities eat the cuts and lay off employees, while others have rallied to support levies on the local level.

But for those communities that pass levies to keep their local jobs and service intact, state officials have taken it as a cue that those communities will fend for themselves, so they cut their funding even more.

A vicious cycle perpetuates where local communities are asked to do more and more and more, while state lawmakers do less and less and less.

What do Ohio’s state leaders do instead?

They give enormous tax handouts and giveaways to unaccountable corporations and the richest people in the state. They give out $12 billion with little to show for it.

It’s a cozy little arrangement if you’re a wealthy corporation or sports franchise owner who can buy political influence with campaign donations.

But if you’re a regular Ohioan trying to live in a decent community with decent opportunities for your children, your family is getting your lunch eaten by unscrupulous and unaccountable politicians who have insulated themselves from electoral consequences with gerrymandering.

They don’t have to really care what destruction they cause, unless some happy day they discover any sense of human shame or conscience.

In the meantime, what you can do is join with your fellow citizens and go to enormous lengths, with incredibly high financial and practical barriers, to try to bring change directly to voters for consideration at the ballot box.

You could introduce a law — an initiated statute.

But Ohio lawmakers showed very clearly with the voter-passed weed law of 2023 that they will not respect voter-passed laws and they will change them however they want, whenever they want, voters be damned.

Or you could try to introduce a constitutional amendment, protected from the machinations of unaccountable, gerrymandered lawmakers.

Those unaccountable, gerrymandered lawsmakers really, really don’t like that though.

How dare you present any check whatsoever on their abuse of power?

‘Can’t have it.

Better try to convince you, again, to willingly give up your own power so that they can continue to abuse theirs.

To me, the worst part is that they are so arrogant and so condescending that they still think you’re dumb enough to buy it.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The warrant, signed by Seneca County Common Pleas Court Judge Damon Alt, was served April 27, 2026, at 5771 E TR 106 in Tiffin — the residence of Brandy Johnson, 34.

Brandy Johnson. (Photo via METRICH Drug Task Force)

Johnson was taken into custody on an active arrest warrant and transported to the Seneca County Jail. Possible charges of Trafficking in Drugs, Possession of Drugs, and Weapons under Disability are pending against her at the conclusion of the investigation, according to the task force.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/drug-task-force-hits-tiffin-home-hauls-out-firearms-and-narcotics/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Click’s campaign sent a mass email on Tuesday with the subject line “Primary Voter Rally,” characterizing the final stretch of the race in increasingly defensive terms.

“It’s less than a week before the primary, and it’s getting crazy out there!” Click wrote. “I’m getting attacked by conspiracy theorists on the right, liberals on the left, and liberals pretending to be conservatives.”

Click also pointed to a Facebook post — embedded in the email itself — in which a social media user called on Democrats and independent voters to pull a Republican ballot to vote him out. “While the post seen below completely mischaracterizes me, it does show you the depths to which Democrats will stoop to win in November, even crossing over to vote for a weak Republican in our primary,” Click wrote. “Shame on them!”

The urgent tone is a marked departure from Click’s posture throughout much of the campaign.

State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) represents the 88th Ohio House District, which includes all of Seneca and Sandusky Counties. (Photo from Ohio House website)

When former U.S. Senate candidate Mark Pukita commented on Facebook that Click “really has his panties in a wad” over the primary challenge from Eric Watson, Click replied directly: “You’re funny, Markie. Not concerned at all.”

When the Fremont News-Messenger asked about Watson’s campaign, Click said: “You move to the right of Gary Click and you’re in the ditch.” And when Watson called for public debates, Click dismissed the idea: “It’s always the guy losing that wants the debate. They are trying to grift off of the leader’s name ID.”

In March, Click’s campaign sent a fundraising email acknowledging that “this is a tough primary” — the first public signal that the race had tightened — and hosted a campaign kickoff in Clyde featuring Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, State Treasurer Robert Sprague, and Majority Whip Nick Santucci. U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, who had originally been announced as the event’s headliner, did not appear.

Tuesday’s email included a “Donate Today!” button three separate times and announced a pre-primary rally set for Friday, May 1, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Fremont Airport, Hangar 1, 365 State Route 53, Fremont. The event, called “Rich’s Rally for Votes,” is co-hosted with Richard J. Farmer II, a Republican candidate for Sandusky County Commissioner, along with other local conservative candidates.

Attempts to reach Click’s campaign for comment were unsuccessful.

Watson: ‘I’m approachable. I listen.’

Watson, in a statement to TiffinOhio.net, said Click’s messaging reflects a campaign under pressure.

“Many months ago, he said he wasn’t concerned at all about my entry into this race,” Watson wrote. “Now he’s urgently asking for a May 1st rally and still pushing for donations this late.”

Eric Watson, of Tiffin, is challenging incumbent State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) in the 2026 Republican primary election. (Photo: Facebook)

Watson declined to accept Click’s framing that crossover voters are driving his primary challenge.

“He’s also leaning on the idea that Democrats are crossing over as a big psyop against him,” Watson wrote. “What I’m seeing on the ground is different. I’m approachable. I listen to people’s concerns. I don’t brush things off as conspiracies or ‘liberal propaganda.’ I take the time to hear voters out, even when we don’t fully agree, and that matters.”

Watson added: “I’ve had plenty of conversations across the board, and people respond to being heard. As I’ve been saying, we may not see 100% eye to eye on everything, but if we come together and work toward what’s best for the district, we’re going to be just fine.”

Jones focuses on jobs and costs as Republicans fight over ideology

While Click and Watson spend the final days before the primary trading accusations and debating the loyalty of their supporters, the Democratic candidate in the race has kept his focus elsewhere.

Aaron Jones — a U.S. Army veteran, production supervisor at Toledo Molding & Die in Tiffin, and Tiffin City Councilman — has built his campaign around the economic concerns facing working families in Seneca and Sandusky counties: jobs, cost of living, property tax relief, and funding for public schools.

Aaron Jones (right) speaks to a crowd of supporters in Downtown Tiffin on Thursday, April 16, 2026. (Photo Submitted)

Jones, who has worked at Toledo Molding & Die for more than 20 years, has a direct personal stake in one of the district’s most pressing economic stories. The company — which operates a plant in Tiffin employing more than 400 workers — has been the subject of active sale discussions following announcements of potential closure. Jones has spoken publicly about the uncertainty facing his coworkers and has made manufacturing job security a central part of his platform.

Jones is running unopposed in the May 5 Democratic primary and will advance directly to the November 3 general election, where he will face whichever Republican emerges from Tuesday’s contest. National veterans organization VoteVets has endorsed his campaign.

“I’ve spent over 20 years on the factory floor, I’ve served my country, and I serve my neighbors on City Council,” Jones said in a statement earlier this month. “I’m running because the people of District 88 deserve a representative who understands what it takes to make ends meet — not someone beholden to out-of-state special interests.”

The May 5 primary is the deciding contest for the Republican nomination. Polls open at 6:30 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sen. Jon Husted’s first ads of his campaign to get elected to the U.S. Senate will start today.

Husted, a Republican, will spend $1 million on the ads, scheduled to start Wednesday and remain on the air for the next two weeks. They will air on TV in Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo, as well as on Fox News and online streaming. 

The ads come even as Husted faces no opponent in the Republican primary election that will be decided on May 5. His likely opponent in the November election is Sherrod Brown, the former longtime Democratic senator. Husted has held the job since January 2025, when Gov. Mike DeWine appointed him to fill Vice President JD Vance’s unexpired term.

In a statement, Husted Campaign Manager Drew Thompson said the election will give voters a choice between Husted and Brown, who served in Congress for 32 years total – split between the House and Senate – before he was defeated in the November 2024 election. 

“This November, Ohioans will have a clear choice between the past and the future. Jon Husted is getting an early start by taking his story directly to voters who are ready for a fresh, common-sense approach in Washington,” Thompson said.

Voters will see what political operatives call a “bio ad” that’s meant to give them a snippet of Husted’s life story. It depicts Husted talking about his background as an adoptee who spent the first few days of his life in foster care, and touts his work as an elected official, including in the Senate, promoting technical education programs. 

The ad campaign comes a week after Husted reported having $8.2 million in his campaign account, compared to Brown’s $16.5 million. Senate Republicans have announced a large-scale campaign to support Husted, with plans to spend $79 million boosting him, the most of any state this year.

That announced spending, plus millions more committed by outside groups, foreshadows that Ohio’s Senate race this year could be a repeat of the historically expensive 2024 election. That year, Republican and Democratic groups spent $250 million as Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno defeated Brown by three percentage points.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A week after Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy doubled down on his push to reform the state’s public universities, Kent State University President Todd Diacon delivered a message: “Come visit.” 

Though Diacon didn’t explicitly mention Ramaswamy by name in an essay on the future of Ohio higher education published April 28, there’s no mistaking who he’s talking about.   

The piece’s headline and its lead sentence included the phrase “centers of excellence,” the same words Ramaswamy used to describe what he wants the state’s 14 universities to become amid enrollment and financial challenges. His calls to consolidate sparked pushback from his Democratic rival, Dr. Amy Acton, and others across the state. 

“The idea of ‘centers of excellence’ has entered Ohio’s higher education conversation, and I welcome it,” Diacon wrote in a message sent via email to the university community and posted online. 

Ohio’s university presidents rarely talk publicly – even tangentially – about politics. Public institutions rely on state support. Diacon didn’t touch on the gubernatorial race, instead simply writing that he wanted to give “some context that the current debate is missing.” 

“We are not waiting for someone to tell us to change,” he wrote. “We’ve reduced our budget, and balanced it, every year save one during the past 30 years, and we did so without drawing on reserves to cover revenue shortfalls.” 

Diacon concluded the piece by inviting “anyone raising questions about Ohio’s public universities” to spend time on one of Kent State’s eight campuses across Northeast Ohio – or even that of another public peer – to better understand these schools.

Ramaswamy spokesperson Evan Machan didn’t respond to Signal Statewide’s question about whether the candidate plans to take Diacon up on his offer to make a campus visit. He did say, though, that the campaign is “excited to partner with the leaders of universities across our state to understand where our universities are excelling and where we have room to improve.”

Ramaswamy’s calls to consolidate begin in March

Ramaswamy first floated the idea of combining public universities in March. He described it as one area where Ohio could cut excess spending to save money. 

“When you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence, who are actually the best in their respective domains instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state,” he said in a video shared online by his campaign. 

He shared more thoughts in a Columbus Dispatch opinion piece a few weeks later. It mentioned Ohio’s dwindling number of high school graduates and pointed out other states with larger populations have fewer public universities. 

If elected governor, Ramaswamy would require the Ohio Department of Higher Education to conduct a thorough review that would identify “where missions overlap, where enrollment collapse has made independence untenable, and where administrative functions can be unified without harming students,” he wrote. 

“Either we reform our higher education system with purpose, or we watch it decline by default,” he wrote. 

Looking at enrollment across Ohio’s public universities

Kent State’s Diacon wrote that total enrollment across the state’s public universities is “roughly the same” now as it was in 2005. 

Data from the Ohio Department of Higher Education supports that claim. The state’s university system enrolled 264,400 full-time students in 2005, dropping by just 0.2% to 263,854 students in 2025.  

Few changes are noticeable when looking at those beginning and ending figures alone – but the years tucked inside contain more storylines. 

One of the biggest includes the enrollment ebbs and flows that colleges in Ohio and nationwide experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected people of color and/or women. Enrollments at many institutions, especially two-year public colleges, plunged during that time, though national data shows those rates may be rebounding.  

Another shift: The state’s biggest institutions got bigger. The growth was most explosive at the University of Cincinnati. Its main campus grew by a whopping 60%, going from 22,389 students to 35,928 students. Last year, UC’s Cincinnati campus and Ohio State University’s Columbus campus accounted for about 36% of all students enrolled at a main campus in Ohio. 

Growth was more modest at places such as Kent State, where enrollment grew by 9.4% from 20,713 students to 22,664 students. Ohio University saw an uptick of nearly 16%, moving from 20,920 students to 24,264 students. 

Smaller universities saw more magnified declines. Enrollment at the University of Akron fell nearly 40% from 17,839 students to 10,802 students. The University of Toledo enrolled about 32% fewer students, going from 18,547 students to 12,673 students. Shawnee State University, in the Southern Ohio city of Portsmouth, saw about a 22% decline as its enrollment fell from 3,273 students to 2,567 students. 

And at the state’s two dozen regional campuses, total enrollment fell by about 14.5% from 33,909 students to 28,993 students. 

It’s important to note that regional public universities tend to enroll more part-time students, including working adults. 

Kent State’s Diacon touts university successes amid declining state support

Diacon’s essay also outlined what he views as some of Kent State’s biggest successes. 

He pointed to individual academic programs, including healthcare, and how those programs prepare both local and national workforces. He also nodded to the university’s role as the region’s only public university to earn a prestigious national distinction recognizing its high scientific research output. 

It wasn’t just a love letter, though. Diacon also called out how state financial support has dwindled since Republican Gov. James Rhodes launched the statewide university system in the 1960s. Back then, about 75% of Kent State’s operating budget came from state allocations, he wrote. Now, Diacon reports that number has shrunk to roughly 22%. 

“The universities didn’t drift into this moment,” he wrote. “Even though public investment was quietly withdrawn over decades, our institutions have continued to deliver ever-improving results.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“The use of race in redistricting should never happen,” the governor’s general counsel, David Axelman, wrote in a memo unveiling a map that aims to hand Republicans four additional U.S. House seats in Florida.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion sharply weakening a major portion of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Even before the decision, Republicans and Democrats across the country were scrambling to get ahead of the court’s anticipated ruling. 

The rush comes even as state legislative sessions wind down and the window to redraw maps rapidly closes ahead of the midterm elections in November — likely pushing most redistricting battles into the 2028 election cycle.

The opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, could reverberate for decades. The court’s conservative majority significantly curtailed the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps. 

Until now, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens.

“If the Supreme Court does decide to gut or significantly weaken Section 2 of the VRA, we’re very concerned that it would give, basically, the green light to states to racially gerrymander,” Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said in an interview ahead of the decision.

Republicans could ultimately secure up to 19 U.S. House seats nationally directly because of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a projection by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters. At the state level, the groups have projected that Republicans could gain up to 200 state legislative seats across the South. 

“It is hard to overstate what an earthquake this will be for American politics,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote in a blog post following the opinion’s release on Wednesday.

Louisiana case

A group of white voters challenged Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander after the state in 2024 created a second district where a majority of voters are Black. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices agreed, ruling 6-3 that the map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the state didn’t need to create a second majority-minority district.

In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

A protest sign outside the U.S. Supreme Court when Louisiana v. Callais was argued on Oct. 15, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the Supreme Court has “had its sights set” on the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote.

Following the opinion, Republican-led legislatures across the South are expected to move to break apart Democratic districts where a majority of residents are Black or from other minority groups. 

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, called on the state legislature to reconvene and redraw the state’s congressional districts to create another Republican-held seat in Memphis. Blackburn, who is running for governor, said an additional seat is essential to cement President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves last week announced a special session to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts, to begin 21 days after the court releases its decision.

“It is a decision that could (and in my view should) forever change the way we draw electoral maps,” Reeves said in a statement announcing the session.

Although the Supreme Court case centered on Louisiana, state officials are likely out of time to adopt a new map for this year’s election. The primary election is set for May 16.

Still, Louisiana will be free to pursue redistricting next year.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, Sr., a Democrat who represents one of the state’s two majority-minority districts, said the court’s decision was a “devastating blow” to the promise of equal representation.

“This ruling is about far more than lines on a map — it’s about whether Black Louisianians will have a meaningful opportunity to make their voices heard,” Carter said in a statement.

The redistricting wars of 2026

As of 2024, roughly a third of U.S. House seats represented majority-minority districts — 122 held by Democrats and 26 held by Republicans, according to estimates by Ballotpedia. Texas and California account for nearly half of all the districts.

Seven states have already taken the extraordinary step of redrawing their maps this year after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to draw lines that maximize partisan advantage ahead of the midterms. Maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after the census.

Texas and California struck first, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah. Virginia voters last week approved a redraw, and Florida lawmakers approved a new map Wednesday. 

Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court when Louisiana v. Callais was argued on Oct. 15, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

All told, Republicans may emerge from the redistricting war with a small net advantage of a handful of seats if the Florida plan is enacted and the other maps are upheld.

The calendar will prove a major obstacle to additional gerrymanders this year. Primary elections have already been held in some southern states and ballots have been distributed in others. 

Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas have already held primaries, while ballots have been distributed in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. 

But after November the clock resets, giving states more than a year to pursue further changes to their maps before the 2028 election.

“We are much more concerned about the impact on 2028 and beyond that that would have, letting these politicians basically just pick their voters instead of the voters picking them,” McNulty said.

John R. Lewis bill

As Democrats look ahead to Callais’ likely fallout in the coming years, they have begun urgently calling for action in Congress and at the state level. They also say the decision emphasizes the stakes of this year’s elections.

“Today is a devastating day for democracy and a wake-up call for all those who seek to protect it,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

Democrats in Congress have repeatedly offered the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Named after the civil rights activist and Georgia congressman who died in 2020, the legislation aims to strengthen Section 2 and other elements of the current Voting Rights Act, though it’s unclear whether the bill would be constitutional under the Callais decision.

The U.S. House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it was filibustered in the Senate. Some lawmakers are speaking about the measure again, and Democrats may take control of Congress in November’s elections—though they would still face President Donald Trump in the White House. 

“We can and must revive the Voting Rights Act,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat and the ranking member of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, said at a shadow hearing on voting rights on Monday.

For their part, Republicans hailed the Supreme Court decision as long overdue.

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said “activists” for too long had manipulated the redistricting process to achieve political outcomes, dividing Americans in the process.

“The Supreme Court made clear that our elections should be decided by voters, not engineered through unconstitutional mandates,” Hudson said.

Voting Rights Act over the years

Over more than a decade, the Supreme Court has narrowed the potency of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law banning racial discrimination in voting that came as Congress battled Jim Crow laws in southern states. 

The measure was intended to help enforce the U.S. Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prohibit denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

In 2013, the court effectively halted preclearance — the requirement that some states and local governments with a history of discrimination obtain federal permission before changing their voting practices. At the time of the decision, most southern states and a handful of others were subject to preclearance.

The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that federal courts cannot review allegations of partisan gerrymandering. The decision cleared the way for state lawmakers to gerrymander their maps for political advantage without fear they would be second-guessed by federal judges. 

The opinion helped empower a wave of gerrymanders after the 2020 census and set the stage for this year’s mid-decade redistricting.

Turning to the legislatures

Facing a bleak federal landscape, some voting rights advocates are increasingly turning to state legislatures. The Supreme Court decision undercutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely intensify efforts to advance state-level legislation.

“Because political participation is inherently local, it is imperative to press for protections at the ground level,” Todd Cox, associate director counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice legal organization, said at the shadow hearing.

Some Democratic state lawmakers already introduced measures in anticipation of an unfavorable Supreme Court decision.

The Illinois House last week approved a state constitutional amendment that would require districts to be drawn “to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race.”

The Illinois amendment would also require, where practical, the creation of racial coalition or influence districts — terms that refer to districts where racial minorities together constitute a majority of residents. The measure, which must also pass the state Senate before going to voters, was a pre-response to the Callais opinion.

“This will ensure that Illinois will always recognize the fundamental principle that a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people must include all the people,” Illinois Democratic House Speaker Emanuel Welch told reporters after the amendment advanced.

Illinois Republicans have cast the amendment as a Democratic power grab. The state has some of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation, Illinois House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, a Republican, said in a statement. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has given Illinois’ maps an overall “F” grade.

“Let’s be clear: this has nothing to do with strengthening democracy,” McCombie said. “It’s about locking in one-party control at any cost.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland told lawmakers that from “bitter division” 250 years ago, the two nations “forged a friendship that has grown into one of the most consequential alliances in human history.”

“I pray with all my heart that our alliance will continue to defend our shared values with our partners in Europe and the Commonwealth and across the world,” he said.

Charles is the first British king to address a joint session of Congress, and only the second monarch to do so after his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, spoke before lawmakers in 1991.

Charles was received with loud unanimous applause from both sides of the aisle — a notable difference from the usual one-party enthusiasm during the president’s annual State of the Union address.

He punctuated his roughly 27-minute speech with laugh lines, including a quip that 250 years for America is “just the other day” for the British.

To whoops and cheers, Charles nodded to the “bold and imaginative rebels with a cause” who declared independence but also “carried forward” the ideals of the Magna Carta, a 13th-century document outlining the protection of rights and property from the monarch.

Both sides of the aisle stood applauding in unison as the king cited U.S. Supreme Court cases that laid the “foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

But the king also delivered his speech against the ominous backdrop of a breakdown of American support for Ukraine and an ongoing war in Iran, initiated by the United States and Israel, that has disrupted energy supply in the United Kingdom and around the world.

The conflicts “pose immense challenges for the international community and whose impact is felt in communities the length and breadth of our own country,” he said. 

As the king was still speaking on Capitol Hill, the White House shared on social media a photo of Charles and Trump together under the heading “TWO KINGS” and a crown emoji.

Trump attacks on British prime minister

U.S.-U.K. relations have frayed as a result of Trump’s recurrent attacks on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to not join offensive operations targeting Iran.

Trump paused his scathing online screeds against the British government during the king’s first full day of his state visit, which included a 21-gun salute and ceremonial flyover after Charles and Queen Camilla arrived on the White House South Lawn. 

Shortly before Charles addressed Congress, Trump took aim on his Truth Social platform at another European leader, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, accusing him of thinking “it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”  

Just over one month into the U.S. campaign in Iran, Trump, on Truth Social, told the U.K. and other allied partners to “Go get your own oil!” from the blockaded Strait of Hormuz. 

“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” he wrote.

Two weeks earlier, Trump attacked NATO allies, telling reporters in the Oval Office, “I’ve long said that, you know, I wonder whether or not NATO would ever be there for us. So … this was a great test, because we don’t need them, but they should have been there.”

Charles recounted in his speech to Congress how the only time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, invoked Article 5 was to defend the United States following the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

The king and Camilla are scheduled to visit the 9/11 Memorial in New York City on Wednesday.

“We stood with you then, and we stand with you now in solemn remembrance of a day that shall never be forgotten,” Charles said.

Just under 460 British troops died fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan.

Epstein files

The king’s trip to the U.S. also comes after the high-profile release of millions of records related to the disgraced hedge fund manager and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had ties to Charles’ brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. 

Mountbatten-Windsor settled outside of court in 2022 with the late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein and the former British prince of trafficking her for sex.

Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of his royal title of prince and is under investigation in Britain for allegedly sharing confidential government information with Epstein, which came to light in the publicly released files.

The king acknowledged victims of sexual abuse in his speech, according to a palace aide, when he remarked to lawmakers, “In both of our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that, so tragically, exist in both our societies today.”

Answering questions about the king’s address, the palace aide told reporters traveling with Charles, “It was certainly in (his majesty’s) mind to acknowledge victims of abuse, so they are naturally incorporated in this line.”

Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s brother who has become an activist following his sister’s death last year, was on Capitol Hill Tuesday for a roundtable about Epstein victims ahead of Charles’ visit.

Roberts and the king did not meet.

King will visit Virginia

Charles, a vocal advocate for the environment, is also scheduled to visit Shenandoah National Park in Virginia Thursday to view America’s “extraordinary natural splendor.” The king emphasized to lawmakers the need for a collaborative effort to fight climate change.

“Even as we celebrate the beauty that surrounds us, our generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of nature,” he said. 

“We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words nature’s own economy, provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security,” he said.

Charles also celebrated the shared financial economy between the United States and U.K., highlighting $430 billion in annual trade. Just over a year ago, Trump began a new tariff regime on British goods, and imports from many other trading partners.

Review of the troops

Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcomed the king and queen on the White House South Lawn Monday morning for a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, including a review of the troops, a distinguished honor for a visiting head of state.

During brief and mostly scripted remarks, Trump highlighted a tree planted on the White House grounds by Elizabeth II in 1991. Trump described the tree as a “living symbol” of the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.

“In the centuries since we won our independence, Americans have had no closer friends than the British. We share that same root. We speak the same language, we hold the same values, and together our warriors have defended the same extraordinary civilization under twin banners of red, white and blue,” Trump said.

Trump and Charles met in a closed-door Oval Office bilateral meeting following the ceremony. 

The first lady and the queen met with American schoolchildren at the White House tennis pavilion, where the students donned Meta Quest headsets to view several U.K. landmarks, including Stonehenge and Buckingham Palace. The event was part of the first lady’s effort to promote technology in education, according to the White House.

Charles and Camilla are scheduled to attend a state dinner at the White House East Room Tuesday night before heading to New York City Wednesday.

The king and queen are scheduled to visit the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, Thursday, as well as meet Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in Shenandoah National Park, according to the British embassy.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended those and other proposed cuts to her agency outlined in Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request, which calls for $75.7 billion in new discretionary budget authority for the department that would mark a $3.2 billion, or 4.1%, reduction from fiscal 2026 levels. 

The administration has taken major steps to dismantle the 46-year-old Department of Education as part of the president’s quest to send education “back to the states.” That effort continues despite much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurring at the state and local levels.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies on April 28, 2026. (Screenshot from committee livestream)

“We’ve been clear: Shifting authority back to the states will not come at the expense of the central federal programs (and) support, much of which predate the department itself,” McMahon told lawmakers at the hearing of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.

The panel shares jurisdiction over Education Department spending with the corresponding subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The president’s budget request is generally considered a starting point for negotiations, but Congress is responsible for deciding federal spending.

Bipartisan support for TRIO 

Republican and Democratic senators took particular aim at the administration’s proposal to eliminate Federal TRIO Programs in fiscal 2027.

The Federal TRIO Programs — funded at $1.19 billion this fiscal year — help support groups including low-income students, first-generation college students, individuals with disabilities and veterans. 

Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the full Senate Appropriations Committee, said she opposes the president’s proposal to eliminate TRIO, noting that these programs have “changed the lives of countless first-generation and low-income students in Maine and across the country.” 

The Maine Republican added that TRIO “enjoys robust support and has made such a difference in the lives of children.” 

Arkansas GOP Sen. John Boozman also emphasized his support for TRIO, noting that in his state, these programs “have been a game-changer in helping low-income and first-generation students not only access higher education, but also succeed once they are there.” 

Sen. Jeff Merkley was the first in his family to go to college and said he comes from a “very blue-collar, frontier, homesteading, timber background.”

The Oregon Democrat said it’s from that perspective he believes that “having conscious programs to help people overcome the cultural chasm that exists between blue-collar kids like myself and that college world that you have very little contact on is enormously valuable in America, and the stats from these programs are pretty damn impressive.” 

The secretary told the panel that while “there are many instances where the TRIO program has been very beneficial … as we look across the country in how to spend these dollars and how to have similar results by maybe not necessarily focusing students towards college degrees, maybe there’s another way for them to have their path to success.” 

McMahon said her agency was in the process of spending “about $2.1 million” for investigating and evaluating the TRIO programs.

In its summary of Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request, the department said that TRIO “has failed to meet the vast majority of its performance measures, and studies of program effectiveness have shown that it has not increased college enrollment.” 

Dems decry plan to eliminate agency

Meanwhile, McMahon took heat from the leading Democrats on the subcommittee and the broader Senate Appropriations panel over the administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the agency. 

Part of those efforts include several interagency agreements between Education and the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior, State and Treasury that transfer many of Education’s responsibilities to those agencies.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, ranking member of the subcommittee, said Education “is transferring the vast majority of its programs to other federal departments, agencies with little experience or expertise or capacity to administer them.” 

The Wisconsin Democrat said that instead of “reducing bureaucracy” — a major goal of the administration across the federal government and the department in particular — the transfers are creating “another layer of it.”

She added that “where states previously primarily dealt with the Department of Education, they will now have to deal with multiple federal agencies.” 

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the full Appropriations Committee, pressed McMahon on the status of the administration mulling the transfer of special education services out of the Education Department amid its dismantling efforts. 

The possible move to transfer programs out of the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services has stoked widespread concern from disability advocates.

McMahon said her department was “still evaluating where those programs would best be located, and we have not made that determination yet.” 

“I can assure you that the intent of this administration is not to put these students at risk in any way whatsoever,” McMahon said. 

But Murray was not satisfied with the secretary’s response, saying she is “deeply concerned that your answer sounds like you’re still moving ahead — let’s make it clear that will break the law, and it will make it a lot harder for these students with disabilities to get the education and understanding that their country will stand behind them with that.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The war will enter its third month on Friday without a clear rationale or goal. A fragile cease-fire is in place, but Iran continues to restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for global energy, fertilizer and mineral flows.

Gas prices in Ohio have surged by more than one-third since Trump launched the war, and some fertilizers have spiked as much as 50% nationally as planting season is underway. Meanwhile, as of January, Trump’s tariffs are estimated to have increased consumer costs by 1.5%, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

Those factors — combined with uncertainty over what will happen next — have created problems in multiple sectors of the economy, according to the Cleveland Fed’s latest Beige Book. 

The Cleveland Fed represents the Federal Reserve System’s Fourth District — a region that covers all of Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia. Eight times a year, it conducts interviews and online questionnaires with businesses, community organizations, economists, and other sources. 

The latest Beige Book said that businesses were feeling the pinch from higher prices.

“Overall, non-labor input cost pressures were robust for the seventh consecutive reporting period, intensifying further and continuing an upward trend that started in September 2024,” it said.

“Contacts across sectors highlighted escalating energy costs related to the conflict in the Middle East, with some describing fuel costs as ‘skyrocketing’ and others noting that this would further exacerbate already-high freight costs. Materials costs continued to rise, particularly for metals like copper, steel, and aluminum, with manufacturers citing tariffs as drivers. Two agricultural contacts reported fertilizer cost spikes, and one attributed this to the Strait of Hormuz closure.”

The report said that due in part to frenzied construction of data centers, manufacturing is expected to grow “modestly.”

But it said manufacturers outside of that field and defense may have a tough outlook.

“While two producers with defense contracts reported stronger activity related to the conflict in the Middle East, many manufacturers worried that a prolonged conflict would increase input costs and soften demand,” it said.

“A few producers continued to report flat or softer demand as customers strategically reduced existing inventories.”

And many producers worried about consumers’ ability to buy their products.

“Consumer spending declined modestly in recent weeks, driven by extreme weather events and high fuel prices,” the Beige Book said.

“Grocery store and automotive contacts noted that higher fuel prices strained customers’ wallets, and one higher-end grocer reported customers making fewer trips and purchases. Contacts expected flat consumer spending in the coming months, with many noting that the evolving conflict in the Middle East and associated increase in fuel costs could hurt their demand.”

People in the bottom half of the income distribution are feeling most of the pain. The Beige Book reported on a semiannual survey of nonprofit community organizations.

It said “most respondents reported a decline in their clients’ financial well-being over the past six months due to elevated prices. One respondent said more people sought foreclosure prevention services amid rising property taxes and insurance, while a homeless shelter operator observed longer stays due to the lack of affordable housing.”

The groups also reported a deteriorating jobs outlook for their clients.

“Some respondents who assist jobseekers noticed fewer entry-level positions available,” the report said. “By contrast, others noted more openings for low-paying jobs — manual labor, part-time or temporary jobs, and gig work — that typically lack health-care benefits or a reliable income.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio state Sens. Beth Liston, D-Dublin, and Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township, introduced Ohio Senate Bill 396 which would provide Ohio workers with up to 14 weeks of job-protected paid leave for personal medical needs, caring for seriously ill family members or caring for new children.

“It will help to grow our population by telling those workers who want to start families or to add to their families that Ohio has their back,” Blessing said. 

More than three-fourths of Ohioans do not have access to paid leave and a typical Ohio worker who takes four weeks of unpaid leave loses nearly $3,100, according to Time to Care Ohio.

“That means when they have a family health emergency, they are faced with a devastating choice — do they stay home with a sick child? Do they care for an aging parent in need? Do they tend to their own health crisis, or do they keep their paycheck?” Blessing said. 

No Ohioan should have to make that choice, he said. 

The bill would create a paid family leave fund maintained by the state from an additional payroll contribution from both employees and employers of about 0.4%. The family and medical leave insurance fund would be in custody of the treasurer of state, but not part of the state treasury. 

The bill would allow someone to take off up to 14 weeks for a qualifying event and up to 18 weeks a year.  

Under the bill, workers would be paid 85% of their pay with a maximum benefit up to $1,231 per week. An employee would also have their job protected while they are on leave. 

The director of Ohio Job and Family Services would administer the program, which would begin in 2028. 

An employer with less than 15 employees would be exempt from the payroll contribution, but their employees would still contribute their half and be eligible for pay. 

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. 

But 40% of Ohio workers are not eligible for the Family and Medical Leave Act, according to Time to Care Ohio.

Both of Liston’s now-adult children were born during her medical residency and her husband ended up staying home with their kids due to the high cost of child care. Liston was able to take six weeks of unpaid leave when her daughter was born. 

“We built up credit card debt, which we struggled to stay on top of, even after my paycheck came back,” she said. “My son was born at the end of my residency, and once again, they entered a time of no income.” 

Her family eventually moved to Columbus in part because of financial stresses. 

“(Our debt) snowballed as we couldn’t climb out of the hole that began when my daughter was born,” Liston said. “Out of necessity, I started working full-time at my current employer four and a half weeks after my son was born. … It’s really hard to recover from the financial hit of taking unpaid leave.” 

Madison Greenspan’s three-year-old twin daughters were born prematurely at 27 weeks and spent weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. 

Despite saving up vacation and sick days, she went back to work three weeks after her caesarean section. 

“When it takes 45 and 65 days for your children to come home from the hospital, you start doing the math in your head and making some really hard choices,” said Greenspan, who lives in the Cleveland area. 

“Be there to hold them, advocate for them when they’re in the NICU, or be there to take care of them when they can finally come home,” she said. “We are forcing parents to make the impossible decision to be there for the NICU babies, or to keep their jobs to care for those babies when they come home.”

After having her daughters home for a month and half, she got a letter in the mail from her employer saying her family and medical leave was running out and they needed to know her plans for returning to work.  

“But that was the same week that one of my daughters had a medical emergency that required me to keep her alive with CPR on the living room floor until medics arrived,” Greenspan said. “How could I possibly go back to work at this time, when we were still just fighting for basic survival and better health for our daughters?” 

If state-funded paid family leave existed, she believes she would have had a chance to keep her job and care for her daughters. 

“It was hard losing my job because my career has always been part of who I am, and I have lost so much myself that year,” Greenspan said. “I just really want to keep that one piece.”

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have guaranteed paid leave: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.  

The Ohio bill was introduced last month and has yet to have had any hearings so far in the Senate Financial Institutions, Insurance and Technology Committee. 

Blessing said he thinks the Republican leadership in the Ohio Statehouse is going to have to look at this bill. 

“I would imagine it is incredibly popular amongst Ohioans,” he said. 

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Bailey Magers and Sunil Kumar cut strange figures on Pensacola Beach. Bags of disinfectant solution surrounded them on the white sand; their gloved hands juggled test tubes while layers of rubber and plastic shielded their skin from the elements. As the two organized their seawater samples on the popular Florida beach last August, an older woman wearing a swimsuit walked over to ask what they were doing.

“We’re just actively monitoring water quality,” they told her, but she pressed on.

“Are you looking for that flesh-eating bacteria?”

“We’re looking into it,” they replied, hoping not to frighten her. The woman turned back toward the ocean, her curiosity satisfied. As she walked away, Kumar noticed that she had scrapes and bruises on her body. A few minutes later, he watched her step into the waves. He shook off a chill and returned to the task at hand. 

Magers and Kumar study a bacteria called Vibrio, part of a lineage of ancient marine species that likely emerged sometime around the Paleozoic Era. Enormous, shallow seas flooded the massive, interconnected supercontinents that constituted the Earth’s landmass at the time, and complex marine ecosystems developed that thrived in these temperate, freshly-formed bodies of water. Researchers think there are more than 70 Vibrio species in the environment today, hundreds of millions of years later. The organisms float in warm, brackish water, attaching themselves to plankton and algae and accumulating in prolific water-filtering species like clams and oysters. 

Two family members harvest seafood from a beach in Florida. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

A small number of Vibrio species can sicken and even kill. In worst-case scenarios, a person who has been exposed to the most dangerous of them — by swimming in brackish water with an open wound or ingesting a piece of raw shellfish that is contaminated with the tasteless and odorless toxin — may find themselves with only hours before the flesh on one or more extremities starts to bruise, swell, and decay. Without the quick aid of powerful antibiotics, septic shock can set in and lead to death. Anyone can get infected, though it is much more likely in people who have liver disease or are immunocompromised, elderly, or diabetic.

Climate change is making the world’s oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, more hospitable to Vibrio. Research shows that temperature and salinity are the largest predictors of how widespread Vibrio bacteria are. As water temperatures rise, so does the concentration of Vibrio in seawater — boosting the risk of infection for beachgoers and shellfish consumers. The bacteria start getting active in water temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and multiply rapidly as coastal waters warm throughout the summer. In recent years, scientists have documented Vibrio expanding into places that were once too cold to support the bacteria, pushing as far north along the U.S. East Coast as Maine and appearing with more prevalence in temperate seas around the world. 

Vibriosis infections in general are the leading cause of shellfish-related illness in the U.S. They have increased “more than any other illness caused by a pathogen in the U.S. food supply” since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, started keeping tabs on such illnesses in 1996, according to a 2019 analysis by the International Association for Food Protection. The report attributed the precipitous rise to a “perfect storm” of factors that include climate change, food handling practices, expanding globalization, a patchwork of regulatory oversight, and improved diagnosis. 

On their conspicuous expeditions to Pensacola and other Sunshine State beaches, Magers and Kumar are trying to understand where, and when, harmful Vibrio species are present across the state. The research they’re doing is part of an ongoing effort by a laboratory at the University of Florida to create a Vibrio early warning system for the eastern United States — a program that can alert public health departments to high Vibrio concentrations in any given area a month in advance. How many limbs would be saved, Magers wonders, if doctors and nurses could be warned ahead of time that their emergency rooms would soon see an uptick in these chronically underdiagnosed infections? 

Natalie Larsen, a member of the Vibrio surveillance research team, gathers seawaters samples from Florida’s Pensacola Beach to test for vulnificus and other bacteria. Courtesy of Natalie Larsen

The work serves more than one purpose: As Vibrio bacteria spread north into cooler waters, they serve as a first warning signal of changing marine conditions — giving researchers a heads-up that the familiar composition of marine species in their local waters may be starting to shift. In Europe’s Baltic Sea, for example, a spike in Vibrio infections in July 2014 closely mirrored a heatwave that rapidly warmed the shallow sea. The incident showed researchers that Vibrio spikes herald unusually warm marine conditions — and they have since been utilized as barometers for ocean heatwaves and sea-surface warming patterns, not just food safety.

“We see Vibrio as the indicator for climate change,” said Kyle Brumfield, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland who has been studying the bacteria for a decade. “We can use the presence of Vibrio and Vibrio cases as a proxy for water health in general.”

The CDC estimates that about 80,000 cases of vibriosis occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 100 deaths. Of those 80,000 cases, most are caused by a Vibrio called parahaemolyticus, which most commonly results in gastroenteritis, or food poisoning. The vast majority of the deaths, however, are caused by a type of Vibrio called vulnificus — the Latin word for “wound-making.”

Vulnificus is so potent it can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours. In the last five years, the CDC registered 429 such vulnificus cases, plus 136 foodborne cases. But even though foodborne cases are less numerous, the patients that contract vulnificus by eating contaminated shellfish are more likely to die than those infected via open wounds. Thirteen percent of those nonfoodborne cases died, compared to 32 percent of people who got the infection from eating seafood. Most cases occur in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions.

As far as infectious diseases go, vulnificus is exceedingly rare: The CDC reports between 150 and 200 cases a year. The sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia, by comparison, one of the most common bacterial infections in the U.S., infects northward of 1.5 million Americans annually. But vulnificus’ astonishing speed and high fatality rate — 15 to 50 percent, depending on the health of the person exposed and the route of infection — makes it a unique public health threat, particularly as climate change grows its pathways of exposure. 

Vulnificus is not the kind of pathogen you’d want behaving erratically, but that’s exactly what it’s been doing since the late 2010s. Across the Eastern Seaboard, local and federal health officials have been reporting “unusual increases” in vulnificus prevalence — jagged spikes in infections that appear to correspond to extreme weather events like hurricanes and marine heatwaves.

An oyster bed in Cedar Key, Florida. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

In 2022 and 2024, years when the brackish water that Vibrio bacteria thrive in was pushed inland by major hurricanes, Florida’s public health department reported 17 and 19 deaths, respectively, linked to vulnificus exposure via open wounds. North Carolina, New York, and Connecticut also saw small clusters of infections during a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2023. “As coastal water temperatures increase,” the CDC warned in its investigation of those outbreaks, “V. vulnificus infections are expected to become more common.”

A 2023 study that analyzed a 30-year database of confirmed vulnificus infections from outdoor recreation along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts found the northern boundary of infections has moved north by a rate of 30 miles per year since 1998. The study noted that “V. vulnificus infections may expand their current range to encompass major population centers around New York,” and that annual case numbers may double as temperatures rise and America’s elderly population grows. 

“In the 1980s, Vibrio abundance would increase in the late spring and stay high through the summer and drop in the middle of October,” Brumfield, who conducts research on Vibrio in Maryland, said. “Now … we can pretty much find them almost year-round.”

Two ways to get infected

Just how worried we should be about the changing dynamics of Vibrio bacteria depends on who you ask and what you read. The gruesome and fast-acting nature of the vulnificus infection makes it enticing fodder for local and national news media, fueling a spree of terrifying reports every time a new severe infection or death surfaces. “Virginia dad wades in calf-high water, dies 2 weeks later of flesh-eating bacteria that ‘ravaged’ his legs,” read a recent headline in People magazine. “2 dead after eating oysters, contracting flesh-eating bacteria, officials say,” per a 2025 web story about two deaths linked to oyster consumption in Louisiana and Florida. Like many others in their mold, neither story mentions how rare the bacteria are. 

Left: Shellfish tags used to keep track of where and when shellfish is harvested. Zoya Teirstein / Grist. Right: A sign advertises oysters for sale in Cedar Key, Florida. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

The press is bad news for some in the seafood industry, which does not welcome a national conversation about the rise in vibriosis cases, vulnificus in particular. Shellfish farmers and industry representatives that Grist spoke to in Florida and New York argued media attention on the safety of their products is unwarranted. “‘Flesh-eating bacteria,’” said Leslie Sturmer, a researcher who works for the University of Florida’s shellfish aquaculture extension program and consults with the shellfish industry on research and regulation — “the media loves it.”

Paul McCormick, an oyster farmer in Long Island who sells 750,000 oysters a year, thinks all press is bad press. “Even if the title of your article says ‘New York oysters are the safest oysters in the universe,’” he told me on the phone from his office in East Moriches in January, “you’ve already created a problem.”

In unrefrigerated oysters left out in warm conditions, Vibrio bacteria reproduce every 20 minutes. But in 2010, states began deploying strict protocols known as “Vibrio control plans,” which require harvesters to rapidly cool their catch onboard and then refrigerate it at a shellfish processing facility within a set number of hours. The measures have proven effective at stopping the growth of Vibrio in harvested shellfish and preventing disease.  

A sign warning of high bacteria levels in the water is seen on the beach as people swim in California. Chris Delmas / AFP / Getty Images via Grist

The fact that infections can happen in one of two ways — shellfish consumption and seawater exposure — makes it easy to shift blame and point fingers. Consumers have more control over how much exposure they have to Vibrio than they have with E. coli, for example. A person with a kidney condition can choose not to eat oysters on the half shell. E. Coli, often found in raw vegetables, is far tricker to avoid. Likewise, someone with an open wound can opt not to bathe in brackish waters if they are aware of the risks lurking in the surf.

For shellfish industry representatives, personal responsibility is the primary way to bring caseloads down. “The person is the risk,” said Sturmer. “Not the climate, not the water, not the bacteria.” Implicitly, this appears to be the government’s position as well: There is currently no numerical threshold at which state public health agencies will “shut down” a beach for outdoor recreation, though states will issue public advisories and, very rarely, close beaches if they happen to find high levels of Vibrio in the water.

But that perspective doesn’t account for the rapid marine changes brought on by climate change, the patchiness of vibriosis awareness, and the fact that Americans often make personal decisions that are at odds with their own health and safety.

The shellfishers Grist spoke to fully acknowledged the research underpinning Vibrio’s spread. McCormick studied environmental science in college, and Sturmer is running her own climate experiments in a laboratory in the fishing town of Cedar Key, Florida, putting different kinds of clams and oysters through heat stress tests to determine which species are best equipped to weather the decades ahead. Marine mollusks are uniquely threatened by rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, and sea level rise, issues that can lead to thin shells, low crop yields, and mass die-offs on farms. A detailed understanding of climate science, in other words, is good business for those who make their living fishing.

The problem, according to Sturmer, is that shellfishers have been unfairly singled out for a health issue that doesn’t affect most consumers and is more often contracted by ocean bathing rather than raw oyster consumption. While beaches stay open even when Vibrio bacteria are present in the water and lead to infections, a small number of foodborne vibriosis cases can trigger state closures of shellfish harvesting areas and product recalls. The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science noted that these precautions “erode consumer confidence and likely decrease sales.” 

Leslie Sturmer checks on oysters growing in her laboratory in Cedar Key. Sturmer puts baby oysters through heat stress tests to see which species will be able to withstand rising temperatures. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

The panic that ensues after media reports of Vibrio infections has a similar effect: A 2024 study asked more than 350 shellfish consumers in Rhode Island — a state that relies heavily on its shellfish industry, particularly in summer months when people vacation along the coastline — to bid on entrees of raw oysters and clams. After showing study participants a real newspaper article about a 2015 Vibrio outbreak linked to an oyster farm in Massachusetts, the researchers reported that the news had a “significant negative impact” on participants’ willingness to bid on oysters. It had a depressive effect on clam sales, too.

“You should really be out there beating the drum on botulism or salmonella or E. Coli,” Sturmer told me on a recent visit to her lab in Cedar Key. “Why worry about [vulnificus] when the number of cases are so minimal?” Sturmer is quick to point out that even the term “flesh-eating bacteria” is a misnomer. She’s right, in a sense: The bacteria doesn’t “eat” tissue; it destroys it. But it’s hard to say whether someone who has survived a bout of necrotizing fasciitis, the medical term for what vulnificus does to the flesh, would care to dispute the difference.

Protecting consumers from being sickened by the deadly bacteria isn’t as simple as trusting people with underlying medical conditions not to eat shellfish. Americans consume 2.5 billion oysters every year, half of which are eaten raw. Vibrio infections, which most often resemble food poisoning, are still underreported and underrecognized, even among individuals who are most at risk of developing a severe infection. Vulnificus infections are also underreported, but much less so than other Vibrio-related infections because they often require a hospital or emergency room visit. 

Seafood for sale in Orlando, Florida Jeff Greenberg / Education Images / Universal Images Group / Getty Images via Grist

“I’ve cared for many people with salmonella infections and water-borne infectious processes, but this is the one that is likely the most serious,” said Norman Beatty, an associate professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine who is also a practicing infectious disease doctor in Gainesville, and has seen limbs and lives lost to vulnificus. 

Identifying coastal areas most at risk

When it comes to preventing Vibrio infections, the work Magers and Kumar are doing could take some of the onus off of individual responsibility. The researchers are identifying which parts of the eastern U.S. coastline will be most risky for overall vibriosis infections, and vulnificus specifically, as waters warm. Alongside a group of microbiologists from the University of Maryland, including Brumfield, the scientists have developed a computer model that can predict how high the vibriosis risk will be in any given coastal county on the Gulf or East coasts a month in advance. The team trained their model by pairing the CDC’s count of Vibrio-related foodborne and waterborne illnesses from 1997 to 2019 with satellite data that measures the conditions that fuel Vibrio growth, such as water temperature and salinity. 

The system is far from perfect. When the model was first trained and evaluated, it was only 23 percent precise in pinpointing high-risk counties, meaning just one in four of the counties the program labeled as high-risk actually ended up seeing a vibriosis case in a given month. But it was very good at determining which counties were low-risk, capturing those regions with 99 percent precision. And it improved over time as the quality of the data they fed it got better. When they had the model do a test run on data collected by the Florida Department of Public Health from 2020 to 2024, 72 percent of total cases occurred in counties the tool flagged as high-risk for vibriosis. 

Sunil Kumar working on a Vibrio surveillance tool at the University of Florida. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Perhaps most significantly, the model was especially adept at predicting high-risk counties ahead of Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 — more than 80 percent of the vibriosis cases that occurred in Florida in the aftermath of those hurricanes were reported in counties the model had already flagged as high-risk. 

The tool is geared toward predicting water-borne infections, but it may also provide useful information to the shellfishing industry, though the system isn’t a replacement for the established protocols farmers already use — protocols that have proven to be effective, particularly in states that are aggressive about enforcing them. What the new tool could do, however, is supplement those Vibrio control plans, especially when an upcoming weather pattern deviates from the historical norm — something that has been happening a lot lately.

States currently use a rolling five-year average illness rate to calculate how many minutes or hours harvested shellfish can stay on a boat before moving into indoor refrigeration. In February, for example, Florida shellfishers have to get their oysters into refrigeration by 5 p.m. on the day of harvest. In July, they have no more than two hours, or they have to cool their catch in ice slurries on board. But these timetables don’t account for sudden temperature anomalies.

“It’s going to be 80 degrees this week in Alabama,” Andy DePaola, a Gulf Coast oyster farmer, told me in February. “Yet I can keep my oysters out for, like, 14 hours, because the rolling five-year average is 20 degrees less than that anomaly.” (DePaola is also a microbiologist who worked on Vibrio at the FDA for the better part of 40 years, and is the author of the 2019 analysis that diagnosed the “perfect storm” for Vibrio spread.)

But the shellfish industry doesn’t appear enthusiastic about the idea of assigning counties a risk category based on Vibrio prevalence. Vibrio researchers, by their own admission, haven’t done a good job of reaching out to shellfishers to find out how such a tool would work best for them. At an August meeting of the Delaware Bay Section of the ​​New Jersey Shellfisheries Council last year, the director of a shellfish research laboratory brought up the idea of using Vibrio predictive models to “determine optimal days to harvest to reduce the transfer of infection to humans.” A lengthy discussion ensued. The consensus, ultimately, was that the model was a bad idea, and could be “used against the industry.”

A member of the Texas Task Force 1 Water Search and Rescue Team is scrubbed down with bleach and soap in order to reduce the chances of Vibrio vulnificus infection after a day of running boat rescues in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on September 5, 2005. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist

Not all shellfishers are dead set against the kind of work Magers and Kumar are doing. “If Vibrio is an indicator of global warming, then that’s just an unfortunate bad luck scene for us,” McCormick, the Long Island oysterman, said. But it’s hard for him to see what relevance that research has to an industry that already has its own methods of controlling Vibrio. “In my mind that exists in one realm and the safety of our oysters is a whole different thing.”

As we move deeper into the 21st century, however, those two realms will have more overlap. If countries keep up their current pace of greenhouse gas emissions, most coastal communities along the East Coast will be environmentally primed for vibriosis outbreaks during peak summer months by midcentury. It won’t be a question of if there will be more vibriosis cases — it will be a matter of how to manage them. That’s the scenario Magers and Kumar are preparing for.

“In 30, 40, 100 years, these models won’t even matter because the risk is so high,” said Magers, the lead author of the predictive modeling study. “When it gets to that point, it would probably be a different kind of modeling strategy where we’d be modeling case numbers instead of infection risk.” 

Know the facts about Vibrio, a bacteria found in coastal waters and raw oysters

Stay informed about your risk level as you enjoy fresh shellfish and beach trips this summer. 

By Lyndsey Gilpin

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with States Newsroom.

What is Vibrio? 

Vibrio is a type of bacteria that has been around for hundreds of millions of years; researchers have identified more than 70 species. These species are mostly harmless, but some can cause infection. The bacteria thrive in warm, brackish (slightly salty) water such as estuaries and bays, attaching themselves to plankton and algae and accumulating in prolific water-filtering species like clams and oysters. Serious infections typically happen either through exposure to an open wound in saltwater or, more rarely, ingestion of raw shellfish that contain the bacteria. 

A grouping of Vibrio vulnificus bacteria as seen magnified through an electron microscope. Centers for Disease Control / Colorized by James Gathany / Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images via Grist

The concentration of Vibrio in coastal waterways is higher from May through October, when temperatures are warmer. Most U.S. cases are in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions. Vibrio is tasteless and odorless. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, estimates that about 80,000 cases of vibriosis (an infection caused by the Vibrio bacteria) occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 100 deaths. Florida has the highest number of cases, with about 20 percent reported from the Indian River Lagoon region, a popular recreation destination on the Atlantic Coast. 

What happens if you come into contact with Vibrio?

Most people are not at risk of developing illness, or they may have only mild symptoms. However, those with compromised immune systems can develop life-threatening infections. 

The majority of the 80,000 annual U.S. cases are caused by a Vibrio called parahaemolyticus, which most often infects people via the raw seafood they eat and usually leads to gastroenteritis, or food poisoning. The symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever and chills, weakness, fatigue, and headache. 

A different type of Vibrio, vulnificus, is much less common, but can cause severe illness. The infected wound may be red, swollen, and painful, or you may develop mild gastrointestinal issues such as watery diarrhea, stomach cramps, or vomiting. Symptoms typically appear within 12 to 24 hours and can last up to seven days. Healthy people tend to fight off the infection on their own. But if flesh on one or more extremities to bruise, swell, and decay, or symptoms of sepsis occur, it is a medical emergency. Vulnificus can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours. This severe infection is rare, but it has a 15 to 50 percent fatality rate; the vast majority of the 100 annual deaths are from this strain. A severe vulnificus infection is much more likely in people who have liver disease or are immunocompromised, elderly, or diabetic.

How concerned should I be — and how do I stay safe? 

You don’t necessarily need to avoid oyster bars or cancel your beach trip, but you should know how to stay informed and take precautions. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Be aware that there are many fearmongering headlines about flesh-eating bacteria, despite vulnificus being one of the rarest forms of Vibrio exposure. Vibrio doesn’t attack random healthy flesh — there must be exposure through an open wound (a break in the skin) or it must be ingested, most often through raw shellfish. People who get sick often have underlying health conditions. 
• If you don’t feel well after eating raw seafood or swimming in brackish water, don’t wait — go to the doctor. Some medical professionals, particularly those in areas where the bacteria hasn’t historically infected people, don’t know what vibriosis is. Advocate for yourself — ask for a test. 
• If you have liver disease, your risk is much higher than the general population’s. Keep an eye out for public health advisories from state and local health officials and avoid swimming in ocean water with an open wound or consuming raw shellfish in warm months. Note that ocean temperatures, especially along the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, have been elevated outside the typical seasonal range in some recent years.
• Be aware when eating raw shellfish, particularly raw oysters. It’s best to be confident that the shellfish was refrigerated and stored in compliance with government standards. The vast majority of foodborne Vibrio cases lead to food poisoning. (Food poisoning from bacteria is always a risk when eating uncooked shellfish and many other foods like salads or deli meat.)

How is climate change affecting Vibrio?

Climate change is making the world’s oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, more hospitable to Vibrio. The bacteria start getting active in temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and multiply rapidly as waters warm throughout the summer. Vibrio is expanding into places that were once too cold to support it, farther north on the U.S. East coast and in other temperate seas around the world. As it spreads, it serves as a first warning signal of changing marine conditions.

College students and others enjoy spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images via Grist

What’s being done to address Vibrio?

There’s a lot of research happening to better understand the risks these bacteria pose under changing environmental conditions: A group of microbiologists at the University of Maryland, alongside other scientists, have developed a computer model that can predict how high the risk of vibriosis will be in any given coastal county in the eastern U.S. a month in advance. The team trained its model, which is still under development, by pairing the CDC’s count of Vibrio-related foodborne and waterborne illnesses from 1997 to 2019 with satellite data that measures the conditions that fuel Vibrio growth, such as water temperature and salinity. It’s far from perfect, but it’s improving. And it was especially adept at predicting high-risk counties ahead of hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 — more than 80 percent of the vibriosis cases that occurred in Florida in the aftermath of those hurricanes were reported in counties the model had already flagged as high-risk. 

This story was originally produced by News From The States, 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. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Vallery entered guilty pleas on April 24 in two of three cases filed against him. A second OVI count — filed separately as a breath-test charge — was dismissed by plea agreement.

On the OVI conviction, Judge Robert Hart sentenced Vallery to 30 days in jail, suspending 27 of those days. Vallery received credit for 3 days already served and was credited with completing a Driving Intervention Program in lieu of the remaining jail time. He was placed on two years of probation under conditions that prohibit him from entering bars, consuming alcohol, using illegal drugs or marijuana, and require random drug and alcohol testing and completion of a formal drug and alcohol assessment and follow-up.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/tiffin-detective-pleads-guilty-to-ovi-gets-2-year-probation/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The extensions — filed simultaneously on Friday, April 24 with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services — cover the Toledo Molding & Die facility in Tiffin, the TMD plant in Bowling Green, and First Brands’ Cleveland corporate headquarters. All three letters cite the same reason for the extended retention: to allow the company “to continue to pursue sales of certain of its U.S. facilities.”

At the Tiffin plant, located at 1441 N. Maule Rd., 345 of the facility’s 407 workers have had their WARN notices extended through May 31. In Bowling Green, 263 of 302 workers received the same extension. At the Cleveland corporate office at 127 Public Square, 61 employees will be retained through May 31.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/first-brands-extends-deadlines-at-all-3-ohio-sites-tiffin-included/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The company made the announcement publicly via Facebook on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. In its statement, AFS said Fine Sinter had completed a review of North American demand and overall group production capacity, and determined that future production for the North American market will be sourced from other group facilities.

“A transition period of approximately two years has been established,” AFS said in the statement. “While the transition will take place in steps over the next couple of years, the first adjustments are anticipated to begin later this year.”

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/afs-closing-tiffin-plant-by-march-2028-175-jobs-to-be-cut/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I really want the voters to understand and know that their local law enforcement leaders and I are in full support of Beth Tischler for judge,” Hilton said in the video. “I would like to ask all of you to join me next Tuesday, May 5th, in support of Beth Tischler for Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas judge.”

Hilton is not simply a supporter. According to campaign finance records on file with the Sandusky County Board of Elections, Hilton serves as Tischler’s campaign treasurer — a formal legal role that makes him responsible for managing and reporting all campaign funds on her behalf.

Hilton is also a documented participant in the same network of relationships TiffinOhio.net reported on last week. He was one of six Sandusky County officials who signed a March 6, 2023, letter to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost requesting approval of the abatement of Finding for Recovery 2020-001, a $33,300 state audit finding against Smith. That letter called Braun a “disgraced former prosecutor” and characterized the investigation as having been driven by Braun for “inappropriate or retaliatory reasons.” The Ohio Attorney General’s Office approved the abatement in April 2023. No repayment was ever required of Smith.

Smith is seeking re-election in the May 5 Republican primary for his seat on the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas, Probate and Juvenile Division. Following TiffinOhio.net’s reporting on the abatement, Smith posted publicly on Facebook endorsing Tischler’s campaign, writing “#VoteForTheChangeWeNeedVoteBethTischler.” Tischler is challenging incumbent Judge Jeremiah Ray in the Republican primary for the General Division of the Court of Common Pleas.

The primary election is Tuesday, May 5.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Without naming his opponent directly, Click used a cactus emoji — an apparent reference to Eric Watson of Tiffin — to make the allegation. “Spoke to a farmer this morning who told me that 🌵 is placing signs on people’s property without permission,” Click wrote. “Not only is that unethical it’s also illegal.”

The post included an AI-generated image of a man in overalls holding a “No Trespassing” sign bearing the same cactus emoji.

Watson, reached by TiffinOhio.net for comment Tuesday, denied the accusation and pushed back on the manner in which it was made.

“Let me be clear: I do not put signs on anyone’s property without permission,” Watson said. “I’m a property owner myself, and I respect private property rights. Period.”

Watson said he believes Click may be referring to a situation that had already been resolved before the post was published. “If Gary is referring to the gentleman I spoke with several days ago, that situation was already addressed,” he said. “We had a respectful conversation, cleared everything up, and he knows I never placed anything on his property. That’s not how we operate our campaign.”

Eric Watson, left, is running an insurgent Republican primary campaign against incumbent State Rep. Gary Click (R) of the 88th Ohio House District. (Photos courtesy Facebook / The Rooster screenshot. Illustration by TiffinOhio.net)

Watson also noted that Click has him blocked on Facebook, meaning Watson would not have seen the post without it being brought to his attention. “Apparently he’s comfortable making accusations he thinks I won’t see or respond to,” Watson said.

Watson characterized the post as a distraction from substantive campaign issues. “This is the same kind of baseless stuff I’ve come to expect,” he said. “Instead of focusing on real issues, he’s pushing rumors. I’m focused on the voters and doing things the right way.”

Attempts to reach Click for comment were unsuccessful.

Click and Watson are competing in the Republican primary for Ohio House District 88 on May 5. Click has held the seat since 2021. Democrat Aaron Jones is running unopposed in the Democratic primary and will face the Republican winner in November.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Hundreds of trucking companies, mostly from out of state, have collectively racked up $5.2 million in unpaid tolls in two years, according to the Ohio Turnpike Commission. 

In something of a public shaming, the organization released a list of 315 companies that owe at least $5,000 in unpaid tolls to the turnpike, which connects northern Ohio to Indiana and Pennsylvania. 

About 90% of those companies are out-of-staters. The Turnpike Commission said it only added the companies to the public-facing list if they have been sent at least three invoices and been sent to collections via the Ohio Attorney General’s office. 

“It could be that they don’t have a transponder, or it could be that they’re ignoring their invoices,” said Brian Newbacher, a spokesperson for the Ohio Turnpike Commission. “It’s not fair to the people who do pay the tolls and it’s not fair to our operation.”

The $5.2 million is a small slice of annual revenue – the turnpike received $388.5 million in toll revenue last year. But unpaid tolls deflate the total. And turnpike officials suspect that truckers are removing front-facing license plates or otherwise obscuring them to avoid identification and toll payments, Newbacher said. 

Spokespersons for the Ohio Attorney General’s office didn’t respond to inquiries. 

The biggest debtor on the list, NYC Trucking Inc., owes about $156,000. Federal transportation records list a residential home in Philadelphia as the company’s address. The company didn’t respond to a phone call.

Some companies proved difficult to locate. Cargo Best Inc. owes about $121,000. Its physical address, listed in federal transportation records, is a loading dock in Chicago. Its mailing address is an office building in St. Petersburg, Florida. Several extensions from its corporate phone line are defunct. 

Uzboys Trans owes $120,000 in unpaid tolls. Alex Abdullev, who identified himself as the company’s owner, said he believes Ohio’s two-year-old open road tolling system (as opposed to the traditional, gated model) sometimes misses the transponder. 

He said neither his company nor his drivers shirked any tolls. 

“Why would I avoid tolls on purpose?” he said. 

However, he said the practice is real within the industry, and he expressed sympathy. Tolls are expensive, he said, and it has gotten a lot harder to make money moving freight. Gas prices are high and the freight market isn’t as strong as it was. 

“Everything is expensive nowadays,” he said. “In this trucking business, it’s hard to survive.”

Pamir Express, which lists a residential Pennsylvania address in federal transportation records, owes nearly $85,000. A person who answered a company phone declined to give his name. He said the Turnpike unfairly charged the company for both its cabs and its trailers, and he said the transponder didn’t work. He also said Pamir Express paid the full $85,000. 

Newbacher, from the Ohio Turnpike Commission, said the attorney general’s office has no record of payment as of Monday evening, but there is sometimes a 72-hour lag after payments are made online or by phone.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio state Reps. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, and Monica Robb Blasdel, R-New Waterford, introduced Ohio House Bill 307 last year, which would require local water providers to work with the state to identify lead services lines, develop a plan to replace these lines with safe alternatives, and execute this plan over a 15 year time period.

“Those lead particles can seep into your water unknowingly and that then could be poisoning your children, your family, your relatives,” Jarrells said. “Then the impact of lead poisoning has, unfortunately, devastating impacts on a child’s cognitive abilities.” 

The bill has had three hearings in the Ohio House Development Committee and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency would be responsible for overseeing this mandate if the legislation passes.  

The Ohio Legislative Service Commission estimates the costs associated with the bill is more than $16 billion over the next 15 years. Costs could be offset by grants, loan funding, and various charges and rates imposed on customers. 

“Everybody wants lead lines to be replaced, especially the mayors in our cities, but it’s a lot of money,” said Sarah Biehl, policy director at Ohio Mayors Alliance. 

“It’s not the kind of thing that local governments can just raise sewer rates, raise water rates, and make that happen.” 

The Ohio Municipal League would prefer to see direct funding for lead line replacement, said Kent Scarrett, the league’s executive director. 

“We just know that our smaller communities that have smaller budgets, tighter budgets and less financial bandwidth find it more challenging to do this work,” he said. “We would want the state to do more direct funding for this infrastructure because it benefits the state as a whole.” 

When asked about the cost associated with his bill, Jarrells responded by asking “what about the cost of families who are drinking this poisoned water?”

Jarrells is a survivor of lead poisoning as a child. He had take some speech pathology classes in elementary school due to some cognitive diminishment he believes were from lead poisoning.

“Lead poisoned victims are invisible because most people don’t even know what lead poisoning even is,” he said. “This bill, I believe, is the preventative measure to say we don’t want any more children poisoned by lead.”

Lead water service lines release low levels of toxin into drinking water that can lead to health issues. Drinking water can make up 20% or more of a person’s lead exposure, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act to stop the installation of any new lead service lines in 1986, but it did not require existing lines to be replaced.

Ohio has 745,000 lead service lines and nearly 4,000 Ohio children are tested for high levels of lead poisoning.

About 8.1% of the nation’s lead service lines are in Ohio, but only 3.6% of the population is in Ohio, according to the Ohio Environmental County report. Ohio ranked third in the nation for the most lead pipes in 2021, according to the EPA.

“We’re dealing with aging infrastructure that has yet to be replaced,” Jarrells said.

A federal mandate during the Biden administration requires states to replace lead service lines by 2037.

“We already have to do the work,” Jarrells said. “This bill is an attempt to codify a plan statewide.”

Many Ohio cities are already working on replacing lead service lines and Akron removed its last lead service at the end of last year. 

“We’re extremely proud of being one of the first cities of our age and size to be completely lead line free,” Akron Mayor Shammas Malik said in a news release. 

Akron started removing more than 55,000 lead service lines in the 1960s, said the city’s deputy service director Jeff Bronowski.

“The risk associated with lead is negligible now at this point,” he said.

The average cost to replace a water lead service line was about $5,000, Bronowski said.

Akron used some of their funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to help replace the lead lines, but their main source of funding for the last several years was through a state revolving loan fund.

“Your children are better and healthier for it,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a video message congratulating Akron.

For every dollar invested in lead service line removal in Ohio, the state would see a public health and economic benefit of $32 to $45, according to a 2024 report by the Ohio Environmental Council.

“It is going to cost a lot to do this, but the benefits are very high,” said Rob Moore, the principal for Scioto Analysis, a public policy analysis firm based in Columbus.

Replacing all the lead water pipes in Ohio would grow the state’s economy between $145 and $185 billion over the next 15 years, according to the report.

“If you care about economic growth, if you care about improving the future of Ohio, this is a good investment,” Moore said. “It is expensive, but the benefits are massive.”

Removing lead service lines in Ohio would lead to 9,700 fewer deaths from heart disease, 7,300 fewer cases of anemia, 3,800 cases of depression, 2,400 cases of coronary heart disease, 640 fewer infant deaths, 520 fewer cases of dementia, and 150 fewer cases of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder over the next fifteen years, according to the report.

Removing lead service lines could also lead to higher wages because of higher IQs, according to the report. 

“What the policy will lead to is the reduction of a public health crisis,” said Alicia Smith with Junction Coalition, a Toledo nonprofit organization.

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Testifying at the Ohio Statehouse in favor of or in opposition to a new piece of legislation can be a daunting proposition. But veterans of the practice say it’s a vital component to democracy in the state.

Nearly every day, state officials, leaders of advocacy groups, topic experts and Ohio residents who are impacted by proposed changes share their experiences and opinions in legislative committees.

Those who are well practiced in testifying before committees say there are rules that have to be followed, but the message and the passion a person has for a subject doesn’t have to get lost among the parliamentary procedure, or the potential intimidation factor as an Ohioan stands in front of a panel of elected officials.

“It’s incredibly important to remind them that they have constituents, and that there are people they need to listen to that have all sorts of opinions on what’s going on in the Statehouse,” said Catherine Turcer, head of voting rights advocacy group Common Cause Ohio.

You don’t need to know everything about the Statehouse to know important decisions are made there, and even people who are nervous about testifying in person can take a first step by making a phone call to their district’s senator and/or representative, Turcer said. Any way Ohioans go about it brings needed engagement in the legislative process.

“It gives you an opportunity to articulate what you’re worried about and to make your case about why you care about it,” Turcer said.

Six steps for testifying in person

For those who want to testify either in writing or in person, the Ohio Bar Association lays out the process in six steps. Before thinking of your testimony, find the bill number for the legislation of interest on the Ohio Legislature’s website. The first step to entering your comments into the record is identifying the committee in which the legislation is being considered – whether it’s in the Ohio House or the Ohio Senate – and when the committee will meet to hear testimony on the bill. 

Committees in both chambers have websites where they post committee times. It is also possible to sign up for individual committee mailing lists to receive meeting notices. Committees hold specific hearings for testimony supporting a bill and testimony opposing a bill, then they can hold further hearings for “interested parties,” or all other testimony.

Testimony on a bill can be submitted as written-only – meaning the testimony won’t be given in-person or subject to committee member questions – or submitted as an in-person statement, which the person reads to the committee on the day a specific bill is being considered.

Anyone who hopes to speak in front of the committee is required to fill out a “witness slip.” The House uses a slip that requests basic information. In the Senate, each committee has a different witness slip, according to the Ohio Bar Association. Witness slips can be requested by emailing the chair of an individual committee.

The legislature requires testimony to be submitted 24 hours in advance of a committee hearing, even if it’s being given in-person.

“However, sometimes circumstances will not accommodate this timeframe (particularly if committee notices come out late),” the Ohio Bar Association states in its how-to on testifying before a committee. “In these cases, it is okay to reach out to a chair’s office to see if they can work with you to get your testimony in.”

Turcer said a good way to understand what goes into testifying before a committee is by watching previous committee hearings on the Ohio Channel, where all committee hearings are streamed and recorded.

Confidence, personal stories and a cool head

When it comes to testifying in person, confidence in your argument, a personal story about the direct impact of an issue, and keeping a cool head are all good ways to make your mark, said Danielle Firsich, director of public policy for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, and a frequent testifier in committee rooms.

“If you are focused on the things that affect everyday Ohioans, the things that Ohioans are desperately begging the legislature to address in their everyday lives, you have already won,” Firsich said. “Because you are pulling the focus to where it is supposed to be, with a group of individuals who are supposed to be public servants.”

Turcer said some of the rules of committees – such as directing responses to questions “through the chair, to the representative/senator” – can be cumbersome, but it shouldn’t distract from the goal.

“Do your best, but do not worry,” Turcer said. “The goal here is to share your story and share what you’re about and why this issue is important.”

Things can get heated when issues mean a lot to the people talking about them, but the power a citizen has is to speak about the impact, not focus on the legislators in the room. 

“You’re there to influence them, so the goal is to focus on why the action is a problem, not why the person is the problem,” according to Turcer.

With her work in the reproductive rights space, Firsich has testified many times to challenge bills that she and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio believe fly in the face of Ohio’s constitutional amendment that established the right to an abortion. 

Those topics can bring about impassioned arguments, and back-and-forth with legislators in committees. Firsich said she focuses on scientific data and her decorum, while avoiding distractions that may come from being questioned by legislators.

“It’s why I don’t name-call, I don’t raise my voice, I always have a calm, considerate answer,” Firsich said. “Because I don’t want to give them that gift of throwing me off and getting me riled up.”

Speaking in front of a committee can be intimidating, Firsich acknowledged, but sharing a personal story helps.

“(Legislators) cannot argue the lived experience of a human being who is discussing something that verifiably happened to them,” she said.

Turcer added that it’s worth mentioning to legislators if those testifying traveled long distances to get there, to emphasize the importance of the measure.

The advocates recognize that even hours of testimony against a bill can end with passage of the legislation, as happened with a measure banning gender-affirming care for minors. But that doesn’t negate the importance of speaking up.

“I think that being in the historical record on these major issues, and at such a contentious time as this, is really going to matter,” Firsich said. “I think at the end of the day, people have to remember that they work for us, not the other way around, and we pay their salaries.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Access to victim compensation varies widely by state, with nearly 30% of applications denied nationwide in 2024, according to federal data from the Department of Justice’s Office of Victims of Crime. Incomplete paperwork is the most common reason, but strict eligibility rules, short filing deadlines and requirements that the crimes be reported to law enforcement also prevent many survivors from receiving aid, the report found.

Each year, tens of thousands of people survive shootings in the United States, often facing lasting injuries, trauma and financial strain. State-run crime victim compensation programs, which are primarily funded through the federal Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, are designed to help cover costs such as medical care, lost wages and funeral expenses.

But the Everytown for Gun Safety report highlighted significant disparities in how those programs operate. Average payouts, denial rates and eligibility rules differ across states, shaping whether survivors can successfully access support.

In some states, claims can be denied based on a victim’s prior criminal record or their perceived role in the incident — practices the report says can disproportionately affect Black applicants and rely on subjective or biased judgments.

The analysis also pointed to administrative hurdles, including complex applications, limited staffing and slow processing times. A lack of awareness of these programs further limits access, especially for people who do not report crimes to police. Federal crime data suggests that nearly half of violent crimes are not reported to police. 

New laws in New York, which went into effect late last year, made changes that the report’s authors cite as examples of how states can improve access. The laws expanded the time victims have to apply for assistance, increased reimbursement caps for funeral expenses and reduced reliance on police reports to verify claims.

Several states this year, including Alabama, California, Idaho and Minnesota, are considering legislation aimed at supporting crime victims. Some of the legislation would extend application deadlines and provide mental health services for young survivors of gun violence.

In 2024, victim compensation programs paid out about $405 million across nearly 219,000 claims nationwide, according to federal data cited in the report.

Funding for those programs has fluctuated over the past decade. The federal crime victims fund, which is financed through criminal fines and penalties imposed by the feds, dropped sharply from about $13 billion in 2017 to roughly $1 billion by 2023, leading to cuts to state programs and service providers. Congress has taken steps to stabilize funding in recent years, but funding has continued to fluctuate.

The Trump administration last year also froze or canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the federal Department of Justice, including an estimated $50 million for victim services.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@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. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But this week, the state appealed to a higher court based on a new law passed by the legislature in March, and the court put the trial on hold indefinitely. It will now be months before the lower court can proceed.

Dulong had complications that led to a miscarriage in November 2022 at 16 weeks of pregnancy, long before fetal viability. Under the state’s abortion ban, which had only been in place for a few months, the hospital sent her home to miscarry on her own. When that didn’t happen, severe infection started to set in 10 days later, when she was able to get doctors to agree to help. The experience left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The delay in the legal case feels like the state trying to silence her and the other plaintiffs, she said.

“It’s shocking to me that there’s anyone in this world that would have such opposing views to think that our voices don’t matter,” Dulong said in an interview. “How are they taking away our voice right now?”

In a motion to dismiss in February, the state argued it couldn’t be sued by the plaintiffs under a term called sovereign immunity, and in April, the Tennessee Legislature passed a law making it harder to sue the state on the constitutionality of a state or government action. Legislators passed another bill allowing the state to automatically appeal a decision related to sovereign immunity.

Nicolas Kabat, a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights who has been working on the case with the plaintiffs, said the state has tried to have the case dismissed four times without success, and said this is just the latest move to delay the trial. But he said the latest laws passed by the legislature allowing automatic appeals in the middle of a case, on the eve of a trial, make the situation unique.   

“There is nothing unusual about appealing an appealable order,” said Phil Buehler, press secretary for Tennessee Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, in an email Thursday.

Similar lawsuits are ongoing or have already been resolved in several states with bans, including Texas and Idaho, where state residents have challenged the law based on their personal experiences. Plaintiffs in Idaho won their case in April 2025, when a judge said the near-total abortion ban does not mean a pregnant patient’s death has to be imminent or “assured” to perform an abortion. Complaints are also pending related to Texas hospitals allegedly not complying with federal law mandating emergency room treatment for a patient who needs an abortion as stabilizing care.

Allie Phillips, the lead plaintiff in Tennessee, joined several other women to sue the state in September 2023, alleging that the abortion ban put their health and lives in jeopardy when they were pregnant. They asked the state to clarify the law so that health is considered in an abortion decision, not just an immediate threat to a pregnant patient’s life. The way the law is written, attorneys argue, is too vague to allow for those exceptions.

Phillips and Nicole Blackmon, another plaintiff, had fetuses with anomalies related to the development of vital organs. Blackmon couldn’t afford to travel out of the state for an abortion, and eventually had to stop working because the pregnancy was affecting her health. She delivered a stillborn baby in her seventh month of pregnancy. Phillips raised enough money to seek an abortion in New York, only to find when she got there that the fetus had already died.

After the court granted a temporary block on the law as it relates to pregnancy complications, the state passed several laws that affected the case. The first bill, meant to clarify the state’s health exception for an abortion, was enacted in April 2025 but didn’t solve the issue, Kabat said. The language still wasn’t clear enough, and the court agreed and allowed the suit to continue.

Kabat said the legal team will continue its effort to clarify Tennessee’s laws so that stories like Dulong’s don’t happen to others.

“No matter how long this takes, we’re going to get the trial, we’re going to get these stories heard and we’re going to seek accountability from the state,” Kabat 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. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“It felt like the rug was pulled out from under me,” said Nyla B., who did not want her last name used to protect her safety. “I remember how hard it was to get housing when I left. I didn’t want to go back to a shelter with my son, who has health needs. The thought of being homeless again — or going back to my abuser — came rushing back.”

Nyla and other renters housed through the federal Emergency Housing Voucher program face a looming deadline to find alternative housing assistance, after the Trump administration announced that funding will run out earlier than expected. The program, created by Congress in 2021 and initially expected to last through 2030, has helped people at risk of or experiencing homelessness as well as those fleeing domestic or dating violence, stalking or human trafficking.

But with funding ending this year, some renters have been provided little guidance on what to do next. Some cities are transitioning them to other programs, but others are struggling with how to ensure the recipients don’t end up homeless. Some housing advocates say cities had plenty of warning about the end of funding and yet some didn’t act fast enough.

Across the country, the program has provided roughly 70,000 vouchers across more than 600 local public housing authorities.

Unlike other ongoing federal housing programs such as Section 8, the Emergency Housing Voucher program was crafted as extra pandemic-era assistance. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced in March 2025 that funding would run out for the program in late 2026, effectively accelerating the end of the initiative years ahead of its original timeline. HUD said the money went faster than expected “due to historic increases in rental prices.”

HUD did not answer Stateline questions about the program.

In New York, Nyla was accepted into the program in the summer of 2022, found an apartment a year later, and moved in by fall 2023. Before that, she spent years living with relatives after leaving her abuser in 2016, because the lingering financial abuse and trauma made it difficult to secure stable housing on her own, she said.

Nyla received an initial notice warning of the program’s diminishing funds in August 2025. A second letter in March informed her that the program would run out of money in 2026. Now, she could be evicted and lose her home.

Transitioning to Section 8

As of April 15, more than 47,000  emergency vouchers remained actively leased, according to HUD. That’s a drop from roughly 59,000 in April 2025.

Vouchers are heavily concentrated in large coastal and urban states, with the two highest cluster of voucher recipients in New York City (5,125 vouchers) and the Los Angeles region (2,823 in the city and 1,624 in the county). Additional concentrations are spread across New York state agencies (1,772 and 1,385) and other major metros — including Chicago (615), Philadelphia (716), the Seattle area (689), and Santa Clara County, California (591).

Before the end of 2025, some housing authorities began preparing for the elimination of the emergency vouchers, such as adjustments made to the Chicago Housing Authority’s fiscal 2026 budget.

For city programs that had relatively low numbers of voucher holders, such as the 45 recipients in Iowa City, Iowa, the city will transition them into the regular Section 8 federal Housing Choice Voucher program without having to reopen the waitlist.

New York City Housing Authority officials originally planned to transition people from emergency vouchers to regular Section 8 vouchers, but were unable to do so because the agency lacks funding and is in “shortfall status.” The city said it sought a federal waiver from that requirement but was denied.

The agency says it has about 5,200 active Emergency Housing Voucher participants, but lacks the funding to move them into the regular Section 8 program. Instead, the agency is urging participants to apply for public housing by May 1, after which it will begin trying to match eligible households to vacant units.

But officials say they cannot guarantee placement in another program or apartment.

“Participants must complete a public housing application,” Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Sklar said in an email to Stateline. “NYCHA encourages residents to submit their application by May 1 and will be accepting applications on a rolling basis through the summer.”

But housing advocates believe the agency should have planned better, noting that the Trump administration signaled more than a year ago that funding would run out earlier than expected.

“That wasn’t a secret,” said Gabbi Sandoval Requena of New Destiny Housing, a New York City-based nonprofit that provides housing and services to domestic violence survivors and their families. “There is no public plan from NYCHA for how to transition these households, and the way this was communicated created a lot of anxiety and confusion. For domestic violence survivors, it could mean going back to their abuser — putting their lives and their children’s lives at risk.”

Other city options

A potential lifeline for those losing the emergency vouchers, a separate New York City rental assistance program called CityFHEPS — Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement — is subject of a legal battle over its cost. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his campaign had promised to expand the program but instead is continuing a lawsuit to block that expansion, saying it would cost too much money.

City agencies see no perfect solution to keep former emergency voucher recipients housed long term.

Roughly 2,000 additional New Yorkers get emergency housing vouchers from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development. Kim Moscaritolo, a spokesperson for the agency, said the city is attempting to transition those households to a separate, locally funded subsidy — HOME tenant-based rental assistance — that could extend assistance by about two years.

“We are limited by the resources that are available to us, because when a program that’s supposed to last for 10 years suddenly loses funding, it’s always a challenge to figure out how to keep people in their homes,” said Moscaritolo. “It’s not a perfect solution, but it at least extends the opportunity for these folks to have that same sort of housing stability.”

New York Democratic state Sen. Brian Kavanagh introduced legislation that would open up an existing state housing program to those at risk of losing their federal rental subsidies. He and other lawmakers also are fighting to increase state funding for that program.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles told Stateline it allocated 3,365 emergency housing vouchers. With the funding for the program set to expire in 2026, the program is no longer accepting new applicants and sent out notices regarding the sunset of the program, a spokesperson told Stateline.

Uncertainty for voucher holders

The loss of these vouchers have some recipients wondering how to stay housed. Do they go back to shelters — which advocates say could be further overwhelmed with evicted voucher holders — or, in some cases, go back to the chaotic situation that led to homelessness in the first place?

Many survivors of domestic violence struggle to leave because they don’t have enough money or a safe place to live. According to a survey by the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, 73% of survivors nationally said their financial situation affected their ability to leave an abusive relationship, while 28% of survivors reported being denied housing due to experiences with domestic violence.

A bill in Nyla’s home state, New York, would prohibit landlords from asking for information or proof from a victim of domestic violence in order to apply for housing.

Nyla recounted being denied on application by landlords when she first looked for apartments after leaving her abuser. She said that landlords were fearful that the situation she left would follow her and possibly cause issues in the apartments she was applying for.

She said finding an apartment became her second job.

“You’re judged before you even say you’re a survivor, and I’m already seen as not reliable, not worthy just for having housing assistance,” she said. “They double-check you, like they don’t believe what’s on your application. And I think regardless of the situation we left, we are deserving of a safe, stable home just like market-rate renters.”

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

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The convergence of scandals comes as the GOP field jockeys for the right to challenge Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, in a district redrawn last October by the Ohio Redistricting Commission to lean Republican by roughly nine points.

Merrin tied to covert smear site targeting Williams

The Toledo Blade reported on April 23 that a website titled “Liberal Fraud Josh Williams” carries digital fingerprints linking it to a consultant paid by former state Rep. Derek Merrin’s congressional campaign. Image metadata on the site lists Alec Faggion — connected to a firm receiving payments from Merrin’s campaign — as the author of multiple photos.

The site, which republishes Williams’ voting record and resurfaced sexually explicit Facebook posts, contains no “paid for by” disclosure identifying who funded it — only a copyright notice. A spokesman for Merrin told the Blade the firm was paid for campaign management services but did not respond to questions about the photo metadata.

Williams responded sharply, saying in a statement: “Promoting unfounded claims and recycled stories that have already been disproven is misleading and far below the standard voters in northwest Ohio deserve. My character and values are worth far more than any political campaign, and it is unfortunate Derek does not feel the same way.”

TiffinOhio.net’s full reporting on the smear site and its connections to the Merrin campaign is available here.

Williams’ own Facebook history remains unresolved

Williams, the Ohio House Majority Whip and the first Black Republican elected to the Ohio House in 50 years, is not entering the final week as an uncomplicated target of opposition tactics. The smear site republishes a series of sexually explicit and degrading Facebook posts about women that appeared on his personal account between roughly 2018 and 2022 — material first surfaced by Ohio political outlet The Rooster in May 2023.

Williams has maintained the comments did not originate from his account, telling the Blade that “no one has ever shown me where they appear on my Facebook ever.” But in a 2023 recorded exchange with The Rooster’s D.J. Byrnes, Williams confirmed authorship of one of the posts — a meme involving Hillary Clinton — and refused to apologize: “I made the post in 2018 being funny while I was in college burning time.”

TiffinOhio.net’s prior reporting on the posts is available here.

Sheahan faces relationship and workplace allegations

Former ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan, who resigned from the agency on January 15 to run for the seat, is fighting separate allegations. The Daily Mail reported on April 24 that an anonymous former Trump campaign worker — then 19 years old and serving as Sheahan’s junior staffer — alleges the two carried on a controlling two-year sexual relationship beginning in October 2020, when Sheahan was 23 and serving as state election operations director for Trump’s Ohio campaign.

The ex-partner described the relationship as “toxic,” “volatile,” and “controlling,” according to the report, which cited two additional sources who corroborated her account.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official separately told the Daily Mail that Sheahan, during her tenure as ICE’s second-in-command, repeatedly threatened to “rip their faces off” when confronting staff, and pushed to fire female employees she viewed as threats. “She’d always try to be the alpha in the room. There could never be a stronger woman,” the official said.

Sheahan’s Ohio campaign manager, Bob Paduchik, flatly denied the relationship allegations: “As the Ohio campaign manager, I can speak with authority that no such relationship existed. Madison was not and has never been in a relationship with a subordinate.” Sheahan declined to comment to the Daily Mail. DHS and ICE did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.

TiffinOhio.net’s full reporting on the Sheahan allegations is available here.

Five candidates, eight days

The five Republicans on the May 5 ballot are Williams, Merrin, Sheahan, Air National Guard Lt. Col. Alea Nadeem, and health care worker Anthony Campbell. Sheahan trailed at roughly 10 percent in a recent JL Partners poll, with Merrin and Williams considered the frontrunners.

The winner of the primary will face Kaptur, who has held the seat since 1983 and narrowly defeated Merrin by fewer than 2,400 votes in 2024. The redrawn 9th District now leans Republican at roughly 54.5 percent to 45.5 percent under maps approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission in October 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The two posts went up roughly 21 hours apart on Click’s public Facebook page in the closing week of the May 5 Republican primary for Ohio House District 88, where Click faces Tiffin business owner Eric Watson.

Sunday: ‘Turn down the rhetoric’

Click’s Sunday post opened with a reference to Saturday night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a gunman was apprehended outside the ballroom and President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. One Secret Service agent was struck in his bullet-resistant vest.

“I’m grateful that the president, his cabinet, the media and all that were in that room are safe,” Click wrote. “This is just another reminder that we ALL need to turn down the rhetoric. Policy, qualifications and etc are fair game. But Republicans, Democrats and social media all need to stop with the character assassinations and false narratives. Cheap shots and lies make you a worse candidate not a better one.”

Click went on to describe his own campaign approach in unambiguous terms.

“Personally, I am more focused on who I am and why I am best qualified rather than vilifying the character of my opponents,” he wrote. “That is why you don’t see me posting about them, or talking about them in my lit. I only talk about my policy, experience, and legislation.”

The post closed with a direct exhortation: “If you cannot run on your own character and reputation rather than. Diminishing your opponent, you might not deserve to win.”

Monday: ‘The Arizona Kid’

About 21 hours later, Click posted again. The opening line: “With one week till election it’s definitely crazy time.”

Click claimed he had received a text from “a Democrat group posing as a conservative organization” attacking Watson as “too conservative.” He provided no screenshot, organization name, or quoted text from the alleged message. He then offered a theory:

“The Democrats have openly expressed support for my opponent through multiple venues not because they like him but because they are confident that they can beat him in the fall but they know from experience that they cannot beat me. So they are trying to use some weird form of reverse psy op campaign to convince republicans to elect him in the primary so that they can have a chance in November.”

The post then attacked Watson directly: “Anyone who has lived in the district for the last six years, (which already excludes the Arizona Kid running against me), knows that I am the consistent, common sense conservative that fights for our district and the only one that can and will win in November.”

Click attached a three-panel cartoon meme depicting a stereotyped “Democrat” figure who pretends to be a conservative in one panel and pretends to be a liberal in another, captioned: “THE TRUTH: ‘I’M A DEMOCRAT. I JUST ADAPT TO FIT THE AUDIENCE.’”

The ‘Arizona Kid’ framing

Click’s “Arizona Kid” nickname for Watson, and his framing of his opponent as a recent arrival to the district, does not match Watson’s documented biography.

According to Watson’s campaign website, he was raised in Seneca County, attended Mohawk Schools, and graduated from Tiffin Calvert High School. He earned an Aviation degree from Sinclair Community College and degrees in International Studies and Aviation Technology from Wright State University. After the 2008 recession affected the aviation industry, Watson and his wife Emily moved to Arizona in 2011, where he started a custom hat business. They returned to Ohio in 2022.

According to Watson’s Ballotpedia profile, his family has been a part of the Seneca County community since they first settled on Honey Creek in 1832. Watson graduated from Calvert High School in 2001, indicating a Seneca County residency of approximately 28 years before his 2011 move to Arizona, plus the four years since his 2022 return.

Click himself moved to Ohio in 2006 from Indiana. According to his campaign biography, Click served as an associate pastor at Hillcrest Baptist Church in Richmond, Indiana, and later as a lead pastor at a second Indiana church before being recruited that year to lead Fremont Baptist Temple in Sandusky County. As of 2026, Click has lived in Ohio for approximately 20 years.

Click’s post sets the threshold for district legitimacy at six years — a window that excludes Watson’s recent return while leaving out the roughly 28 years Watson lived in the district before his Arizona business. Seneca County Board of Elections records previously reported by TiffinOhio.net show Watson voted only once in recent district elections, in the 2024 general election — a separate point about his recent voting history that does not address the “fresh arrival” framing.

The opponent Click praised

Sunday’s civility post did not name Watson. It did, however, single out the Democratic candidate Click would face in November if he wins next Tuesday’s primary.

“So far, I have to give my Democratic opponent credit for doing the same,” Click wrote. “While I don’t know him well, he has stuck to policy rather than character assassination and baseless attacks. I respect that about him.”

Click did not name Aaron Jones, but Jones — a Tiffin City Councilman, Army veteran, and manufacturing supervisor — is the only Democrat on the May 5 ballot in District 88.

The candidate Click did not extend that respect to is Watson, the candidate Click is actually running against on Tuesday.

Election context

Early voting in the Republican primary opened April 7. Election Day is Tuesday, May 5. The winner of the GOP primary will face Jones in the November 3 general election for the District 88 seat representing Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A group fighting to uphold an Ohio county’s ban on renewable energy has significant financial ties to individuals and organizations that promote fossil fuels, as a campaign finance report filed this week reveals.

Last summer, Richland County became one of the more than three dozen Ohio counties that bar utility-scale wind and solar in all or part of their jurisdiction under a 2021 law that places extra hurdles on siting renewables — though not fossil fuel projects. Richland’s ban applies to 11 of its 18 townships, blocking new solar projects of 50 megawatts or more and new wind projects of 5 MW or more.

What makes Richland unusual, however, is that residents who oppose the new restriction banded together and got it on the ballot for the May 5 election, allowing voters to decide if they want to restore the right to consider wind and solar projects on a case-by-case basis. If successful, the referendum could offer a blueprint for pushing back on the local renewable energy restrictions proliferating around the U.S.

The main group urging voters to keep the ban is Richland Farmland Preservation. Its recent campaign finance report is telling: As of April 21, the organization reported only five contributions, totaling $8,000. On the spending side, the campaign has agreed to pay more than $12,400 to the Republican political advertising firm Majority Strategies LLC for text messaging and digital advertising.

Majority Strategies has known links to the fossil fuel industry. For years, it has been the largest recipient of money spent by The Empowerment Alliance, which promotes natural gas use and has pushed for policies that define the fossil fuel as ​“green energy.” The dark money group was launched in 2019 by former executives for Ariel Corp., a gas turbine compressor manufacturer.

Even prior to the filing of its campaign finance report, Richland Farmland Preservation appeared to have a connection to The Empowerment Alliance: The campaign group’s treasurer, Dustin McIntyre, is also the treasurer for the Affordable Energy Fund PAC, which The Empowerment Alliance set up in 2021 to support Republican candidates in Ohio.

Meanwhile, the chief strategist at Majority Strategies, Tom Whatman, has a long history of working against renewable energy. He emceed a November 2023 anti-solar town hall in Knox County, which is just south of Richland County. Whatman was formerly the executive director for the Ohio Republican Party.

It also appears that one of Whatman’s other businesses is the largest donor to the Richland Farmland Preservation campaign. He shares an address with and signed the articles of incorporation for Whatman Farms LLC, which gave the campaign group $2,500, its largest reported donation.

For some clean energy advocates, it’s disingenuous for fossil fuel proponents to campaign against the industry’s competition under the premise of protecting farmland.

“It reminded me … of this overall abuse by either front groups or political operatives for the gas industry,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a national watchdog group that promotes clean energy. He noted that these organizations oppose solar and wind by framing arguments ​“around farmland preservation, while also advocating for lifting any limits on oil and gas extraction in those same rural counties.”

Emails in public records obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute show that Whatman received roughly two months’ advance notice of the July 2025 Richland County commissioners’ meeting in which the ban was unanimously adopted. In contrast, dozens of residents who showed up to oppose the ban at that meeting found out about it only days beforehand.

Neither Whatman nor Richland Farmland Preservation’s McIntyre has responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment. 

Canary Media also did not hear back from Ohio state Sen. Mark Romanchuk, a Republican, whose campaign committee gave $1,500 to Richland Farmland Preservation.

Romanchuk spearheaded efforts to label natural gas as ​“green energy” as part of last-minute amendments to an unrelated poultry bill that became law in January 2023. He’s also a primary sponsor of Senate Bill 294, which was introduced last fall and could preempt future solar and wind development in the state by defining it as neither affordable nor reliable. Renewable energy supporters have said such arguments are specious, noting that wind’s and solar’s levelized cost of energy is often on par with or cheaper than natural gas, and that batteries can store power for later use.

Compared to the yes-vote camp, the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development — which is encouraging Richland voters to overturn the renewable energy ban — spent more money but attracted a much broader range of donors, according to its campaign finance report. Individual contributions range from $5 up to $500. The group also reported cash and in-kind donations from the Natural Resources Defense Council and from Ohio Citizen Action, which has been public about its volunteers’ work to support the local group. Expenses include things like costs for a February fundraiser, rental fees for holding town hall information meetings, and advertising, printing, and sending out campaign materials.

For Emily Adams, the treasurer for Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, the number of donors and range of amounts show real buy-in from people in the county ​“to help get this message out to voters so voters can make an informed decision and protect their property rights.”

“I’m not surprised that people with direct ties to the natural gas industry would be giving money to the vote-yes campaign,” Adams said, when asked about the report from Richland Farmland Preservation. ​“I guess it just kind of shows that it’s not really about preserving farmland for them. It’s about preserving the land for their own use and personal gain.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The payment, listed as an “event sponsorship,” appears on a Schedule B itemized disbursement filed with the Federal Election Commission by the Husted for Senate committee. The disbursement is dated April 7, 2026.

CCV is headquartered at 62 East Broad Street in Columbus, directly across from the Ohio Statehouse.

The Southern Poverty Law Center first listed CCV — then operating under the name Citizens for Community Values — as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group in 2015. According to The Buckeye Flame, the civil rights watchdog reclassified the group as a hate group again in 2023 following publication of its Project CAPTAIN report on what SPLC described as “growing anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience and its primary manufacturers.”

The Buckeye Flame, in a July 2025 report on the designation, described CCV as a primary driver behind anti-LGBTQ+ legislation at the Ohio Statehouse, including House Bill 68, the state’s ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender minors. The group’s annual revenue has grown from roughly $480,000 to more than $4.37 million in recent years.

CCV President Aaron Baer has rejected the SPLC designation, calling the civil rights group “corrupt” and its hate map “heinous” in posts to X, according to The Buckeye Flame.

The April 2026 disbursement caps a yearslong pattern of public alignment between Husted and CCV.

A March 2025 investigative report co-published by ProPublica, The New Yorker and the Ohio Capital Journal documented Husted’s appearance at a CCV-organized “Prayer at the Statehouse” event in May 2024, when Husted was lieutenant governor. As CCV’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced him, Husted spoke about faith-based prayer meetings in the governor’s office and tied them directly to legislative wins for the group.

“We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” Husted said, according to the report. “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.”

The same report included a photograph showing Husted speaking with Baer outside the Statehouse during the October 6, 2023 Ohio March for Life rally — a CCV-coordinated demonstration aimed in part at opposing that November’s Issue 1, the constitutional amendment that ultimately enshrined reproductive rights in the Ohio Constitution.

After Husted was appointed to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by JD Vance in January 2025, CCV issued a statement including a photograph of Husted and his wife Tina speaking on stage at the group’s 2023 Ohio March for Life. Baer praised Husted as “a champion for Ohio’s children and families” and said Ohio under his leadership “has become a national school-choice leader.”

On April 3, 2025, Husted posted on X about an office visit from a CCV staff member, writing: “While in our Nation’s Capital to speak up for children and families, Ruth Edmunds of Citizens for Christian Virtue stopped in to see us. Ruth has given so much of her heart to fight for the lives of children, born and unborn.” Ruth Edmonds is CCV’s director of Christian engagement, according to her bio on the group’s website.

A month later, Husted and Ohio’s senior U.S. senator, Republican Bernie Moreno, delivered keynote addresses at CCV’s Columbus Gala on May 10, 2025. CCV billed the dual-senator keynote as part of “an elegant evening featuring a catered dinner, the latest updates on Ohio politics, and CCV’s strategic efforts to address the breakdown of marriage and family.”

Husted, who served as Ohio secretary of state from 2011 to 2019 and as lieutenant governor from 2019 until January 2025, was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by JD Vance after Vance became vice president. Husted officially launched his 2026 campaign on Dec. 12, 2025, in Columbus and faces former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in the November special election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The council, which represents 18 construction unions across 10 counties in Southwest Ohio’s Greater Dayton and Miami Valley region, cited Acton’s commitments to working families, cost-reduction plans, and labor values in its decision.

“Dr. Amy Acton understands the struggles of working families and how to address the issues that matter most to working people. She is exactly the kind of leader that our union members need,” said David Cox, the Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council. “Dr. Acton is the clear choice to build a stronger future for the entire state of Ohio, and we are proud to endorse her for Governor.”

The endorsement adds to a growing list of organized labor backing for Acton, including the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union District 1199, the Communications Workers of America, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Mine Workers of America, and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 6.

ACT Ohio, the statewide affiliated construction trades body, endorsed Ramaswamy — a Republican — for governor last year, with Executive Director Matthew A. Szollosi citing Ramaswamy’s “willingness to listen, engage and recognize the role that our members, contractors and training programs play.”

Acton drew a direct contrast with her opponent in response to the Dayton endorsement.

“I am honored to receive the endorsement of the Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council. Unlike my opponent, who calls Ohioans ‘lazy’ and ‘mediocre,’ I know that unions and a strong working class are the backbone of our state,” Acton said. “I am the only candidate in this race that will lower costs for working families and put Ohio’s working people above corporations and special interests. As governor, I will always stand on the side of labor.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It’s an historic sum for the physician who led Ohio’s health department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her campaign noted no previous Democratic hopeful has raised so much at this point in the calendar.

That announcement, which revised a previous quarterly fundraising total of $4.8 million, came after Republican Vivek Ramaswamy announced bringing in roughly $5 million from donors.

Despite that showing, however, money is likely a race Acton can’t win.

Although both candidates’ fundraising lands in the same ballpark when it comes to donors, Ramaswamy is a billionaire. Acton is not. In addition to raising $5 million in the first quarter, Ramaswamy cut his campaign a check for $25 million. That’s separate from the Super PAC supporting Ramaswamy, which has raised another $29.5 million thus far.

In a press release, Ramaswamy’s campaign described the candidate’s eight-figure cash infusion as making good on a campaign pledge to spend at least $30 million of his own money on the race.

Meanwhile, Acton’s campaign manager Phil Stein said Ramaswamy is “panicking.”

“He can continue throwing money at his campaign from the seat of his private jet, but Ohioans see right through his false promises,” he said.

Ramaswamy’s $25 million is structured as a loan, meaning he can use money his campaign raises to pay himself back.

Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton. (Photo by Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal.)

Acton’s Q1

Acton garnered over 195,000 total donations in the first quarter, 43% of which came from individual donors. Stein said in a press release these numbers are “proof that Ohioans are ready for change.”

“Ohioans are sick and tired of struggling to make ends meet,” Stein said. “They want a Governor who understands what they are going through instead of claiming affordability is a “buzzword”, and they know Amy is the only candidate in this race who will lower costs and build a state where all of us can thrive.”

Some of Acton’s biggest individual sums came from labor PACs, including United Healthcare Workers East and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Columbus. Acton also received donations from top executives at Amazon, Kroger, and Alpha Generation, an independent power producer.

Her biggest expense was about $1.4 million on digital advertising, nearly all of which went to Liftoff Campaigns LLC. According to POLITICO, the group launched in 2023 to help Democratic candidates align their campaign and fundraising messaging. Acton also spent about 50 bucks on digital ads on X.

The Acton campaign has taken every opportunity available to bash Ramaswamy for flying private. During the first quarter, Acton spent nearly $20,000 on airfare with commercial airlines.

That’s about half of what Ramaswamy spends each month to lease his jet.

Ramaswamy’s Q1

Among Ramaswamy’s big donors are leaders in finance, energy and real estate. He got five grand from an executive at an independent Pepsi bottling company, ten more from Sbarro’s CEO, and the leader of NetJets maxed out for Ramaswamy — giving the campaign $16,615.67.

The second biggest share of funding came in the form of a $290,000 transfer from Rob McColley’s campaign fund. Ramaswamy tapped the Senate President to be his running mate in January. The biggest contribution, of course, came from Ramaswamy himself.

In a press release, Ramaswamy’s campaign manager John Ewing bragged they were “resetting all fundraising benchmarks” and received support from 120,000 unique donors, 98% of whom gave less than $200.

“No gubernatorial campaign in Ohio history has ever put up numbers like this,” he said, “and it sends a clear message: Ohioans are fired up for Vivek, our campaign is growing, and we will win big in November.”

Even more notable is Ramaswamy’s campaign spending. During the first quarter, Ramaswamy spent $12.5 million — or roughly two-and-a-half times what he brought in.

The biggest share of the spending was a $10 million ad buy the campaign announced early last month. At the time, Ewing stated the ad blitz would continue until November.

Nearly $7 million of that total went to The Strategy Group, the Ohio firm that became embroiled in a $220 million ad scandal that contributed to the ouster of Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem. On social media, The Strategy Group stated it only received about a quarter million dollars to produce the ads.

In the first quarter of 2026, Ramaswamy spent nearly $120,000 to lease a private jet. That brings his total spending on the private plane to more than half a million dollars since the campaign began. Notably, the aircraft is leased through a company which Ramaswamy himself owns called V Leasing LLC.

Ramaswamy’s campaign also racked up more than $162,000 in credit card bills during the quarter, including more than $96,000 in the most recent billing period alone.

The Ohio Capital Journal asked Ramaswamy’s campaign if V Leasing earns a return in the private plane arrangement and whether it could provide an itemized statement of its credit card spending. The campaign did not respond.

V-PAC

In addition to his own personal fortune, Ramaswamy stands to gain from the largesse of others. The Super PAC supporting his bid for governor, V-PAC: Victors, not Victims, has raised $29.5 million since the beginning of 2025. At the end of March, it had $23 million in cash on hand.

Super PACs can run ads supporting or opposing specific candidates, but they can’t coordinate with a candidate’s campaign or make direct contributions. The groups also have to report their donors, but there’s no limit on what those donors can contribute.

A single donor, Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, has so far poured $20 million into V-PAC, including two $5 million contributions during the first quarter of 2026. Yass heads up the investment firm Susquehanna International Group and is worth more than $67 billion according to Forbes.

Back in 2024, when Ohio voters were considering an amendment that would’ve established an independent redistricting commission, Ramaswamy urged Ohioans to vote no. On social media, he complained the effort was being “funded by left-wing billionaires from out-of-state.”

The Super-PAC also received a quarter million dollars from the Scotts Company and $150,000 from the Sports Betting Alliance — a group representing online sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel. A for-profit charter school operator called Pansophic Learning pitched in another $25,000.

Outside of a $3 million ad buy in March of last year, the Super PAC’s spending has been relatively modest. The biggest expense during the first quarter was three $150,000 digital ad buys supporting Ramaswamy spread out roughly every four weeks.

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

They also asked that in proposing their own transparency rule, the feds make clear that they’re not pre-empting state transparency laws. 

The attempts at transparency are aimed at pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. 

The companies represent insurers in drug transactions.

The biggest three control about 80% of drug transactions, and each is part of a huge health conglomerate that also owns major insurers. In addition, the conglomerates own pharmacy operations, with one, CVS Health, owning the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar chain.

PBMs work on behalf of insurers in drug purchases. They decide which drugs are covered, and often extract large, non-transparent rebates from drugmakers in exchange for covering their products.

PBMs also create pharmacy networks and determine how much to reimburse them for what they sell.

The companies claim that PBMs are the one link in the drug-supply chain aimed at bringing costs down. 

However, inflation in drug prices has far outpaced that in the general economy since the PBMs arose. And research has shown that the current rebate system increases list prices of drugs.

Meanwhile, small-chain and independent pharmacies say that the companies that own PBMs have an obvious conflict when they decide how much to reimburse their own pharmacies as well as competitors. Many blame the conglomerates for a wave of pharmacy closures in the United States.

A raft of reforms has been proposed over the past decade by individual states and the federal government. 

Perhaps the most thoroughgoing is the Break up Big Medicine Act introduced earlier this year. It would prohibit companies from being both the provider of health services and the entity that determines how much consumers ultimately have to pay for them.

A more modest measure is a federal rule proposed in January by the U.S. Department of Labor. It would require PBMs working with plans subject to Employee Retirement Income Security Act to open their books to plan sponsors twice a year and allow sponsors to audit them.

Those sponsors are self-insured plans typically used by large employers. The idea behind the rule is to allow the employers to see if they’re getting the savings the PBMs promised them.

In their letter, the state AGs applauded the effort at transparency, but they asked the Justice Department to make sure state transparency laws aren’t pre-empted by it.

The question isn’t merely theoretical. 

A lower court held that states couldn’t impose requirements on multi-state, self-insured plans. But the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 overturned that decision.

Ohio and many other states have passed their own laws attempting to make PBMs’ actions more transparent. Last week, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond led 45 attorneys general in seeking assurances that the Department of Labor’s proposed rule won’t vacate the state laws.

“In a letter to the Department of Labor, the coalition urges the adoption of two additional protections,” Drummond said in a written statement. “First, they ask the Department to clarify that the rule does not override existing state PBM transparency laws. This is an important safeguard since PBMs have historically argued that federal law preempts state oversight. Second, they ask the Department to commit to coordinating enforcement with state attorneys general, including by referring potential violations of state law to their offices.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The historic criminal trial of two former FirstEnergy executives ended with a deadlocked jury and mistrial. Now, they’re set to stand trial for a second time on the same state criminal charges related to Ohio’s House Bill 6 utility corruption scandal.

It’s the latest twist in the largest corruption scandal in state history, in which FirstEnergy’s executives allegedly bribed officials to pass and protect HB 6, a 2019 law to bail out uncompetitive coal and nuclear plants and to gut the state’s clean energy standards. Judge Susan Baker Ross plans to begin the new trial on Sept. 28.

The effects of the scandal are visible to this day: Ohioans have less solar and wind power, pay higher energy bills, and continue to have more pollution as a result of HB 6.

The state’s criminal case has focused on allegations that the former executives paid a $4.3 million bribe to a company owned by the late Sam Randazzo, weeks before he became Ohio’s top utility regulator. Other claims include fraud, money laundering, records tampering, racketeering, and conspiracy.

The defendants, FirstEnergy’s former CEO Chuck Jones and its former senior vice president for external affairs Mik Dowling, have pleaded not guilty in the state case and in a pending federal criminal case against them.

FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 that it and its subsidiaries had paid approximately $60 million to dark money groups, which then funneled the funds to an organization controlled by former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder. Householder was convicted in 2023 on charges under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

State prosecutors did not include charges about Householder in their indictment, so Baker Ross kept that evidence out of the state case. She also excluded statements by FirstEnergy lawyers that fingered Jones and Dowling as the individuals who made the payments.

The judge’s rulings also kept jurors from learning about FirstEnergy’s admission in a deferred prosecution agreement that it paid the $4.3 million to Randazzo’s company shortly before he became chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. In return, FirstEnergy expected Randazzo to pass HB 6 and otherwise further the company’s priorities ​“as requested and as opportunities arose,” the company admitted in the agreement.

The two-month trial ended on March 31 when jurors made it clear they could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Minimizing confusion at the retrial

Ashley Brown, a former public utilities regulator for Ohio, said confusion could have led to the hung jury.

“The prosecutor failed to provide a full context of the legal ethics and regulatory aspects of the case,” Brown said.

Even when Dennis Deters, a current public utilities commissioner, was on the stand, the state’s lawyers did not ask him to explain some basic issues that are obscure for most of the public, Brown noted.

In the state’s retrial, a better grounding could help guide jurors when testimony again gets into the weeds.

Additional context could have helped rebut suggestions in testimony by other former FirstEnergy executives that money payments under secret side agreements were common and somehow acceptable in regulatory cases. In fact, regulators fined FirstEnergy nearly $19 million for that violation last fall.

Similarly, the first trial included multiple instances in which cross-examination by defense lawyers mixed up different aspects of utility regulation. The defense at one point treated money that FirstEnergy earned as compensation or incentives for offering energy-efficiency programs as equivalent to a charge it could collect under HB 6 for basically doing nothing.

“Most people don’t understand how that all works,” said Michael Benza, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who teaches criminal law and procedure. ​“So corruption can kind of hide in plain view because nobody understands what’s happening in the first place.”

The defense’s cross-examination also suggested that Randazzo couldn’t have been acting on FirstEnergy’s behalf, because ending the energy-efficiency standard cut off some of the fees the company had collected, and because Randazzo already wanted to get rid of the standard. On retrial, the prosecution might include evidence that FirstEnergy tried to put the brakes on Ohio’s energy efficiency standard as early as 2012. And, of course, one can still be paid unlawfully for something they otherwise want to do.

Brown also pointed out a question that the jurors sent the judge last month, asking for clarification about whether a bribe can happen before someone formally submits their application for a public appointment. From Brown’s perspective, the question was a legal one, to which the judge should have answered yes.

Trials’ timing may matter

The federal case against Jones and Dowling does not yet have a trial date, although one could be set next month.

As a general rule, what happens in the state criminal case should not affect what happens in the federal case, Benza said. Nonetheless, if the defense ultimately gets a verdict of not guilty in the state case, it could change how federal prosecutors approach their trial.

Because the federal case alleges violations of Ohio law in order to prove there was a pattern of corrupt activity under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, however, the state case might well influence the federal one. A not-guilty verdict on charges related to bribing Randazzo could block that part of the case dealing with allegations about him, suggested David DeVillers, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio who is now in private practice with Barnes & Thornburg in Columbus. The federal government could still move ahead on the allegations relating to Householder.

For now, both the prosecution and defense will hope that the jury comes back with a unanimous verdict in their favor the next time around. But, Benza stressed, a ​“not guilty” verdict is not an acquittal.

“‘Not guilty’ does not mean you’re innocent,” he said. ​“The jury by saying ​‘not guilty,’ at best, is saying that the prosecution failed to prove an element or elements of its case.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

About two hours after the shots were fired, Trump, still wearing his tuxedo, addressed a roomful of reporters also in formalwear at the White House briefing room. Trump said one officer had been shot in the attack, but was saved by “a very good bulletproof vest.”

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a separate press availability that the officer and the suspect had been transported to local hospitals. 

The suspect was armed with a shotgun, handgun and multiple knives, Washington Metropolitan Police interim Chief Jeffery Carroll said. As of Saturday night, investigators believed the suspect acted alone, though a full investigation was underway, Carroll said.

He would be prosecuted on two charges, using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said. He would be arraigned in federal court Monday, she added. 

No other casualties were reported, and the U.S. Capitol Police said all members of Congress in attendance were unharmed. The high-profile press dinner intended to honor the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel, often dubbed “nerd prom,” attracts about 2,600 attendees who pay $480 each for tickets.

Charged security checkpoint

The suspected shooter, who law enforcement said was a guest at the hotel, was a man from California who charged “a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons,” from about 50 yards away, Trump said. 

He posted a photo on his social media platform of what appeared to be the suspect, lying shirtless flat on the floor. Some news media identified the individual but States Newsroom cannot yet confirm those reports.

Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said in a statement on social media the incident occurred near the main magnetometer screening area at the dinner.

“He was running full-blast,” Trump said. 

Federal law enforcement on Saturday night was pursuing warrants to search the man’s home, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the briefing with Trump.

Asked if he believed he was the target of the attack, Trump said, “I guess.” 

Trump said he’d been targeted, now apparently in a third assassination attempt in two years, because of his impactful record as president.

“It comes with the territory,” he said. “You take a look at what’s happened to some of our greatest presidents, and it doesn’t happen to people that don’t do anything,” he said.  

In a social media post before briefing reporters, Trump said he was in “perfect condition.”

Rescheduled dinner

At the White House briefing room podium, Trump praised the law enforcement response and committed to rescheduling the event in the next 30 days. The dinner, an annual celebration of the White House press corps, is “dedicated to freedom of speech,” he said.

“And we’ll make it bigger and better and even nicer,” he said. “I just want to thank everybody that was involved. I also want to thank the press, the media. You’ve been very responsible in your coverage, I will say. I’ve been seeing what’s been out.”

An initial press pool report from the hotel after the shooting occurred, sent at 8:39 p.m. Eastern, said “There was several loud bangs and the Secret Service with guns drawn rushed the pool out of the room. (The) Secret Service pushed us back screaming ‘Shots fired.’”

Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News said on social media shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern that she was behind the podium with other guests, “in a hold,” and Trump was still down the hall and did not want to leave.

Trump himself confirmed that in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. 

“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” he wrote. “They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Frightened reporters seated at tables in the Hilton ballroom dove for the floor. Cabinet members and White House officials were hustled out of the room.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said on air that he heard “a really loud blasting away” and the next thing he knew he was being pushed to the floor by police. “I was just a few feet away from the gunman, and it was a really scary moment,” Blitzer said.

Reagan shooting

The annual formal dinner is hosted by an organization made up of journalists who cover the White House. Trump’s invitation to the event had been controversial given his frequent personal attacks on reporters and the news media in general.

The Hilton was also the site of another attack on a president when on the afternoon of March 30, 1981, gunman John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan while he was leaving the hotel. Reagan recovered after a stay in the hospital. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, also was wounded, as were police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy.

Details of the shooter’s motive and plan Saturday were not immediately clear. Trump said the public would know much more about him in the coming days.

Trump was injured in an assassination attempt during a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Another suspected assassin was arrested near Trump’s home in Florida on Sept. 15 of that year.

Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The vote, held at the Sandusky County Engineer’s Office in Fremont, filled the seat held by former commissioner Charlie Schwochow, whose last day was March 31, according to the Fremont News-Messenger. Vice Chairman Ben Decker presided as acting chair to avoid a conflict of interest with Smith’s candidacy. Of 41 voting members, 32 attended.

The central committee was tasked with making two appointments simultaneously: filling the remainder of Schwochow’s term and naming the candidate who would appear on the November 3 general election ballot to fill the final two years of the seat. The committee approved making both appointments to the same candidate by unanimous voice vote.

Of nine original candidates, all but three were eliminated in the first round after a five-way tie for last. Smith advanced past Sandusky Township Trustee Paul Lotycz and Barbara Bristley to win on the third ballot. He was sworn in April 20 by Sandusky County Juvenile and Probate Judge Brad Smith, no relation, in a ceremony at the county commissioners’ office.

“I’m very excited and looking forward to working for the citizens of Sandusky County,” Smith told the News-Messenger after the vote. “We’re going to make a difference and do everything we can to make the county a better place to be.”

Smith resigned from his day job after the appointment and stepped down April 20 from his seat on the Sandusky County Board of Elections.

A 2019 forced resignation from county court

Smith’s appointment comes seven years after he was pushed out of a different county job following documented criticism that he was using county time to conduct political business — the very kind of activity his new role on the county board of commissioners is meant to oversee.

Justin Smith at a meeting. (Photo via Facebook)

In March 2019, Smith resigned from a deputy clerk position in Sandusky County Court District No. 1 in Clyde after being verbally reprimanded, according to personnel records reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. Smith told the Fremont News-Messenger at the time, “I was forced to resign,” and denied any wrongdoing. “It was the right thing to do. It was a negative work environment. I have done nothing wrong,” Smith said, declining to elaborate.

The political-business findings were the throughline of the supervisor’s complaints. Then-Sandusky County Clerk of Courts Tracy Overmyer reviewed two months of Smith’s outgoing phone calls and concluded that he had repeatedly contacted the county board of elections from work, along with making other calls that appeared related to his political role, the personnel records show. One specific call documented in the file was placed at 4:25 p.m. on Feb. 6, 2019 — the filing deadline for the May 2019 primary — to check which candidates had filed petitions. Smith acknowledged that call but denied making other political calls on work time.

Overmyer’s broader assessment, in a Nov. 30, 2018 memo contained in the file, was that Smith was failing to demonstrate adequate knowledge of the job and was turning in inaccurate work.

The file documented multiple specific case-handling failures. In February 2018, Smith failed to dismiss a temporary protection order against a woman who was later arrested in Ottawa County for allegedly violating it. The order should have been dismissed Feb. 27, 2018, but Smith did not enter the dismissal until May 10 — one day after the woman was arrested. Charges against her were ultimately dropped after the error was discovered. In September 2018, Smith and another clerk restored driving privileges to a defendant whom Judge John Kolesar had not granted privileges; the clerk’s office later sent corrective messages to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

An Aug. 31, 2018 letter of reprimand cited Smith for failing to correctly serve eviction paperwork on multiple occasions, illegible handwriting that affected scanned records, continuing to ask questions after training was complete, and leaving cases open. An earlier performance review covering 2016 to March 2017 commended Smith for working hard and staying busy throughout the day, but flagged concerns about his attention to detail and the legibility of his handwriting.

From city council to county commission

Smith has chaired the Sandusky County Republican Party since 2008, when he was elected at age 23 — at the time the youngest political party chairman in Ohio, according to prior News-Messenger reporting. He served on the Fremont City Council representing the First Ward from 2017 until November 2023, when he resigned to take a seat on the Sandusky County Board of Elections following the death of board member Peg Rettig. He had previously served on the elections board from 2010 to 2015.

Smith works as a permanent substitute teacher for Clyde-Green Springs Schools at Clyde High School, and previously substituted at Fremont Middle School. He won his Ward 1 council seat in 2017 by two votes — 328 to 326 — over Don Nalley, and was reelected in 2021 against Cassandrea Tucker.

The other finalists and the road ahead

Lotycz, who finished second in the central committee vote, is on the May 5 Republican primary ballot for the commissioner’s seat held by Russ Zimmerman, according to the Sandusky County Board of Elections candidate list. Zimmerman’s term ends Dec. 31, 2026, and he is leaving office at the end of his second term, the News-Messenger reported. Lotycz is a Sandusky Township trustee who previously ran his family’s floor-covering business and now drives a school bus for Fremont City Schools.

Bristley, the third finalist, is on the May 5 primary ballot for a seat on the central committee in Sandusky Township D, according to the elections office. She is a retired accountant who previously worked at Whirlpool and has led American P.A.G.E., a Sandusky County conservative group focused on government transparency.

Schwochow’s reasons for stepping down have not been publicly disclosed. At the swearing-in ceremony, Smith told Schwochow, “I have very tough shoes to fill, and you have done a great job for the county, Charlie, and we are all praying for you.”

Commissioner Scott Miller, who was out of town for the central committee vote, submitted a letter on the appointment process that was read by Zimmerman, who urged the committee to choose someone “electable, come November.” At Smith’s swearing-in, Miller called Smith “a good leader” and said the county was lucky to have him.

Under Ohio Revised Code, when a partisan county officeholder vacates a seat, the central committee of the same political party fills the vacancy. The seat will appear on the November 3 general election ballot for the final two years of the term.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Toledo Blade reported Thursday that a website titled “Liberal Fraud Josh Williams” — which publishes Williams’ voting record, legislation he has supported, and sexually explicit Facebook posts Williams has publicly and repeatedly denied posting — carries image metadata listing Alec Faggion as the author of several photos on the site. Public financial disclosure records show Faggion owns AMF Political LLC, a Republican consulting firm based in Lansing. Campaign finance records reviewed by the Blade show Derek Merrin’s campaign made payments to AMF Political in both February and March. No other candidate in the race paid the firm.

The site carries no “paid for by” disclosure identifying who funded it — only a copyright notice with all rights reserved. A spokesman for Merrin’s campaign told the Blade the firm was paid for campaign management services, but did not respond to questions about Faggion’s connection to the photos. TiffinOhio.net also reached out to Merrin’s campaign and had not received a response at the time of publication.

Williams responded sharply. “Promoting unfounded claims and recycled stories that have already been disproven is misleading and far below the standard voters in northwest Ohio deserve,” he said in a statement. “My character and values are worth far more than any political campaign, and it is unfortunate Derek does not feel the same way.”

Williams added that he had once supported Merrin — backing his bid for Ohio House speaker in 2023 and his 2024 congressional campaign against Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur, which Merrin lost by fewer than 2,400 votes.

The sexually explicit posts at the center of the site are not new. TiffinOhio.net previously reported on the posts, which date to roughly 2018–2022 and were first surfaced by Ohio political outlet The Rooster in May 2023. Williams has maintained they did not originate from his account. “No one has ever shown me where they appear on my Facebook ever,” he told the Blade. “I’ve said it since the beginning, but the comments were never made by me, and I don’t even know who made them up.”

Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, told the Blade that opposition websites are common in contested primaries and carry broad First Amendment protection — but that the absence of any attribution is notable. “Oftentimes a ‘paid for by’ can be a PAC or a political entity,” Loge said. “They could have a super benign name … that doesn’t tell you anything, but that’s pretty much the disclosure.”

The Blade’s report landed on the same day that a separate candidate in the race faced her own damaging story. TiffinOhio.net reported Friday on allegations from an anonymous former Trump campaign worker who told the Daily Mail that Madison Sheahan — then 23 and serving as state election operations director for the Trump campaign’s Ohio operation — engaged in a secret two-year sexual relationship with her beginning in October 2020, when the woman was 19 and briefly in a direct reporting line to Sheahan. The accuser described the relationship in three words: “Toxic. Volatile. Controlling.” Sheahan’s Ohio campaign manager, Bob Paduchik, flatly denied the account. “Madison was not and has never been in a relationship with a subordinate,” Paduchik said.

The five Republicans on the May 5 ballot are Williams, Merrin, Sheahan, Air National Guard Lt. Col. Alea Nadeem, and health care worker Anthony Campbell. The winner faces Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, in a district redrawn to lean Republican by roughly nine points under maps approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission in October 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

You’ve probably noticed your electric costs creeping upward. You’ve maybe even read our coverage about it. 

But the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog organization that’s critical of investor-owned utilities, noticed a specific labor cost increase: electric companies’ CEO pay. 

Here’s what the CEOs of the major, investor-owned electric companies operating in Ohio made last year. 

1. American Electric Power (central Ohio), Bill Fehrman $36,601,524 
2. Duke Energy (southwest Ohio), Harry Sideris $13,652,630 
3. FirstEnergy (northern Ohio), Brian Tierney $13,337,245
4. AES (southwest Ohio), Andrés Gluski $9,153,896

Making their move

National House Democrats are making a play for two Ohio Trump districts.

Per plans shared exclusively with Andrew, House Majority PAC, the Democrats’ main super political action committee focused on the House, plans to spend $10.8 million on TV and digital ads in Ohio later this year.

That number includes $4.7 million in spending to target GOP Reps. Mike Turner of Dayton and Mike Carey of Columbus. Both won reelection comfortably in 2024 and currently represent districts that President Donald Trump won by 7 and 10 percentage points, respectively.

Notably, the PAC is spending nearly as much protecting vulnerable longtime Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo ($3 million) as it is targeting Turner ($2.9 million). Most of the spending is on TV ad reservations, which could change over time if the group decides to spend more or less on any given race.

The increased spending follows years of Democrats pulling resources out of Ohio as the state has trended in Republicans’ favor, and it is the latest sign that Democrats believe they will benefit from a favorable national political environment in 2026.

On a related note, the top Senate Republican PAC recently announced plans to spend $79 million defending GOP Sen. Jon Husted, the most the group plans to spend in any battleground state, to help him in the November election against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Click here for more details.

Property tax abolition campaign to show its hand while opposition gets organized

It’s far from clear that the grassroots campaign seeking to abolish property taxes in Ohio will manage to qualify for the November ballot.

That’s not stopping a broad coalition of emergency responders, social service agencies, unions and business groups from launching what looks like the early outline of an opposition campaign against the proposed amendment. 

A group called Ohioans to Protect Public Services announced its existence last week, complete with a website and a slick campaign-style ad. The group warns that abolishing property taxes would translate to huge income tax and sales tax increases and/or tens of thousands of job cuts for teachers and first responders. 

The development reflects widespread worry about the amendment among tax-funded entities like libraries, schools and parks.

Jen Detwiler, a consultant who’s worked on ballot issue campaigns in the past, called the website a “public education campaign.” 

“It’s important for folks to know what the consequences are,” she said.

Meanwhile, Citizens Against Property Taxes, the citizen group behind the proposal to abolish property taxes, plans a press conference in Geauga County next Wednesday. The event will take place behind the Resolute Desk “in the legendary Oval Office replica of Northeast Ohio,” according to the group’s leader, Brian Massie.

Massie has been tight-lipped about his group’s progress, for months saying merely that his group had collected fewer than 200,000 voter signatures. It needs to get roughly 413,000, including a minimum number from 44 counties, before the end of June to qualify for the November ballot. If the group manages to make the ballot, it would be the only ballot issue campaign in recent memory to do so without major financial backing. 

In a statement, Massie said that it’s time to provide the campaign’s 5,000 volunteers with a status update.

“It is also time to put the do-nothing politicians on notice,” Massie said.

Downballot blues

Imagine you’re a candidate for a downballot statewide office, campaigning tirelessly across the state and asking everybody you know for money.

With that in mind, consider this new poll conducted ahead of the May 5 primary election by Bowling Green State University. 

The poll found remarkably inconclusive results for Republican and Democratic primary elections for Ohio secretary of state, attorney general and treasurer. Democrat Allison Russo hit the poll’s high-water mark, getting 32% support compared to the 8% number for her primary opponent, physician Bryan Hambley, with 60% of voters undecided for secretary of state. (ICYMI, Andrew profiled that race this week as a rare example of an Ohio primary contest featuring two well-funded Democratic candidates.) 

Meanwhile, other races like the Democratic attorney general primary between Upper Arlington attorney John Kulewicz (14%) and ex-state lawmaker Elliot Forhan (15%) or the Republican state treasurer primary between state Sen. Kristina Roegner (18%) and ex-state Rep. Jay Edwards (17%) were a shrug-your-shoulders wash, with roughly 70% of the electorate undecided. 

The Republican secretary of state primary between state Treasurer Robert Sprague (22%) and ex-Air Force intelligence officer Marcell Strbich (10%) was relatively clearer, but “undecided” still would win by a landslide if it were eligible to run.

David Jackson, a Bowling Green political scientist who worked on the poll, had an unsurprising take: The results show voters aren’t paying close attention to these races and haven’t really thought about them. The candidates will spend what little money they have through the primary trying to mobilize whoever they think is most likely to vote for them.

“I think the Senate race and the governor’s race are collectively taking a lot of the oxygen,” Jackson said.

An anti-vaccine lobbyist and economic developer clash in GOP primary

Because of big-picture forces like rampant gerrymandering and geographic polarization in politics, few Ohio House seats will produce genuinely competitive races in November. 

But one Republican primary race, in the Akron suburbs, caught Jake’s eye. Mike Kahoe, a 24-year-old economic developer with ties to the lieutenant governor’s office, is running against Stephanie Stock, the president of Ohio’s preeminent anti-vaccine lobby. 

The possibility of someone with a decade of experience attacking Ohio’s vaccination laws reaching public office comes as Republican confidence in vaccines and Ohio’s school immunization rates are waning and also as the once-eradicated and vaccine-preventable measles is on the rise in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. 

The winner will face off against Noah Spinner, a corporate attorney from the area.

Supreme Court rules against submeterers said to drive up electric costs

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that submetering companies are public utilities and ought to be regulated as such. 

The ruling means tens of thousands of renters could soon enjoy the benefits of price controls and consumer protections that traditional utility companies have been subjected to for decades. 

Renters, especially in Columbus, where the industry has concentrated, have long complained of unfair water and electricity prices from the submeterers. Companies such as Nationwide Energy Partners say their customers don’t pay any more than those of American Electric Power, the regional utility.

Ratepayer advocates called it a major win. 

“No company gets to sell essential electric service in Ohio without playing by the rules,” said Maureen Willis, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, in a statement. “The court’s ruling enforces that.”

Read more from Jake here.

In the news

Special interest spotlight: Cryptocurrency, sports betting and school-choice interests are among the outside groups funding Ohio political candidates this year. Andrew breaks down who’s giving how much to whom.

Early voting 101: Planning to vote early? Andrew made this Q&A of common questions such as, when do extended in-person voting hours begin, when does your absentee ballot application need to be returned, or which third parties are allowed to handle completed absentee ballots. 

Ohio State investigation: OSU investigated itself over Ted Carter. Amy Morona explains why experts say that’s a big deal.

What’s with all the giant letters on Ohio campuses? Amy Morona noticed the trend and reports many colleges are adding the big letters as they rethink how people interact with institutions in the social media era.  

School funding ‘unfair’: Leaders from public school districts in Summit County this week shared a clear message: The state’s commitment to their students is broken, given funding policies that direct public dollars to charter and private schools. Read more from Signal Akron’s Carissa Woytach.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A group of citizens seeking to abolish property taxes in Ohio said Thursday they’ve accumulated about 305,000 signatures – about 108,000 shy of the legal minimum and nearly halfway toward their goal as a July 1 deadline approaches. 

Brian Massie, leader of the Official Committee to Abolish Ohio’s Property Taxes, said organizers have satisfied a requirement to gather a requisite number of signatures in 44 of 88 counties. This, in theory, would make it easier to gather signatures in the future without worrying about geography. 

“Help us push back against the socialist tyranny that has taken over the Ohio statehouse,” he said. “If we fall short of our 620,000 goal, we will decide if we will risk turning in all the signatures, hoping we have met the required signature count.”

The figures Massie provided, which cannot be independently confirmed, suggests what some see as a quixotic idea has a viable chance of becoming a political reality. Conversely, Massie openly acknowledged the reasonable likelihood of coming up short. Campaigns typically aim to overshoot the required number of signatures as some will likely be deemed ineligible.

If they clear the roughly 413,000 signature requirement by July 1, the question of property tax repeal would go to voters statewide on the 2026 ballot. 

The signature number claims are a shot across the bow to Ohio state government leaders, school officials and others with a stake in the state’s finances. Abolishing property taxes would eliminate $20 billion in funding for schools, libraries, social services, emergency response and other government services. 

The press conference was steeped in unusual rhetoric and pageantry. It took place in a faux version of the Oval Office of the White House in a residential home in Geauga County. Two of five committee spokespeople wore sunglasses. Massie signed what he called an “Ohioans Declaration of Independence.” He invoked the Boston Tea Party, called to establish a Department of Government Efficiency in Ohio and to consolidate K-12 schools. 

Massie rejected the notion that the organizers should “replace” the billions in property tax revenue the state receives each year and called Ohio a “socialist” state on multiple occasions. 

Massie said the group would decide in a couple of months whether to submit the signatures on hand or hold them for a potential second attempt next year.

“I’m thinking probably the middle of June, will probably hold another press conference, or we will issue a press release,” Massie said. 

A high-stakes crossroads could be coming in June

If the issue were to qualify for the ballot, it would be an existential threat to many Ohio institutions, and likely would be viewed as nothing less than a crisis by political, government and business leaders. This is why a broad coalition of public safety agencies, business groups, organized labor, school officials and others launched an anti-amendment education campaign last week, which offers an early outline of an eventual formal opposition campaign.

“Every Ohioan relies daily on essential services that are funded by property taxes – police, fire, and EMS services, road maintenance, senior care, public schools, services for at-risk kids and those with developmental disabilities, local parks, and more,” said Jen Detwiler, spokesperson for Ohioans to Protect Public Services, an organized opposition to Massie’s campaign.  

“Abolishing property taxes sounds good on the surface. But doing so without a plan for what comes next will only create chaos and trigger big increases in sales and income taxes, drastic reductions in local services, or both.”

Still, the decision facing the campaign in June could come down to a calculated risk. Here’s why.

If Citizens Against Property Taxes were to turn in more than the minimum 413,487 signatures before July 1, elections officials would then review them for accuracy. 

It’s common for many signatures to be rejected, most commonly when the information voters provide fails to match what’s in the voter file. This is why ballot issue campaigns commonly collect extra signatures, sometimes double the minimum requirement. 

If, after this review, the effort is found to have fallen short – either in the overall number, or in any individual county – property tax abolition backers would then get an extra 10-day “cure period” to try to make up the difference. Sometimes this cure period is needed for a ballot issue to get over the hump – such as was the case when a recreational marijuana ballot issue qualified in 2023. 

If, after the cure period, the campaign still falls short of either the 413,487 signature requirement or the 44-county requirement, the effort would be dead, and the petitions would be worthless.

On the other hand, the campaign could keep the petitions and try to submit them for the November 2027 election. However, this would likely increase the chances that the petition would have a higher rejection rate as voter information grows outdated.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. House Democrats have said they’re looking to play offense in Ohio – even though doing so would involve flipping districts comfortably won by President Donald Trump in 2024.

They’re starting to put actions behind those words.

House Majority PAC, the main super political action committee working on behalf of U.S. House Democrats, plans to spend $10.8 million on ads in five Ohio congressional districts later this year, the group announced Thursday in Ohio plans shared exclusively with Signal Statewide. It represents the group’s most aggressive spending in Ohio over the past eight years.

Of that, about $6.1 million will be spent defending Democrats, with the largest sum ($3 million) going to defend Toledo Rep. Marcy Kaptur. 

The remaining $4.7 million would be spent trying to defeat a pair of Republicans – Dayton Rep. Mike Turner and Columbus Rep. Mike Carey – who represent districts that Trump won by 7 and 10 percentage points, respectively, in 2024. 

Notably, the plan calls for spending nearly as much trying to defeat Turner (just less than $2.9 million) as the group plans to spend defending Kaptur, who faces the biggest uphill battle of any incumbent Democrat in the country. 

Ohio Democrats have spent years fantasizing about defeating Turner, a former Dayton mayor who’s been comfortably elected 11 times since he first took office in 2003. Meanwhile, they’ve eyed Carey’s district as being a potential target someday as the Columbus area has added more and more Democratic voters. 

But the spending marks the first time national Democrats have targeted either district in recent history – a notable shift for a party that has spent years pulling resources out of Ohio as the state has trended Republican.

Over the past eight years, the most the group spent trying to flip a Republican-held district was in 2020, when it spent $3 million trying to defeat then-Rep. Steve Chabot, of Cincinnati, federal campaign finance records show. The group spent nearly $6 million in Ohio in 2024, all of which went to protect two Democratic incumbents.

The shift toward offense comes as Democrats increasingly believe this year’s national political environment will benefit them. Conditions could end up resembling 2018 – when Democrats won dozens of competitive races and gained majorities in the House and Senate. 

A statement from House Majority PAC President Mike Smith said House Democrats are “firmly on offense,” while referencing the war in Iran and rising health care prices.

“HMP’s historic television and digital ad reservations reflect that Democrats are firmly on offense heading into November,” Smith said.

The spending references reserved ad time and digital ads in TV markets. The amounts aren’t set in stone. Political groups often try to reserve advertising time in advance so they can lock in lower prices, and later increase or decrease their spending as races develop.

Turner’s and Carey’s districts still remain outer-reach targets for Democrats – both Republicans won their races by far larger margins than Trump did in 2024. Republicans redrew both districts last year too – with Democrats signing off to avert a more GOP-leaning map – giving each Republican a couple extra percentage points of breathing room.

But it’s still the latest tangible sign that both parties view Ohio as a congressional battleground this year. 

The Senate Leadership Fund, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, announced earlier this month that it would spend $79 million defending U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. That’s the most of any state this year and a sign of how seriously Republicans are taking the potential of an election loss in Ohio. Republicans are favored to hold the Senate, since losing the majority would involve them losing multiple red-leaning states like Ohio. 

Notably, House Majority PAC’s Ohio plan does not target Rocky River Rep. Max Miller, another incumbent Republican whose district Democrats have eyed. Trump won Miller’s Cleveland-area district by 11 points in 2024, which apparently is too steep a hill for Democrats to climb for now.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the spending.

9th Congressional District

$3 million in ads are planned for Toledo, which corresponds with Kaptur’s district. She narrowly won reelection in 2024 even as Trump won her district by 7 percentage points. 

Republicans redrew her district last year to make it a +11 Trump district, giving Kaptur the largest uphill climb of any incumbent Democrat in the country.

Several Republicans are competing for the Republican nomination in the May 5 primary election, including ex-state Rep. Derek Merrin, state Rep. Josh Williams, Alea Nadeem and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy director Madison Sheahan.

10th Congressional District

$2.88 million will be spent in Dayton, corresponding with Turner’s 10th Congressional District. 

Most recently, Turner was reelected by 18 percentage points in 2024, while Trump won the district by 6 points. 

But after Republicans added some GOP-voting areas during redistricting last year, the district is now +7 Trump. 

Several candidates are running for the Democratic nomination, with many Democratic officials coalescing behind Kristina Knickerbocker, a nurse and U.S. Air Force veteran. Also running are Janice Beckett, a retired attorney; David Esrati, an activist; Manuel Foggie, a Hamilton County court employee; Jan Kinner, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and Tony Pombo, an IT professional.

1st Congressional District

$1.9 million will be spent in Cincinnati, corresponding with Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman’s 1st Congressional District. Republicans redrew Landsman’s district last year to make it tightly competitive, converting it from a district Trump lost by 6 points to one he won by nearly 3 points.

Eric Conroy, a former CIA officer, is likely to be Republicans’ nominee for the district after Trump endorsed him, prompting his main rival in the primary, dentist Steven Erbeck, to drop out of the race.

15th Congressional District

$1.8 million is slated to be spent in Columbus, corresponding with Carey’s 15th Congressional District. In 2024, Trump won the district by 9 percentage points, although in its current form, it’s a +10 Trump district.

Two candidates are running for the Democratic nomination – Adam Miller, a former state representative who lost to Carey by 13 percentage points in 2024, and Don Leonard, an Ohio State University professor.

13th Congressional District

Finally, $1.175 million is planned to be spent on ads in Cleveland, which Democrats said corresponded with Akron Rep. Emilia Sykes, whose district extends into the Cleveland suburbs.

Democrats have come to view Sykes as being safe in her seat after Republicans redrew her district from a 50-50 district to one that Vice President Kamala Harris won by 3 percentage points. Sykes meanwhile outran Harris by 2 percentage points. 

Several Republicans are running for the chance to face Sykes in November: Leetonia Mayor Kevin Siembida, former radio host Carey Coleman, Margaret Briem, a businesswoman, Sanjin Drakovac, a medical school graduate and Neil Patel, a perennial candidate.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The woman, who spoke to the Daily Mail on condition of anonymity, said the relationship began after Sheahan — then 23 and serving as state election operations director for the Trump campaign’s Ohio operation — invited her to share a bed following a campaign party. The woman was 19 at the time and had recently moved into Sheahan’s home after losing student housing during the COVID-19 pandemic, she told the outlet. She said a sexual relationship began within weeks.

Three sources told the Daily Mail that Sheahan briefly became the woman’s direct supervisor in November 2020 while the sexual relationship was ongoing.

The relationship continued through the end of the 2020 campaign and into the Georgia Senate runoffs in December 2020. The woman told the Daily Mail that Sheahan’s allegedly controlling behavior grew more apparent when the two were stationed separately — Sheahan with senior staff in Buckhead, the younger woman roughly an hour away in rural Georgia.

The most specific allegation in the report involves a November 29, 2020 incident in Atlanta. The woman says she sent Sheahan a photo of her outfit before going out with a group of friends and that Sheahan’s response shifted abruptly.

“She lost it on me,” the woman told the Daily Mail. “It went from her saying, ‘Have fun, have a great night,’ to, ‘What the f***, you’re not gonna f***ing go. Are you actually f***ing serious? I’m not gonna talk to you again.’”

The woman went out anyway. She says a subsequent phone call with Sheahan escalated further, with Sheahan telling her: “People who do that stuff, that’s what they do. They cheat on people.”

A separate source who was present that night told the Daily Mail they could hear Sheahan screaming through the hotel room walls on speaker phone. The woman said Sheahan’s jealousy was directed not at the women in her group, but at the men.

The woman also described a pattern involving control over her dress, her smoking, and her professional decisions. Public displays of affection were prohibited. When the woman began exploring a job out of state in late 2021, she says Sheahan opposed it. The relationship ended in 2022 over a phone call, according to the report, which the woman described as “very defeating.”

The ex-lover said she also believed the conflict reflected Sheahan’s discomfort with her own sexuality.

“I think a lot of the problems with our relationship was that she’s not comfortable in her own skin,” the woman told the Daily Mail. “It’s okay to be gay … but I don’t think that’s something she has accepted.”

When asked to describe the relationship in one word, the woman offered three: “Toxic.” “Volatile.” “Controlling.”

The Daily Mail reported that the account was corroborated in part by two independent sources.

A separate senior DHS official told the Daily Mail that Sheahan exhibited similar behavior at ICE, where she served as deputy director from March 2025 until her resignation in January 2026. According to that official, Sheahan targeted female staffers she regarded as disloyal and frequently invoked the authority of then-Secretary Kristi Noem.

“She’d always try to be the alpha in the room. There could never be a stronger woman. Madison was intimidated by strong women,” the official told the Daily Mail. “She’d always push to get women fired.”

The same official alleged Sheahan was known to threaten staff, telling them she would “rip their faces off.” DHS and ICE did not respond to the Daily Mail’s requests for comment.

Sheahan declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Mail. Her Ohio campaign manager, Bob Paduchik, denied the allegations.

“As the Ohio campaign manager, I can speak with authority that no such relationship existed,” Paduchik told the Daily Mail. “Madison was not and has never been in a relationship with a subordinate.”

Sheahan, 28, is one of five Republicans competing in the May 5 primary in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, where she is seeking to challenge longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur. She resigned as ICE deputy director in January 2026 to launch her campaign. The Daily Mail reported she has raised more than $450,000 since announcing her candidacy but trails in third place with 10 percent support among Republican primary voters, according to a JL Partners poll cited in the report.

The Ohio Capital Journal has separately reported that Sheahan has not received a White House endorsement, and that Lucas County Republicans — whose voters fall within the 9th District — have publicly voiced displeasure with her candidacy.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The oral arguments bring together two cases dealing with the temporary protected status (TPS) granted to Syrian and Haitian immigrants.

In an amicus brief, a bipartisan group of former Ohio attorneys general urge the court to reject the Trump administration’s bid to terminate TPS protections.

“Fully revoking TPS — which would uproot more than 14,000 people across Ohio — would irreparably harm the state and wipe out economic gains that have spread throughout the community,” they wrote.

The court hears the case as Congress considers a three-year extension of TPS protections for Haitian immigrants. Several GOP U.S. House members signed on to a discharge petition which forced a vote on the measure. Last week, the U.S. House approved the bill and advanced it to the U.S. Senate.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Nashville press conference on July 18, 2025. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

How we got here

Last year, then-Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attempted to terminate immigration protections and work authorizations for immigrants from several countries including Somalia, Nepal, Burma, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Venezuela.

Last June, when she rescinded those protections for Haitian immigrants, a DHS spokesperson said the decision “restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary.”

Noem’s actions would affect the more than 330,000 Haitians nationwide who have received immigration protections.

Civil rights attorneys quickly sued the Trump administration and the Washington D.C. District Court halted Noem’s orders. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and set oral arguments for April 29.

Amici’s arguments

Former Ohio attorneys general Jim Petro, Marc Dann, Nancy Rogers, and Richard Cordray all signed on to an amicus brief – a legal brief filed by individuals or groups who aren’t parties in the lawsuit – urging the court to maintain protections for Haitian TPS recipients.

They argue Noem overstepped her authority by failing to consider the economic impact Haitian workers have on communities like Springfield and making spurious claims that TPS recipients are involved in crime.

“Neither the Constitution nor the TPS-enabling statute permit the executive to terminate TPS by executive fiat,” they wrote, “let alone do so with threadbare process and absent any meaningful evidence supporting its decision.”

Still, their argument focuses not so much on what the government did as how the government did it. The former AGs contend Noem violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires agencies to consider the economic fallout of their actions, and justify their changes.

The legal brief cites reports that roughly 14,000 Haitians with TPS status call Ohio home, and they contribute $160 million to the state’s economy.

“More than 3,000 children born to Haitian TPS holders in Franklin and Clark counties since 2020 are U.S. citizens,” they added.

Zeroing in on Springfield, the brief contends that Haitian workers have been a boon to the local economy. While Springfield has blossomed, they argued, the counties that house similarly sized cities, like Warren and Mansfield, have not.

“In 2022, one year after Haiti was redesignated for TPS protection, Clark County (where Springfield sits) saw its GDP grow by 1.6%,” the brief stated, “while Trumbull County (where Warren sits) saw its GDP grow by only 0.4%, and Richland County (where Mansfield sits) actually saw its GDP contract by 0.4%.”

Removing several thousand workers from the local economy would hamper that growth, and present challenges to the businesses who’ve come to rely on them as employees and customers. Because Noem’s order didn’t consider those impacts, the attorneys general argue, it shouldn’t be allowed to go forward.

“Ohioans significantly benefit from, and rely on, Haitian TPS holders’ contributions to the Ohio economy,” they wrote, “and the secretary was required to take these benefits and economic considerations into account.”

As for the justifications Noem did offer, the AGs contend they’re no justification at all. Far from being prone to criminal behavior, they noted, Haitian immigrants nationwide have an incarceration rate 26% lower than all other legal immigrants and 81% lower than American citizens.

“Because its public-safety theory is unsubstantiated—and, indeed, contrary to the evidence — the government has offered no reasoned explanation at all,” the attorneys general wrote.

In addition to violating the broader Administrative Procedures Act, the attorneys general contend Noem’s order violates the process laid out in the TPS enacting statute.

Since the country’s founding, the brief explained, Congress has set the terms for immigration policy, and so the secretary’s actions are bound by federal law.

The TPS statute directs the DHS secretary to weigh whether conditions in country like Haiti still justify TPS status “after consultation with appropriate agencies of the government.”

To Noem, that gives cabinet officials broad discretion to determine what constitutes “consultation.”

But the Ohio AGs note the typical process includes a thorough review from the U.S. State Department followed by an official report recommendation to DHS.

“Reading the phrase ‘after consultation with appropriate agencies’ to mean whatever minimal process the secretary chooses to call consultation does not respect the statute’s limits,” the attorneys general wrote. “It erases them.”

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But a lesser-known cut ends child care relief to working families before it got a chance to start. Without it, many middle and lower-income families will pay much more for daycare in Ohio than in any other state, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress.

For the hardest hit group, the loss could exceed $15,000 in child care assistance per year. That’s nearly $4,000 more than the next-closest state, Vermont, the analysis said.

Hailey Gibbs, co-author of the study, said those are dollars that moderate-income families with children can ill-afford to lose.

“It shifts more of the cost burden to families already paying at the top end of their budget,” she said in an interview. “That is particularly pronounced for folks in Ohio. Obviously, families everywhere are facing an affordability crisis.”

The losses are likely to come because Trump in January moved to scrap a 2024 measure implemented by the Biden administration. It applies to the Child Care Development Fund.

In Ohio, assistance under the program is available to families who meet income guidelines. For a family of three, that’s $77,000 a year.

The Biden rule capped the percentage of family income going to child care at 7%. The researchers estimated that without the cap, some eligible Ohio families are paying as much as 27% of their income on daycare.

For the maximum-earning family of three, that’s $1,700 a month. Under the Biden cap it would have been $452.

The cap was to go into effect this year, with states obtaining waivers as they worked toward it. But in January, the Trump administration filed a proposed rule eliminating it.

The rule hasn’t yet been finalized, but it’s expected to be.

Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy for the Center for American Progress, said few working families can afford child care.

“The costs to provide child care almost universally exceed families’ ability to pay for it,” she said.

A 7% cap on child care copayments had been long sought by providers and educators. 

“It’s a widely accepted threshold for what affordability should look like in child care,” Gibbs said.

With the Trump administration announcing that it would eliminate the pending cap, Gibbs and her colleagues undertook an analysis to demonstrate real-world impacts. They collected data looking at what the top copayment would be for a family of three with a child in daycare.

“We wanted to demonstrate the highest possible copayment a family could be required to pay in order to understand the impact of that regulatory rollback,” Gibbs said. “These are maximum possible lost savings. Real dollars are going to vary just as actual copayments are going to vary depending upon the age of the child enrolled, the type of care the family chooses, whether the state is bringing in other funding streams to offset those costs.”

As they evaluated states, Ohio stood out.

“In Ohio, it was staggeringly high,” Gibbs said. “It was 27% of household income. It was 20 percentage points higher than the threshold of what we think of as affordable.”  

Money spent on one priority comes at the expense of others.

“Twelve hundred dollars could go to rent or food, paying off debt, cover utility bills that are almost certain to spike this summer, or things for kids like clothes, books and enriching experiences,” Gibbs said. “At a time when things are getting more expensive, removing one of the affordability guardrails from child care — which is one of the highest costs for young families — is downright harmful.”

That harm extends beyond the families losing help they stood to receive. Even though children are the future of the U.S. economy, they’re far down the list of federal priorities.

Earlier this month, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School published a study of federal spending on various age groups. It found that while the federal government spent $2.7 trillion last year on people 65 and older, it spent just $449 billion — or one-sixth as much — on people younger than 26.

Of course, health costs account for much of that differential. But Gibbs said it’s prohibitively expensive for many families to have kids, and that’s making a rapidly aging society age even faster.

“I don’t know that (providing affordable child care) will mean a boom in birthrates, but not having those services in place definitely is depressing the birthrate,” Gibbs said. “We’re seeing fewer births… I think families are looking at the economic forecast right now. They’re seeing everything about the cost of living going up. And children are incredibly expensive… It’s a huge part of the kitchen-table calculus for families.”

Gibbs was quick to say that the report was not intended to find fault with social-service providers in Ohio or any other state. All are trying to meet huge needs with limited resources and need federal help, she said. 

In Ohio, the legislature has been quick to cut taxes and provide public resources to wealthy interests on the promise they will grow the economy. But Gibbs said supporting families with things like child care would clearly be a pro-growth policy.

“People are going to go where they can find those supportive services or they’re going to go without having children,” she said. “And we are hearing cases of people making family-planning decisions based on whether they can afford child care.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The report, filed by Friends of Faber and covering activity through April 19, lists four charitable contributions made on March 18: $5,000 to the State FOP Charitable Fund, $2,500 to the Ohio Domestic Violence Network, $2,500 to Akron-based Hope & Healing Survivor Resource Center, and $2,500 to Freedom a la Cart, a downtown Columbus nonprofit that trains survivors of human trafficking for workforce re-entry. The four gifts total $12,500.

In a Feb. 25 Dayton Daily News report, Faber campaign spokesperson Matt Dole said the attorney general hopeful had donated $15,000 “to law enforcement and victim rights charities” from Wexner’s contributions. Previously reported Wexner donations to Faber include $10,000 in 2025 and $5,000 in 2022. The pre-primary finance report does not itemize any separate charitable contribution that would close the $2,500 gap.

Colin Flanagan, campaign manager for Democratic attorney general candidate John Kulewicz, said Thursday that the discrepancy raises questions about Faber’s oversight of his own campaign records.

“Clearly, the Auditor failed to audit his own records,” Flanagan said in a statement. “Actions like this show that Keith Faber is a protector of the powerful. Ohioans deserve an Attorney General who is committed to holding even the wealthy and well-connected accountable. That’s John Kulewicz.”

Wexner, 88, the retired founder of L Brands — parent company of Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works and Abercrombie & Fitch — has drawn renewed scrutiny since the U.S. Department of Justice unredacted FBI documents in February identifying him as an alleged co-conspirator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein served as Wexner’s personal financial adviser from 1987 to 2007. In a February deposition before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, Wexner said he had been “conned by the world-Olympic-all-time con artist,” denied knowing of Epstein’s crimes, and declined to characterize the two men as friends. A legal representative for Wexner has said he was “neither a co-conspirator nor target” of the federal investigation. Wexner has not been charged with any crime.

At least a half-dozen other Ohio Republicans have publicly announced plans to redirect Wexner contributions to charity since the files were released, including U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, State Treasurer Robert Sprague, and Attorney General Dave Yost. Campaign finance records show Wexner has been a donor to Faber’s campaigns across multiple election cycles.

Faber, a Republican, has served as state auditor since 2019 and is unopposed in the May 5 primary for Ohio attorney general. He previously served 12 years in the Ohio Senate, including as Senate president from 2013 through 2016, and two stints in the Ohio House of Representatives. Kulewicz, an Upper Arlington City Council member and longtime Columbus attorney, is endorsed by the Ohio Democratic Party and faces former state Rep. Elliot Forhan in the Democratic primary.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Officers responded at approximately 7:46 a.m. after the resident, located in the 100 block of 1st Avenue, reported the text. As a precaution, police shut down 1st Avenue between North Washington Street and Vine Street and evacuated nearby residences. The Tiffin Fire and Rescue Division was staged in a secure area in the event their assistance was needed.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/13-year-old-charged-after-tiffin-bomb-threat-hoax/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Auditor of State’s 2020 audit of Sandusky County identified seven invoices that “were identified and determined to have been manually created by Juvenile Court Judge Brad Smith by his own admission” during an investigation covering the period November 2015 through March 2018. The invoices were made to appear as though they came from two local nonprofits — CASA of Seneca, Sandusky & Wyandot Counties and The Village House — for services the auditor determined those organizations did not provide. Six of the seven corresponding county checks were cashed by the vendors, totaling $33,300.

The Ohio Auditor of State issued Finding for Recovery 2020-001 against Smith and his bonding company, The Cincinnati Insurance Company, jointly and severally, in the amount of $33,300, in favor of the Sandusky County General Fund.

That finding was never repaid. Instead, Sandusky County Prosecutor Beth Tischler, acting as legal counsel for the county, formally offered a full abatement of the entire finding pursuant to O.R.C. 117.33 — making the amount to be collected $0. The abatement was approved by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in an April 5, 2023, letter from Senior Assistant Attorney General Shelley Goodrich. “The Finding for Recovery issued against you in the amount of $33,300.00 has been abated pursuant to R.C. 117.33,” Goodrich wrote. “No monies are due with respect to this matter.” Smith signed the abatement agreement on April 24, 2023. Tischler signed it on May 11, 2023, in her capacity as legal counsel for Sandusky County. The abatement agreement specifies that Tischler did not represent Smith personally in the matter, and that Smith chose to proceed without independent counsel.

The Ohio Auditor of State’s online findings database reflects the finding as resolved with a $0 balance. That entry reflects the abatement, not a payment by Smith.

Smith is currently serving as judge of the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas, Probate and Juvenile Division, a position he has held since 2009, and is seeking re-election in the May 5 primary. Tischler is also on the May 5 ballot, running in the Republican primary for the General Division of the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas, where she is challenging incumbent Judge Jeremiah Ray. Campaign signs for both candidates have been displayed together publicly, and Smith has solicited yard sign hosts for both races on social media.

In response to a request for comment, Smith disputed the auditor’s characterization of the invoices. “I take issue to the auditor’s characterization of me admitting to creating or falsifying the invoices,” Smith wrote, “as I have maintained consistently that I merely updated prior invoices in order to reflect the amount budgeted by the commissioners for that year … which has been proven.” Smith wrote that his office “no longer does this,” but added that updating prior invoices in that manner “is still routine in other offices across the county… with no apparent concerns by others.” Smith also confirmed that no repayment was made, writing that “the attached abatement agreement spells out and verifies all that I am stating.”

The signed abatement agreement contains a notable admission regarding the conduct of former Sandusky County Prosecutor Timothy Braun. The agreement identifies Braun by name, stating that it was Braun who designated the State Attorney General as Special Prosecutor to review the matter. Item 17 of the agreement states that “The Sandusky County Prosecutor was consulted by Judge Smith on the underlying matters at various points during the pendency of the investigation and ongoing payments, and despite the clear conflict of interest, it was not disclosed in any manner, and legal advice, counsel, and assistance was given to Judge Smith by the Prosecutor.” Item 18 states that Smith “relied upon and followed this advice of counsel, which had the practical impact of allowing and continuing the payments, and ultimately increasing the dollar amount of payments now in contention in the finding for recovery.”

A March 6, 2023, letter requesting AG approval of the abatement — signed by Tischler, Sandusky County Sheriff Christopher Hilton, County Auditor Jerri Miller, and County Commissioners Charles Schwochow, Russ Zimmerman, and Scott Miller — went further, characterizing Braun’s conduct as going “well beyond the clear and obvious conflict of interest to something that appears more intentional and nefarious.” The letter states that Braun appeared to “target” Smith “on numerous occasions for inappropriate or retaliatory reasons, which were misrepresented to investigators.” In his written response to TiffinOhio.net, Smith wrote that Sheriff Hilton could verify that Braun, “when prosecutor, attempted to initiate multiple other simply bizarre allegations against me… again, all unfounded, and all disproved… based upon retaliation.”

The overlapping relationships between Smith and Tischler extend into a separate ongoing legal matter. Smith testified as a character witness in Ohio Supreme Court Board of Professional Conduct disciplinary proceedings against Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge Jon Ickes, Case No. 2024-032. In that testimony, Smith described Ickes as “a solid human being and a good judge” and attributed courthouse tensions entirely to Judge Jeremiah Ray, Ickes’ colleague on the General Division bench, calling that dynamic “a one sided problem.” Disciplinary counsel challenged that characterization in post-hearing briefs, writing that Smith “seemed to minimize respondent’s conduct,” and noted that Smith acknowledged he lacked firsthand knowledge of the day-to-day interactions in Ickes’ chambers. Counsel also quoted Smith’s own admission from the stand: “I still don’t know as I sit here today, what is quite factual and accurate and what might be twisted or exaggerated.” In his response to TiffinOhio.net, Smith said he testified “under a subpoena” and that his comments about courthouse tensions were made “in a greater context of the question, and previous questions… and was related to that point in time… and not related to the original allegations.”

Tischler also testified in the Ickes proceedings — called as a witness by disciplinary counsel, the party bringing the case against Ickes. During cross-examination, she rated Ickes a nine out of ten as a trial judge. It was Ray — the same judge Tischler is now challenging in the May 5 primary — who first brought the underlying Ickes allegations to Tischler on April 29, 2024, contacting her in her capacity as statutory counsel for the court. Ray’s involvement in the courthouse’s recent history extends further: on December 31, 2019, it was Ray who suspended Braun from the prosecutor’s office, one day after Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a complaint seeking Braun’s removal following Braun’s conviction on a negligent assault charge. Tischler was appointed to replace Braun by the Sandusky County Republican Central Committee on February 18, 2020. Disciplinary counsel has sought a two-year suspension with one year stayed; Ickes’ attorneys have asked for a fully stayed 12-month suspension. The matter remains pending before the Ohio Supreme Court.

Tischler did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. The primary election is Tuesday, May 5.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment that clears the path for the state’s legislature, controlled by Democrats, to redraw congressional district lines to benefit Democrats in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House districts. 

That could net the party four new seats in Virginia, though state court cases challenging the proposal are still to be decided.

Former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Florida Democrat who now leads the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, said the results showed a dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and the nation’s capital in general.

“It sends a clear message to the administration, to the White House, to Washington, D.C., that they’re not happy with the status quo, with the policies that are coming out of Washington, that they want to see a change,” she said in an interview Wednesday.

After 10 months of bitter back-and-forth that began with Trump urging Texas Republicans to revise their congressional map to help gain seats in the House, neither party has netted a significant advantage.

But the tit-for-tat may have a lasting harmful effect on U.S. democracy, experts said.

If Virginia’s proposal goes into effect, Democrats would be favored in one more House district nationwide than they had been in 2024, according to the nonpartisan election research organization Ballotpedia.

Further changes, including the Florida Legislature potentially redrawing its House map and a U.S. Supreme Court decision to gut the federal Voting Rights Act’s protection of majority-Black districts in Southern states, could tilt the advantage back to the GOP. 

Republicans narrowly control the chamber now, 217-212, with one independent and five vacancies after Georgia Democrat David Scott died Wednesday. 

The president’s party typically loses House seats in midterm elections, and Trump’s sagging poll numbers and the results of special elections do not suggest anything different this year.

Good for Democrats, bad for democracy

Elected Democrats largely framed the Virginia results as a win for free and fair elections.

“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they pushed back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,” Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, wrote on X.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger gives her first speech after being sworn in on Jan. 17, 2026. (Photo by Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)

But the entire cycle could deepen political polarization, leading to less compromise and policymaking in Congress and ceding power to the executive branch, Erik Nisbet, the director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy at Northwestern University, said Wednesday.

“There were some quotes today from some leading Democrats about how you can’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and this is the only way to, like, save democracy, and sort of rationalizing it,” he said. “It’s still bad for democracy long term… It means that Congress, long term, is even more polarized and ineffectual.”

Mucarsel-Powell, who represented one of the country’s few competitive House districts, also said redistricting would make legislating more difficult.

“Redistricting doesn’t necessarily help the country overall,” she said. “As we continue to become more polarized, I think that having these maps being redrawn to favor one or the other party is just going to deepen the polarization. I think it makes it more difficult for members to be able to reach consensus. I’ve seen it, right? When you represent a solid red or a solid blue district, there’s really no incentive to compromise.”

Republicans sour on Virginia result

Republicans, from Trump on down, complained Wednesday that the result was unfair because it could give Democrats 91% of the U.S. House seats in a state where the party’s most recent presidential candidate gained only 52% of the vote.

In a post to his social media site Wednesday afternoon, Trump said the result was illegitimate — repeating, without evidence, his frequent assertion in elections he has lost that mail ballots were fraudulent — and called for courts to “fix” the result.

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump wrote. “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before — And the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”

Questionable strategy

But the proposed Virginia map would only even the playing field after Trump initiated a rare mid-decade redistricting cycle last year by asking Texas officials to redraw the state’s districts. 

Texas’ new map could net Republicans five more House seats. But its creation kicked off an arms race that included California drawing five new Democratic-leaning districts, effectively neutralizing Texas’ move. 

Legislatures in Missouri and North Carolina then voluntarily redrew their maps, while an Ohio constitutional amendment and a Utah Supreme Court decision led to new district lines in those states.

Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under Republican President George W. Bush, bemoaned the Virginia results but called them a self-inflicted wound. States should stick to redistricting once a decade after a census, he said, blasting the GOP strategy to attempt mid-decade redistricting in some states.

“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you’re going to pick a fight, at least win it. The other side will always fight back,” he wrote. “All this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.” 

Fleischer linked to a post he’d written in August criticizing the GOP effort in Texas as that state geared up for a vote on the new map. “Mid-census change” was not the way to win more seats in the House, he’d said.

National Democrats celebrated.

“House Democrats have crushed Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering scheme,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York wrote on social media Tuesday night. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

What’s next?

Two more decisions could further alter the landscape for U.S. House races before November.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last year in a case challenging a Voting Rights Act provision that has been interpreted to require majority-Black districts in Southern states equal to their population. Louisiana is challenging a lower court ruling that threw out a map in which only one of the state’s six districts was majority-Black, though Black people make up about one-third of the state’s population.

Depending on the scope and timing of the conservative court’s ruling, several safe Democratic seats in the South could be in jeopardy.

And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called the state legislature into a special session, scheduled to begin next week, to consider a redistricting effort and other issues.

‘Dummymanders’?

Florida Republicans have not fully endorsed a redistricting push, which could ultimately make some incumbents’ districts less reliably red. Gerrymandering relies on spreading a party’s voters across more districts, making some individual races more difficult, especially in a potential wave election year.

“Republicans are pushing back, saying that it’s going to actually lessen the power that they have in some of these districts,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “Because if you have (a district favoring Republicans by five points), with all the overperformance that we’ve seen, including here in the state of Florida, it’s very likely going to favor the Democrats.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holds a press conference May 13, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

Jeffries in a Wednesday morning news conference practically dared Florida Republicans to dilute their U.S. House districts, comparing the effort to the Texas map that he said was not as Republican as they thought and calling the entire GOP effort a “dummymander” that would backfire.

“F around and find out,” Jeffries said. “If they go down the road of a DeSantis dummymander, the Florida Republicans are going to find themselves in the same situation as Texas Republicans, who are on the run right now.” 

“The Republicans are dummymandering their way into the minority before a single vote is cast,” he added. “They started this war, and we’re going to finish it.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio State this week released the 47-page report, which details the investigation into the circumstances that led to Carter’s abrupt resignation last month. The university has also released thousands of documents as part of the investigation.

“Carter intentionally put his own interests before Ohio State’s interests when he used the authority and influence of his university position to secure benefits for Vlachos,” according to the report. “Carter’s actions betrayed Ohio State’s Shared Values and violated university policy.”

The report has been shared with the Ohio Inspector General, Ohio Ethics Commission, Ohio Auditor of State and Ohio Attorney General, said university spokesperson Ben Johnson. 

“Sufficient evidence exists that Carter should have seen that Vlachos’ efforts both internal and external to the university implicated this reporting requirement because her efforts, if successful, would have resulted in misuse or misappropriation of public funds,” according to the report. 

The report states Carter implicated Ohio Ethics law through his continued actions, citing the Ohio Ethics Commission’s definition of conflict of interest, which “prohibits public officials or employees from participating in actions or decisions that definitely and directly affect themselves, their family members or their business associates.”

Under Ohio Revised Code 102.03, public officials are prohibited to “use or authorize the use of the authority or influence of office or employment to secure anything of value or the promise or offer of anything of value that is of such a character as to manifest a substantial and improper influence upon the public official or employee with respect to that person’s duties.” 

The report notes that Carter’s actions “may warrant further consideration” by state agencies. As of Thursday, no action by other state agencies had been announced, and Carter had not been charged with a crime related to the university’s investigation.

Carter tried to help Vlachos get a job at the university, space on campus, staff and technical support for her podcast, help with her app idea, and university investment in her business proposals, according to the report. The investigation found that at least 14 university employees received requests from Carter to help Vlachos. 

According to the report, Carter connected Vlachos with JobsOhio, Anduril Industries, the Ohio National Guard, the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, OH.io, Student Veterans of America and Vet Mentor AI. Anduril Industries is the autonomous weapons manufacturer building a facility in Pickaway County.

“Carter’s efforts on behalf of Vlachos therefore potentially jeopardized the university’s relationships and credibility with these external parties,” the report states. 

“Carter sought resources and assistance for Vlachos despite there being no clear nexus to a viable service or product that she could deliver that would serve Ohio State’s interests. The pervasiveness of his efforts, and the inappropriate nature of Carter’s relationship with Vlachos, were not apparent when they occurred because he typically made such efforts in serial fashion, and the full extent of those efforts was not apparent to individual employees,” according to the report. 

Vlachos took at least five trips with Carter and had at least 24 meetings with him in the just over two years he was Ohio State’s president, according to the report. Carter took over as Ohio State president in January 2024 and was earning $1,189,732 when he resigned in March.

“Carter actively concealed the true nature of his actions involving Vlachos through the use of his personal email, personal meetings on his calendar, and other means,” according to the report. 

The investigation concluded that university processes and decisions by Ohio State employees thwarted Carter’s attempts to help Vlachos from succeeding within the university. Vlachos was never hired as an Ohio State employee and she did not receive university funding. 

The investigation

Ohio State University Board of Trustees Chair John W. Zeiger requested an investigation on March 8, the day after Carter resigned. The investigation was conducted by the Office of University Compliance and Integrity and the Department of Internal Audit. 

“Its findings regarding our former president are deeply disappointing, but it is gratifying the university’s systems and processes – and the people charged with implementing them – prevented misuse of Ohio State’s resources,” Zeiger said in a news release. 

Investigators examined emails, text messages, calendars, Carter’s two university laptops, social media accounts, contracts, payments, travel expenditures and BuckID records. 

They also conducted 60 interviews, including 12 with people not affiliated with Ohio State.  

Carter declined to be interviewed for the investigation through his attorney, and Vlachos did not respond to an interview request for the investigation. 

The report made five recommendations:

• Maintain the processes of the President’s Office and the independence of the Board Office in reviewing travel and expenditure requests submitted by the president, as well as transparent scheduling processes for the president. 
• Units should review their practices on leadership requests for assistance. 
• Consider revisions to ethics and insider threat training for senior leaders. 
• Reinforce the importance of culture and shared values at the senior leadership level. 
• Continue to respond as appropriate to any state and federal agency inquiries.

Vlachos met Carter in 2023

Vlachos and Carter met at a Veterans in Energy forum in Washington, D.C. in March 2023, according to the report. At that time, Carter was president of the University of Nebraska. 

On the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)

It was there that Vlachos asked Carter to cohost her podcast and mentor her son who was joining the Navy. 

Her son emailed Carter’s personal email in February 2024 and asked for a recommendation for the Seaman to Admiral Commissioning program. Carter asked his chief of staff to help write a letter of reference. 

Carter graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1981 and served in the United States Navy. He was the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy from 2014-2019, and was the president of the United States Naval War College.

In July 2024, Carter forwarded Vlachos’ resume to Katie Hall, Ohio State’s senior vice president for talent, culture and human resources. 

“She is planning to move to Columbus immediately (from St. Louis) and is looking for a full time position,” Carter said in his email to Hall. “She tells me she is open to any opportunity that fits her skill set. Think she would be a good fit for anyone’s team.”

Vlachos applied to five positions related to advancement, but it does not seem that she was ever formally interviewed and was not hired by Ohio State, according to the report.

In October 2024, Carter asked Ohio State Senior Vice President for Marketing and Communications Elizabeth Parkinson to help Vlachos produce her podcast and Parkinson’s team helped twice. 

Vlachos said in a December 2024 email that Carter was in her “most inner circle.” 

“Ted’s been the unrelenting cheerleader who has understood my vision energizing me to realize my own power & potential,” Vlachos wrote in the email. “He’s also been an incredible resource of knowledge, important relationships & OSU’s support in total of the podcast’s mission!” 

Many witnesses interviewed for the investigation described Vlachos as “persistent” and “unsophisticated,” according to the report. 

“Vlachos was described as ‘weird’ because she did not follow typical professional courtesies. She was very demanding and made unusual requests or comments, like asking to house-sit professors’ homes or saying she was living out of her car,” according to the report. “She made employees uncomfortable, and many witnesses described avoiding or ignoring her contacts.” 

Vlachos was seen with Carter on several occasions and the pair were seen walking outside of a Philadelphia hotel in the morning at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities annual meeting in November 2025, according to the report. 

“No inappropriate interactions were observed,” according to the report.

‘The Callout’ podcast

Vlachos had a $93,716 contract with WOSU, home to Ohio State’s public radio and TV station, for 50 episodes of “The Callout” podcast she hosted, according to the report. The podcast was a veteran-focused program that had about a dozen episodes posted on YouTube, but they have all been removed.  

“WOSU offered Vlachos the university rates charged to nonprofits because they considered her podcast to be a nonprofit,” according to the report. “WOSU personnel did not feel pressured by anyone and saw the contract as in line with the type of engagement WOSU was seeking to increase revenue.” 

Vlachos had a desk on the third floor of WOSU, email records show. 

WOSU took care of filming and production. Three episodes were recorded at WOSU in 2025 — the first on Aug. 6 for $2,410, the second on Aug. 27 for $1,982, and the third on Dec. 10 for $2,196.

“Vlachos’ Callout Podcast appeared to narrowly focus on connecting veterans with utility industry jobs that did not require a college degree,” according to the report.  

Carter participated in at least five of the 19 episodes of “The Callout” podcast. 

“Vlachos’ podcast appears to have never obtained many subscribers or significant viewership and did not evidence substantial marketing capabilities,” according to the report. “A witness who participated in the podcast described it as unprofessional and unengaging.”

Carter helped connect Vlachos with JobsOhio, the state’s privatized economic development agency, at the Memorial Tournament in Dublin in 2025 and JobsOhio agreed to a $60,000 contract for four podcast episodes. 

JobsOhio Chief of Staff Phil Greenberg said they had been considering doing podcasts and viewed this as an opportunity to partner with Ohio State, but their goal was to expand the podcast beyond the utilities industry, according to the report. 

Ohio Department of Veterans Service Director John C. Harris Jr., was on the Dec. 10 podcast episode and he “described Vlachos’ interview style as amateurish and the podcast experience as difficult,” according to the report. 

Carter sought university businesses expenditures related to Vlachos

The report highlighted various instances of business expenditures requested by Carter from May 2025 to January 2026, all of which were related to Vlachos. 

His first trip with Vlachos was highlighted by the report. Carter was invited to an annual Gaff-n-Go Lineworker Rodeo as a guest speaker in February 2025. The event was hosted by the Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives, whose president and CEO, Brian Moiser, cited Vlachos in his email invitation to Carter. 

At the event, Carter and Vlachos met with executives from Vet Mentor AI, who introduced them to the company’s CEO, Paul Hylenski. 

The trip’s cost totaled $1,706.34, including travel and business dinners. Lodging was paid for by the Rodeo, according to the report.

Carter traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada in January 2026 to speak at a conference on behalf of JobsOhio. The total cost of the trip including airfare and lodging was $4,320.17. 

The university’s investigation revealed Carter requested Vlachos to join the delegation and conference, which was approved by JobsOhio, even though none of the documentation submitted to the university listed Vlachos as a guest, according to the report. 

Vlachos did not submit any expenses to JobsOhio for the trip. 

While business documentation reflected that no university funds were used to pay Vlachos or subsidize her expenses, the report found at least one instance of Carter fabricating a business expense in order to travel with Vlachos on the university’s dime. 

Carter planned to travel to Orlando, Florida on a personal trip in September 2025, and he asked his wife, Lynda Carter, to book travel through their Southwest Airline points. He later changed the nature of the travel to business, listing the purpose as “Veterans and executive engagements scheduled by President Carter,” according to the report, and requested to be reimbursed for the use of his airline points. He was scheduled to meet with University of Central Florida President Alexander Cartwright, as well as multiple Disney executives. 

During the trip, Carter visited the International Lineman’s Museum, according to photographs posted on social media that show him there with Vlachos. Carter did not mention the visit to his staff or submit documentation regarding event attendance or Vlachos’ presence, according to the report. 

A witness confirmed that Vlachos visited the museum with Carter. He dropped her off and left to attend a meeting, later returning for an hour-long meeting with Vlachos to discuss her “app idea,” according to the report. 

“This trip, and perhaps others, do not represent a responsible use of university funds, as required by the Expenditure Policy, because they were connected to Vlachos,” according to the report. “Therefore, sufficient evidence exists that Carter violated the Expenditures Policy.”

Ohio State’s Expenditures Policy states for every trip, there must be a written statement explaining the justification of the expense, and must include details of who, what and why something was purchased, and how it benefits the institution. 

University employees are required to document expenses approved by an authorized employee. Notably, the president’s expenses are solely approved by the secretary of the Board of Trustees. 

“While university employees satisfied their policy obligations, they trusted that Carter’s requests were made appropriately and in good faith,” according to the report. “In contrast, Carter’s actions suggest that he did not follow the spirit of the policy by incurring business travel and requesting expenditures connected to Vlachos, an individual seeking public resources to support her personal business.”

Within Carter’s local business expenditures, the report noted one instance of Carter fabricating a business expense to cover costs associated with Vlachos. 

On Nov. 17, 2025, the university paid for a $2,124.12 meal at a Student Veterans of America dinner attended by university, Google, and SVA executives at Carter’s specific request. The dinner was at Butcher & Rose in downtown Columbus. 

Carter, a member of the SVA Board of Directors, was invited to the 11-person dinner, where he requested to include Vlachos as a guest. 

After reviewing the documentation, Carter’s chief of staff asked him if Carter had authorized the payment. Carter denied doing so and asked for the expense to be stricken from the record, according to the report. 

The report revealed Carter had a history of trying to fold Vlachos into SVA.   

Carter invited Vlachos to the organization’s national conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this past January where he requested she introduce him in his 10-minute address, and proceeded to introduce her to attendees. 

He also nominated Vlachos to join the organization’s board of directors. She did not move forward in the election process because she was deemed unqualified in comparison with other sitting board members. 

“Notably, SVA’s Directors individually are extraordinarily qualified, and Vlachos’ experience and expertise does not objectively compare to those of existing Directors,” according to the report. 

Carter’s efforts to launch Vlachos’ military app

Vlachos was trying to to launch an app — Operation Forward — centered on assisting veterans in pursuing higher education and obtaining jobs. 

Carter used university and external partners to aid Vlachos in her pitch. He leveraged his position to connect her with dozens of university staff members across departments in order to further her goals. 

Vlachos first connected with Carter to pitch the idea to the university on Aug. 18, 2025. Carter orchestrated a virtual meeting with Vlachos, Carter’s Chief of Staff JR Blackburn, and Chris Kabourek — former senior vice president of administration and planning, and senior advisor to the president. 

Ohio State University students walk on the Oval on Oct. 6, 2025. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Kabourek stepped down from his position April 13, without elaboration on the reason for his departure. According to the report, Kabourek made “substantive efforts” to support Carter’s will on behalf of Vlachos, including serving as Carter’s university point of contact for Vlachos. 

“No other employee other than Carter communicated so extensively with Vlachos, and no other employee had the same level of awareness of or involvement in Vlachos’ activities both inside and outside the university,” according to the report. 

After Vlachos’ initial pitch to the university, Carter and Kabourek continued to facilitate meetings on her behalf despite internal pushback. University employees collectively decided over months that the idea was not feasible. 

“Employees noted Vlachos did not appear to understand the obvious technical challenges, and they concluded that Vlachos did not present a viable solution to those challenges or even a thoughtful plan to begin to address them,” according to the report. “Further, employees consistently concluded that they saw no benefits to the university in assisting Vlachos or pursuing her App idea.” 

Employees who worked under Kabourek raised concerns about Carter’s relationship with Vlachos. According to the report, Kabourek told them to raise their concerns directly with Carter, even though they were Kabourek’s subordinates. 

“This refusal or unwillingness to respond appropriately to such concerns, and in fact to direct them to go themselves to the person about whom the concern relates, is a dereliction of duty for a senior leader and does not demonstrate the behavior expected by the university of its leaders,” according to the report. 

Kabourek facilitated a meeting between Vlachos and Vet Mentor AI, which she attempted to partner with to build her app. 

According to the report, during a meeting with JobsOhio and Anduril in July 2025, Zach Mears, Anduril’s senior vice president of strategy, said there was a blurred line between Vlachos’ podcast and potential app, lacking organization in her ideas. 

Mears said Vlachos never made a formal request for partnership between herself and Anduril, but would frequently attempt to communicate with him regarding the idea. According to the report, Mears ignored her communication as he saw no value in the relationship. 

While Mears said he never felt pressured by Carter to work with Vlachos, he questioned Carter’s judgement in advocating for her ideas. 

“Mears also noted that the time spent by Carter and others on Vlachos’ idea felt discordant in comparison with Anduril’s substantial ongoing business with the university,” according to the report. 

Carter also attempted to engage university donors to support the app. In September 2025, Vet Mentor AI CEO Hylenski said he had conversations with Vlachos about funding in which she claimed Carter could introduce the pair to billionaire Les Wexner. 

In a text message included in the report, Vlachos told Hylenski that Carter told her he’d spoken to Wexner about the app in an attempt to facilitate a meeting between the parties. 

“Notably, Wexner’s attorney was contacted as part of the investigation process and confirmed that at no time did Wexner ever discuss or meet with anyone, including Carter, regarding Vlachos or her App idea, and therefore he never agreed to purchase or invest in any technology associated with it,” according to the report. 

Carter used his personal Gmail account to contact Vlachos and Hylsenski to discuss the app and funding, promising to highlight their efforts in his presentation on AI Fluency to the I/ITSEC conference in December 2025. 

In documents shared in the report about the follow up of the conference, Carter discussed “a significant philanthropic contribution from a donor,” with a plan that “involves leveraging this funding with JobsOhio’s support to attract veterans to Ohio, with Ohio State providing educational support.”

“According to several witnesses, Carter stated that he had obtained or would obtain donations for or interest in Vlachos’ business ventures from university donors,” the report states. “We confirmed that Carter had not, in fact, done so. This misrepresentation of the engagement of university donors by Carter is a notable misuse of influence by a university president.”

Hylenski told investigators Carter coached the group on how to obtain financial support for the app. 

Carter’s search for external support for Vlachos culminated in a Dec. 10, 2025 meeting between JobsOhio, Vet Mentor AI, the department of veterans services, and Ohio State executives. The report states that Carter and Kabourek went to “extraordinary efforts” to attend the meeting. 

Kabourek skipped a luncheon honoring his employees due to Carter’s request to attend the meeting, and Carter — the keynote speaker for the luncheon — left only 15 minutes into the event to support Vlachos’ meeting. 

According to the report, Hylenski described Carter entering the meeting “like the Godfather,” and proceeding to make authoritative statements about the app, even saying he would put his and the university’s name on the app. 

Greenberg said the JobsOhio technology staff was unimpressed, and would not go forward in supporting the technology. 

Carter, however, continued to push for efforts to support Vlachos’ app, including helping to name and structure the venture. 

“Hylenski stated that Carter had discussed being named to an advisory board of the Operation Forward venture, which Hylenski noted might come with some form of equity or compensation,” according to the report. 

Carter and Vlachos ultimately cut ties with Vet Mentor AI over business disagreements. 

Disagreements arose when Vlachos demanded 25% equity of the venture and demanded to be CEO, according to the report. Hylenski said the organization and Vlachos had never come to an official business agreement, and declined her request as she did not own any of the technology associated with the app. 

Vlachos told Hylenski that if these requests were not met, the company would “lose Ohio,” according to the report.  

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

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.