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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LGBTQ bills

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

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

The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills nationwide and 10 bills in Ohio.

Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams, R-Sylvania Twp., has introduced many of Ohio’s anti-LGBTQ bills. He recently lost in the Ohio 9th District Republican Primary to Derek Merrin, so Williams won’t be returning to the Ohio Statehouse next year. The Ohio Capital Journal reached out to Williams for an interview, but he was unavailable. 

Ohio House Bill 249 would ban drag performers from performing anywhere that is not a designated adult entertainment facility. 

The bill passed the Ohio House in March, but has yet to have any hearings so far in the Ohio Senate. This type of law has been blocked in other states for violating freedom of speech.

“The language they use is so legally vague and broad that this could target theatrical performances that we might not consider obscene or harmful to juveniles,” Meek said. 

Williams and state Rep. Angie King, R-Celina, introduced the bill. 

Ohio House Bill 693 would prevent parents from being charged with abuse and neglect if they do not recognize their child’s trans identity. 

Williams and state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, introduced the bill, which has had two hearings so far in the Ohio House Judiciary Committee. 

Williams introduced these bills earlier this year, which have had no hearings so far.  

• Ohio House Bill 700 would ban using state funds to provide gender transition for minors. 

• Ohio House Bill 796 would make sure Ohio inmates and prisoners are housed by their biological sex. 

• Ohio House Bill 798 would restrict transgender Ohioans access to using public bathrooms and prohibit changing sex markers on birth and death certificates. 

• Ohio House Bill 838 would prohibit state and local municipalities from covering gender reassignment surgery.

Ohio House Bill 172  would ban children 14 and older from receiving mental health services without parental consent. State Rep. Johnathan Newman, R-Troy, introduced this bill, which has had a few hearings so far in the Ohio House Health Committee. 

Ohio House Bill 262 would designate the weeks from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day as Natural Family Month. Williams and state Rep. Beth Lear, R-Galena, introduced the bill, which has had four hearings so far.  

“So many of our LGBTQ+ Ohioans, especially the youth and the youth that are in rural Ohio, they don’t have anybody they might know that was part of the community, or they might not see others like them, so I think passing this kind of bill just reaffirms the narrative that Ohio is not really a welcoming place right now for LGBTQ+ Ohioans,” Meek said. 

Ohio House Bill 190 would require parental permission for schools to use different pronouns or different names for students that don’t match up with the biological sex or birth name. Williams and Newman introduced the bill, which had sponsor testimony last year. 

Ohio House Bill 196 would require political candidates to list their former names on candidacy petitions. This, however, would not apply to names that have been changed due to marriage. 

King and state Rep. Rodney Creech, R-West Alexandria, introduced the bill, which had sponsor testimony last year. 

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio —  the only openly gay lawmaker in the Ohio General Assembly — has introduced a few bills that would help LGBTQ people, but none of these bills have had any hearings so far this General Assembly.

• Ohio Senate Bill 70 would expand anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity. House Bill 136 is a companion bill. 

• Ohio Senate Bill 71 would ban any licensed health professionals from doing conversion therapy when providing mental health treatment to minors. Antonio and state Sen. Beth Liston, D-Dublin, introduced the bill. House Bill 300 is a companion bill. 

• Ohio Senate Bill 211 would designate the first full week of June as “Love Makes a Family Week.”

Antonio has introduced the Ohio Fairness Act in every General Assembly since she was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 2011 and this is the first time since 2018 the bill has no Republican support. 

Any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered. 

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Letting students decide how they learn is almost as important a goal of Mayfield High School near Cleveland as learning itself.

The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn praise from national education advocates, including the XQ Institute and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including Indiana, Vermont and Virginia, while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to greater Chicago.

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program.

• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work.

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.”

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year.

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation.

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility…to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing…this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home.

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to The 74. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“These parks belong to all of us, and they offer every Ohioan a chance to connect with nature, spend meaningful time outdoors, and appreciate the landscapes that make our state special,” DeWine said. 

These would be wonderful words — if Ohio wasn’t the only state to frack its own state parks, thanks to Ohio House Bill 507, which DeWine signed in 2023. 

Since then, Ohio’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission has approved fracking parts of Salt Fork State Park, as well as parts or all of six wildlife areas: Valley Run, Zepernick, Keen, Leesville, Jockey Hollow, and Egypt Valley. All told, almost 24,000 acres of Ohio state parks and wildlife areas have been approved or nominated for fracking.

Ohio Senate Bill 219, now sitting on DeWine’s desk, would make this problem much worse. DeWine vetoed many of these provisions when they were slipped into the state budget bill last year. Now they are back, and he faces a choice between signing the bill or vetoing these provisions again.   

47 pages of favors for the oil and gas industry

Sponsored by Sen. Al Landis, R-Dover, with a long list of Republican co-sponsors, Ohio Senate Bill 219 is framed as an overhaul of the law governing oil and gas wells. 

In reality, it is 47 pages of favors for the oil and gas industry — starting with speeding up fracking of Ohio’s parks and wildlife areas. 

If passed, S.B. 219 would:

• Give the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission only 90 days to decide on a nomination to frack public lands; currently they have 180 days. 

• Require the commission to put approved nominations out for bid immediately; currently they do that next calendar quarter.

• Require the commission to select the “highest and best bid” within 60 days; currently there is no deadline. 

• Require the state agency that manages the land to execute a lease within 30 days; currently there is no time limit. These leases are more complex than a standard lease due to safeguards needed to protect our public lands 

S.B. 219 favors oil and gas companies that frack public land even further, such as by:

• Giving an oil and gas company the option to extend a lease to frack public land for five additional years instead of three years under existing law.

• Giving an oil and gas company that has a lease to frack public lands up to 60 days to pay any advance royalties or bonuses, instead of 10 days under existing law.

• Suspending royalty payments and time limits on leases to frack public land if the land has to go through a federal approval process. This applies to Zepernick and Leesville wildlife areas. 

• Suspending royalty payments and time limits on leases to frack public land if litigation of any kind is filed, until a final nonappealable court order has been issued. Conceivably a litigant would have to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to obtain a final nonappealable order – yet the oil and gas company would be allowed to continue drilling operations with payments suspended throughout this process. 

As if all that is not enough, Senate Bill 219 would also cut into the Ohio Department of Natural Resource’s ability to regulate fracking operations by:

• Requiring ODNR to write its own administrative rules for oil and gas operations, instead of relying on the state Administrative Procedures Act, which could weaken regulations and make enforcement more difficult. 

• Curtailing ODNR’s authority to deny requests for expedited review of permit applications. If an oil and gas company requests expedited review, the department would have to grant that for up to 10 permits per year.

• Prohibiting ODNR from charging an oil and gas company more than the costs specifically outlined in the lease. Potentially the state could not fine companies that do not follow the rules or make companies pay to clean up after a spill, leak, or accident.

• Allowing an oil and gas company to negotiate “surface use” of state land — meaning they could frack IN our state parks and public lands. DeWine ordered “no surface use,” meaning frack wells must be located outside state parks and wildlife areas, but that could easily change under a new administration.

What will DeWine do?

Gov. DeWine is right: Ohio’s state parks and public lands belong to all of us. Ohio is one of only a handful of states that do not charge admission to their state parks – which were recently named the best state park system in the nation. 

S.B. 219 puts all of this at risk. DeWine previously vetoed many of S.B. 219’s provisions from the budget bill — but at that time he had line-item veto authority because it was an appropriations bill. 

Now his choices are different: he can sign the bill; he can do nothing and let it become law in 10 days; or he can veto the bill and send it back to the legislature, which could try to override. 

As he makes this crucial decision, we hope DeWine takes into account the need to protect Ohio’s state parks and public lands, the wishes of its citizens, and our duty to preserve the environment for future generations. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Without explicitly tying their efforts to a replacement of Pride Month — which celebrates the LGBTQ+ community — GOP governors in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, Tennessee and Utah have labeled June with conservative-friendly monikers that celebrate one type of family unit: a man and woman who are married with children.

The proclamations don’t carry the weight of law, but they are public statements about the kind of families that leadership in those states want to promote.

In Tennessee, GOP state lawmakers passed a resolution signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee designating June as “Nuclear Family Month.” The resolution labels a ‘nuclear family’ as “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted or fostered children” and calls it “God’s design for familial structure.”

Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Braun also declared June “nuclear family month” in a proclamation with wording similar to Tennessee’s. Braun told reporters the proclamation wasn’t intended to send a message to other types of families, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey declared June as “Strong Families Month.” Her official announcement of the designation highlighted the role of fathers as “head of the household.”

In Nebraska, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen designated June as “Marriage and Family Month,” with a proclamation saying “God’s design” for marriage is a family with one husband, one wife and children.

Pillen called it “the most important proclamation I’ve ever had the privilege to sign.”

The Republican governors of Arkansas and Utah declared June “Fidelity Month,” defining fidelity as dedication to faith, family and country. The proclamations don’t explicitly describe the composition of those families. The idea of a “Fidelity Month” was first proposed and promoted a few years ago by a conservative Christian legal scholar.

Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted about her declaration on X by sharing a link to an article calling such efforts “counter-programming” to Pride Month.

But the rebranding of June marks a departure for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who declared June as Pride Month during his first three years in office and has previously expressed remorse for his attitude about gay people.

Pride Month celebrates LGBTQ+ history and culture, and serves as a platform to increase visibility for queer communities that continue to fight for civil rights and equality. It’s marked by celebratory parades, concerts and festivals in every state.

LGBTQ+ advocates have called the rebranding efforts “disappointing” and a deliberate attempt to erase communities that are already vulnerable.

“Pride month is a celebration that uplifts marginalized folks and gives them resources to survive and spaces where they can thrive,” the Utah-based organization Project Rainbow posted in a statement about Cox’s choice to designate June as Fidelity Month.

Advocates say the month is not only about celebration, but also provides important opportunities to support queer people. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 3 in 5 LGBTQ+ high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the previous year. One in 5 LGBTQ+ participants in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey said they had attempted suicide.

While Republican governors have mostly shied away from directly mentioning Pride Month or tying their month-naming efforts to its erasure, some elected officials have been more explicit.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican, posted from his official X account, “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month” on June 1 but later deleted it.

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican, shared an illustrated version of the proclamation on social media, titled “Take back the Rainbow!” and depicting a heterosexual white couple with children.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

To a former public-pension official, that combination carries an unsettling echo of Ohio’s past. The last time the state moved public money into an unconventional, hard-to-value asset steered by a politically connected insider, it produced Coingate — one of the worst investment scandals in Ohio history.

Chris Tobe, a financial analyst and former pension trustee in Kentucky, told the Center for Media and Democracy that an Ohio governor holds “great influence” over state funds and warned that Ramaswamy’s crypto ties through his firm Strive could “take the corruption to the next level” — a remark he tied to Ohio’s history of public-money scandals. The American Prospect, reporting in partnership with the group, drew the line directly to Coingate.

The conflict at the center of that warning is established. Ramaswamy holds Bitcoin and Ethereum and retains about a 10% stake in Strive, a firm that has committed most of its treasury to Bitcoin; in January 2025 he praised House Bill 18, then titled the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, as a “thoughtful & powerful bill”; and the crypto industry has poured millions into his candidacy. TiffinOhio.net has detailed his personal holdings and the bill and the crypto money behind his campaign in earlier reporting.

What Coingate was

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation expanded beyond traditional stocks and bonds into alternative investments. One was a $50 million fund to buy and sell rare coins and collectibles, run by Tom Noe, a Toledo coin dealer and prominent Republican fundraiser who chaired the Northwest Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign and had sharply increased his political giving before winning the work, according to Toledo Blade reporting and court records.

About $13.7 million ultimately went missing. Noe was convicted in 2006 of theft, money laundering, forgery and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. The broader scandal produced 19 convictions and a guilty plea from then-Gov. Bob Taft on an ethics charge for failing to disclose gifts. In the years after, the bureau moved to reduce its exposure to high-risk, exotic investments.

The lesson critics draw is structural: Ohio has been badly burned before when public funds flowed into a volatile asset class connected to political insiders. The crypto proposal, they argue, recreates that incentive structure. Ramaswamy and the company he co-founded hold Bitcoin, his largest outside campaign backers are crypto investors, and large institutional buying by a state tends to push the asset’s price up — meaning the people positioned to benefit overlap with the people funding his rise.

Where the comparison breaks down

The parallel has clear limits, and they matter. Ramaswamy has not been charged with or accused of any crime, and House Bill 18 is lawful proposed legislation. Coingate centered on outright theft by a manager who controlled the money directly; the concern raised about the crypto plan is conflict of interest and market exposure, not embezzlement. Bitcoin is also a publicly priced, openly traded asset, unlike the illiquid collectibles whose opacity helped conceal the Coingate losses for years. The comparison is to risk and incentive, not to conduct.

A bill that has stalled — and divided Republicans

House Bill 18 has not advanced. Sponsored by Rep. Steve Demetriou, R-Bainbridge Township, it remains in the House Technology and Innovation Committee, where it has drawn multiple hearings but no committee vote, according to the legislature’s official record. Committee amendments reported by the Ohio Capital Journal broadened the fund to allow more traditional investments such as bonds, added liability protection for the officials overseeing it, and dropped “cryptocurrency” from the fund’s name. As written, the measure is discretionary — it would permit, not require, the treasurer to invest — and limits eligible digital assets to those with a market capitalization of at least $750 billion, a threshold only Bitcoin meets today.

Not all Republicans are convinced. State Treasurer Robert Sprague, who would carry out any such investment, has said there are “issues that we’re trying to work through” on the bill and pointed to the volatility of digital assets. House Speaker Matt Huffman has been blunter, telling reporters, “I’m still scratching my head over cryptocurrency.” Demetriou has defended the idea as a way to “hedge against inflation” and keep Ohio competitive in digital finance.

Ramaswamy has said he wants to be the nation’s strongest pro-Bitcoin governor and has framed digital-asset investment as a way to diversify state holdings. Innovation Ohio, a progressive policy group that has tracked his holdings, counters that steering public and pension money toward Bitcoin would benefit Ramaswamy and his firm while shifting the risk onto Ohio’s teachers, public employees and retirees.

Ramaswamy faces Democratic nominee Amy Acton, a physician and former state health director, in the general election on Tuesday, November 3. House Bill 18 remains in committee.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Breeden succeeds interim president Dr. Cory Stine, who is stepping down July 19 after less than two months in the role. Stine, who has worked at Terra State for more than 20 years, is leaving after accepting a position at another college, board Chair Mircea Handru told WTOL. Breeden takes over the next day.

The college said Breeden brings experience in higher education leadership, governance and strategic planning. He currently serves as vice president of operations for the United States Naval Community College, the federal community college for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. He is a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel with more than three decades of leadership experience and holds a doctorate in community college leadership from Ferris State University. The college said he has also served as a university trustee.

“The Board of Trustees is excited to welcome Dr. Breeden to Terra State Community College,” Handru said in the announcement. “His commitment to financial stewardship, enrollment growth, academic excellence, and community engagement aligns strongly with Terra State’s mission.”

Breeden inherits a college working to climb out of fiscal watch. The Ohio Department of Higher Education placed Terra State under the designation on March 23, 2026, following a March 17 recommendation from the Ohio Auditor of State. State officials cited missing annual audits for the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, late payments to vendors and flaws in the college’s payment processing, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

Dr. Ronald Schumacher, who had led the college since 2018, resigned effective April 2 — the same day trustees appointed Stine to lead it. The college has up to three years to resolve the problems and end fiscal watch, and is required to submit a financial recovery plan to the state, consult with the auditor on its accounting systems and adopt a mandatory monthly review of its finances.

The college said a campus-wide welcome event and community forum will be held so students, employees and community members can meet Breeden and hear his plans for the college. Additional details are to be announced.

Terra State, located in Fremont, is Sandusky County’s only community college and serves students across the region. It enrolled 1,240 students in fall 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The crash happened just before 5:30 p.m. on June 20 on County Road 62 near County Road 80 in Jackson Township, according to the Patrol’s Fremont Post.

A preliminary investigation found that a Jeep Commander driven by Doyle B. Durst was traveling east on County Road 62 when it went off the right side of the road. Durst overcorrected, and the vehicle traveled off the left side of the roadway, struck an embankment and overturned, the Patrol said.

Durst was ejected from the vehicle and died at the scene.

The Fremont Post was assisted by the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, Helena Fire Department, Sandusky County EMS, the Sandusky County Coroner’s Office, Mercy Health Life Flight and John’s Welding and Towing.

The crash remains under investigation.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Seneca County Common Pleas Court granted the board’s motion to dismiss counts two through four of WIN Waste’s complaint, which alleged the board violated Ohio’s Open Meetings Act, according to a June 15 news release from the Seneca County General Health District. The court found the company failed to state a claim that the board broke the law as alleged in those counts.

A remaining count was not part of the board’s motion and will be decided later, the district said.

The court’s journal entry noted that the case is one of seven filed by or involving WIN Waste over the board’s decisions on the landfill’s license.

“We’re gratified that our local court followed the law and granted the motion to dismiss,” Board of Health President Clay Wolph said in the release. “The landfill is forcing the Board to spend taxpayer funds to fight in court. Still, we have and will continue to keep the health and safety of our communities at the forefront when making decisions.”

WIN Waste pushed back in a statement, rejecting the board’s framing of the litigation’s cost to taxpayers. While the company said it sued to ensure government transparency, the court observed that it waited two years after the first alleged violation to file and initially sought a civil penalty of $500 for each of 88 separate alleged Open Meetings Act violations.

“We find it ironic that the Seneca County General Health District has suddenly discovered a concern for taxpayer dollars. We pay millions in fees that are specifically designed to fund legitimate regulatory oversight,” the company said. “Instead of working collaboratively with the Ohio EPA and a facility that has operated in compliance for years, the SCGHD has repeatedly attacked both WIN and the Ohio EPA, manufacturing violations that do not exist.”

WIN Waste operates the landfill, formerly known as Sunny Farms, at 12500 W. County Road 18 south of Fostoria. The health district licenses and inspects the site and earlier this year installed two ambient air monitoring stations near the landfill. The two sides have clashed for years over conditions attached to the landfill’s annual operating license, and the county has cited the facility for violations the company contests.

The open-meetings complaint is one front in a wider legal battle that has produced rulings for both sides. In separate proceedings, the state Environmental Review Appeals Commission has found a number of the district’s license conditions unlawful or unreasonable, and the Ohio Supreme Court in 2024 dismissed an earlier WIN Waste challenge as moot. The board, in turn, has voted to appeal the Ohio EPA’s approval of the landfill’s expansion.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But they still need nearly everything to break their way against a map that put them at a starting disadvantage, analysts and campaign officials say.

At the outset of this election cycle, Republicans appeared highly likely to hold their majority. Democrats would need to flip four seats, and competitive races this year are in states that are more Republican than average. 

But as election watchers increasingly expect a blue tint to the November midterms, the question is now whether it will be blue enough to put Democrats back in the Senate majority, where they are now at a 53-47 disadvantage.

Democrats are mounting competitive campaigns in Republican-run states typically seen as stretches, including Texas and Iowa. But analysts say scandals surrounding the party’s nominee in Maine, Graham Platner, have exposed how dependent Democrats are on a rising tide of voter anger with Trump and Republicans to lift their candidates to victory. 

“Is 2026 gonna be a mildly blue lean year, like 2018, or a kind of tsunami blue year, like 2006 or 2008?” J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a University of Virginia-based election forecaster, said. “I think the answer to that question is still kind of, we’ll see.”

Strong candidates, high prices

Thirty-five Senate seats will be on the ballot during the November midterm elections. 

Of the nine deemed most competitive — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — that will likely decide control of the chamber, Trump won all but Maine and New Hampshire in 2024. Democrats would have to retain their current seats and flip others in some combination of seven of those Senate races to take over control of the chamber. 

But Democrats have also offset their geographic disadvantage by fielding strong candidates in a few of the most important races, making pink-to-red states such as Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina ultra-competitive.

Democrats’ optimism comes as Trump has made a series of moves they believe could prove toxic for Republicans. Potentially most damaging, the war with Iran sent gas prices soaring and inflation rising, calling into question his handling of the economy as voters continue to rate affordability as a top issue.Trump has signed a ceasefire agreement and gas prices are dropping, but the question is whether there’s enough time left to erase the damage. 

The president’s approval rating was near 50% when he won the 2024 election, Coleman said, but has since sunk as the cost of living keeps rising. 

Trump continues to turn off voters, with elections now less than five months away. A New York Times daily average of polling placed the president’s approval rating at 39% as of June 17.

A switch in Senate control would have major implications for the remainder of Trump’s term. 

Democratic senators, assuming they vote together, would have the power to block any U.S. Supreme Court nominees put forward by Trump in the final two years of his term, as well as executive branch nominees and federal judges, and to shut down major party-line legislation enacted by Republicans twice already in the past year through the budget reconciliation process.

The combination of an unpopular president and a strong crop of candidates gives Democrats a fighting chance to win the majority, even if they still face long odds, Coleman said.

“If you asked me a year ago if Democrats had a path to the Senate, I would have said the chances aren’t zero, but they’re very hard,” Coleman said. “Now, I think there are several paths that the Democrats have to take the Senate, but I think the Republicans just have an easier path holding it.”

Moderates put red states in play

Alvin Tillery, a Democratic pollster and consultant who is also a professor in Northwestern University’s political science department, said strong candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska give his party the edge in those states

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola are “moderates who have won statewide,” Tillery said.

Though the Democratic candidates in those states are establishment-friendly, Tillery said Democrats generally should look to motivate younger voters and voters of color by leaning in to issues that the No Kings protests have elevated, as well as keeping affordability in focus.

But, despite the apparent quality of Democratic candidates, those states are still purple at best. Trump has won each state in each of his three White House runs.

The president’s drooping approval may not be as big a factor as Democrats need, a national Republican campaign operative said.

“Yes, approval ratings, obviously, have gone down,” the operative, who declined to be identified by name, said. “However, when it comes to the Republican base, they are still showing up for Trump, and he will make sure to turn them out … At the end of the day, we have an advantage when it comes to the state-specific electorates that we’re looking at.”

Control of the Senate may come down to the Democratic candidates’ strength against the overall partisan lean of the states in play.

“They’ve by and large done a good job of recruiting the candidates they need to to put those states in play,” Coleman said of Democrats. “It’s just a question of: Are those states too red?”

Democrats are also defending open seats in Michigan and New Hampshire, while Sen. Jon Ossoff is seeking reelection in Georgia. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Michigan race as a toss-up and the contests in New Hampshire and Georgia, where Ossoff will face Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins after his win in the June 16 GOP primary, as leaning toward Democrats.

A Maine street fight

On paper, Maine could be seen as the bluest state on the map this year because of its state’s record in presidential elections.

But its Senate race also may be the most immune from the national environment, with a battle-tested Republican incumbent running in a lightly populated state where retail politics can still swing an election.

The matchup, which may be the single most competitive in the country, pits a controversial newcomer in Platner against Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate and powerful Republican with proven electoral appeal who has occasionally criticized the president during the Trump era but also voted for conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Democrats are betting that Maine voters want more full-throated opposition to Trump. Primary voters formally made Platner the nominee in June after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, seen as a more establishment candidate, suspended her campaign. 

Platner, a gruff-looking oyster farmer and Marine veteran, has connected with voters with a populist, outsider message. But he has faced an array of flaps, including over a tattoo with Nazi associations and that Platner had sexted several women while married. The New York Times also reported on women who said they were disturbed by Platner’s behavior while dating him.

He faces a difficult matchup with Collins, who has won other races in the face of significant national headwinds. In 2020, even as Trump lost the presidential election nationwide and in Maine, Collins won reelection while outperforming Trump by 18 points.

Senate math

The president’s party typically does poorly in midterm elections. Republicans are seen as likely to lose the House, though gerrymandering may make the fight for control of that chamber tighter than before. Republicans losing the Senate, too, would be seen as a stinging rebuke of Trump and GOP lawmakers.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is seeking election after he was appointed to the Senate last year to replace JD Vance, who resigned to become vice president. Brown is running against Husted after losing reelection in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno. 

Brown, who promotes a populist message, hearkens back to an earlier era of Ohio politics, when Democrats were more popular. President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012 but Republicans have since become ascendant, with Trump winning the state all three times he’s run for president.

While Husted hasn’t won a Senate race, he’s won statewide races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. 

In North Carolina, Cooper is now favored in a contest with Republican Michael Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report have said the race leans Democratic, though another forecaster, Inside Elections, rates it as a tossup.

They are battling to flip the seat and succeed Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who chose not to run for reelection after repeatedly clashing with Trump. He has publicly said Trump is harming Republican chances in November.

“We need Republicans to do well in November, but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!” Tillis wrote on social media in late May.

Alaska’s Senate race pits two well-known politicians in the state against each other. Incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing Peltola, who was the state’s lone U.S. House member for more than two years.

Peltola represents a hope by Democrats that a familiar face will resonate with voters in a state where the party has struggled. She was the first Democrat to win statewide in Alaska since 2008. Peltola, who was first elected to Congress in a 2022 special election, lost her race for reelection in 2024.

Sullivan’s campaign got a boost after Alaska election officials disqualified a different Dan Sullivan from appearing on the ballot. Alaska Elections Division Director Carol Beecher wrote that the other Sullivan had filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead” voters.

In Iowa, Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek, a state representative, are running for an open seat created after Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican, declined to run for reelection.

Iowa was once a major swing state and home of long-serving Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, and helped power President Barack Obama’s rise in 2008. It has since become solidly Republican, but anger over Trump’s tariffs and concerns that the war in Iran will send fertilizer prices rising have potentially created an opening for Democrats.

Lone Star longing

After Maine, no race has perhaps attracted as much attention as Texas.

Republicans are emerging from a bruising primary battle between Sen. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued and previously indicted state attorney general. Paxton won and will face Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminary student who speaks openly about his faith, a progressive form of Christianity.

A Democratic victory would represent a political earthquake. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s and haven’t won a statewide election since the 1990s.

Trump won 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024. A Talarico victory — a statewide Democratic victory — would open up the possibility that the party might one day again compete at the presidential level in Texas, the state that sent President Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington. Texas has 40 Electoral College votes, the second-biggest prize after California’s 54.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The agreement is “a win-win situation” for the U.S., Vance said.

“If they change their behavior, big things are going to happen for Iran and for the world,” Vance said. “If they don’t, no skin off our backs” because Iran’s nuclear program and military are “still destroyed.”

The agreement immediately stops hostilities that began Feb. 28. The war claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members, thousands of civilians in Iran, Lebanon and across the Gulf region, and disrupted the global economy. 

Vance said the “Israelis, just like everybody else, have to respect this process,” highlighting that the agreement binds Israel to ceasing its bombing campaign in Lebanon against Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters.

Without specifying a date, Vance said he expects to brief Congress but is “quite confident” the administration does not need congressional approval on terms of the deal that will lift sanctions on Iran, despite the claims of some U.S. senators.

‘Just signed it’

Vance was slated to finalize the 14-point memorandum of understanding in Switzerland Friday, but President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced early Thursday morning that he had signed the deal while attending a state dinner hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles after the G7 summit among the world’s wealthiest nations concluded.

“Just signed it,” Trump told journalists after hugging and saying goodbye to France’s president and first lady Brigitte Macron just after 1 a.m. local time, according to the traveling press.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian posted images on social media early Thursday of the signed agreement in English and Farsi. 

“This text is the reflection of the voice of a nation that did not trade its dignity and independence for any threat or pressure. What was recorded today was the result of national resilience, political rationality, and responsible diplomacy,” he wrote, according to a translation on X.

Trump posted a series of messages about the signed memorandum on his own social media site, Truth Social, Thursday morning, including a link to a news article about Pope Leo commending the deal. The Trump administration engaged in a public war of words with Leo in April.

“These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT” the president posted online early Thursday.

Hours later, in all caps, he wrote: “OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE!), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY!). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ‘YOU’RE WELCOME!’ President DJT”

‘Foreign policy blunder’

Several, including some from the president’s own party, have been critical of the agreement.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who recently lost his primary after Trump endorsed an opponent, said in a statement on social media the deal “is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.

“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped.”

Sen. John Kennedy, also a Louisiana Republican, said on the Senate floor Thursday morning “We ought to give peace a chance. It’s only 60 days and we’re going to just have to trust the president on this one.”

Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Fears of troops or other federal agents at voting sites have long loomed over the approaching midterm elections in November. Democrats and voting rights advocates have grown alarmed in recent months as Trump has publicly entertained the possibility. Other administration officials have mocked or sidestepped questions about possible deployments.

The legislation, the Protect Our Polls Act, would require Congress to pass a resolution approving any deployment beforehand. Federal law prohibits troops and other armed federal personnel from polling places, but contains an exception to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — fueling speculation that Trump could invoke this exception to bypass the ban.

“He is trying to nationalize the elections and he is telling us in his own words what he is trying to do,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “On top of that, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet positions have come up here and refused to rule out uniformed military or federal law enforcement being sent to the polls on Election Day.”

White House justification

The bill would require the White House, 48 hours before any deployment, to provide Congress with intelligence, legal justifications, deployment plans and evidence that state and local officials are unable to address the threat themselves. 

It also prohibits military personnel from using federal funds to access election records, a provision designed to block troops from seizing ballots.

Slotkin is offering the bill alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Alex Padilla of California, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I served to protect the Constitution of the United States and our democracy,” said Gallego, a Marine veteran. “I swore that oath, and the last thing any Marine, sailor, Army, Coastie, Air Force, spacemen — whatever they call them nowadays — wants to do is to undermine that. We’re here to protect democracy, we’re not here to undermine democracy.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that if Democrats “really cared about securing our elections,” the party would pass the SAVE America Act. 

The legislation would require voters to provide documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship. The measure has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

In May, Trump told reporters that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to questions about sending National Guard personnel or federal immigration agents to voting locations in November.

Amendments blocked

At a Senate hearing in April, Slotkin pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on sending troops to the polls. He called the questions “another gotcha hypothetical.”

The Democratic legislation comes a week after Slotkin said Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked two amendments to ban troops at the polls during work on the National Defense Authorization Act. The committee typically works on the defense spending bill behind closed doors.

The Protect Our Polls Act has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. Still, its introduction underscores the level of concern among Democrats as Trump’s efforts to influence the midterm elections come into focus.

The Department of Justice has spent a year demanding states turn over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data on voters. DOJ officials have said in court that the department wants to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. 

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data, but no judge has so far ruled in the administration’s favor.

Investigations

The Department of Justice is also engaged in several election-related investigations over past elections. 

The FBI raided a Georgia elections warehouse in January and seized ballots from the 2020 election. Election officials have been subpoenaed in Minneapolis and the FBI last week searched the office of an Ohio voting rights group.

And Trump signed an executive order that restricts voting by mail. It would require states to provide lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service before using the mail to send ballots and directs Homeland Security to share lists of voting-age citizens with every state. The order remains in effect for now, despite a series of lawsuits challenging it.

“There’s a common theme here,” Padilla said at a Democratic forum on election security on Tuesday. “All of these things are illegal and many unconstitutional.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Yet at least one state — New Hampshire — offers insight into how civic groups can work around a lack of registration opportunities to ensure young people can register, as well as the challenges that remain.

Since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, nearly all states must allow residents to register to vote at motor vehicle offices. But fewer teens are obtaining driver’s licenses today, translating into fewer trips to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and more missed chances to register.

More than 7.5 million people ages 16 to 18 don’t have a driver’s license, according to data compiled by The Civics Center, a nonpartisan group focused on boosting youth voter registration. Three million of those youth will be old enough to vote this year and all will be eligible by 2028, the organization said in a June research report on how declines in teen driving, spurred in part by the rising cost of obtaining a license, could affect voting.

Young people represent a large pool of potential voters for candidates ahead of the midterm elections this November and the presidential election in 2028. Still, voting advocates worry barriers to registration will keep many of them from the polls.

“Our goal is to help people debunk these myths that it’s somehow young people’s fault that these systems aren’t working well for them,” said Laura Brill, founder and CEO of The Civics Center.

Low registration rates

In recent years about 60% of 18-year-olds have held driver’s licenses, according to the Federal Highway Administration. By contrast, in 1994, the year after the National Voter Registration Act was passed, about 74% had licenses.

Even without declining visits to the DMV, registration rates among the youngest voters are low. During midterm election years, the percentage of 18-year-olds registered to vote typically remains under 30%, according to The Civics Center, compared to about 75% of Americans 45 and older. 

Some civic groups are pushing for more in-person voter registration drives, including in high schools, which may help offset the effects of fewer trips to the DMV. Without significant action, they fear registration rates will dip even lower. 

The League of Women Voters announced a partnership with The Civics Center in April to promote high school voter registration. The groups are offering state-specific training and toolkits to help members of the League, which has hundreds of chapters across the country, help students, teachers and school administrators hold registration drives.

They also want states to provide teens more time to register before they can vote. About half of teens currently live in states that allow voter pre-registration at 16 or earlier, according to The Civics Center. 

These states include California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

“Young people have a very short window of opportunity,” said Jeanette Senecal, chief of civic learning and impact at the League of Women Voters. “So when we increase that window of opportunity to allow for preregistration at 16 and 17, there’s a much longer kind of runway in order for us to get them registered to vote for that first election.”

The focus on voter registration drives reflects, in part, an acknowledgement that online voter registration isn’t a panacea for fewer in-person DMV visits. Thirty-six states either offer no online voter registration option or allow voter registration only with a driver’s license or state-issued identification, according to information compiled by The Civics Center.

“Paper forms, typically you only need a Social Security number and not a driver’s license. That’s one of the reasons that in-person efforts can be so effective,” Brill said.

SAVE America Act

Voter registration drives are under threat, however. President Donald Trump’s signature election legislation, the SAVE America Act, would effectively prohibit drives held by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters because it would require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican senators. Trump is still urging lawmakers to pass the measure and posted on social media recently that he opposes unrelated foreign surveillance legislation unless it also includes the SAVE America Act.

As of late 2024, 24 states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on third-party voter registration drives, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

What worked in New Hampshire

Because of its voter laws in the early 1990s, New Hampshire is one of six states exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, along with Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The exemption means New Hampshire isn’t required to offer voter registration at motor vehicle offices.

In New Hampshire, everyone — teens and older adults alike — registers in person with election officials and can also register at the polls on Election Day.

Open Democracy, a New Hampshire voting rights group, has spent several years working to improve the registration rate among 18-year-olds. 

The organization hired an employee focused on high school voter registration and held 41 high school voter registration drives in 2024, said Olivia Zink, the group’s executive director. To hold the drives, it had to assure election officials were present to accept paperwork.

In December 2023, an election off year, just 9% of New Hampshire 18-year-olds were registered. After the November 2024 election, nearly 64% of 18-year-olds were registered, according to data compiled by The Civics Center. Zink acknowledged that the presidential election was a major motivator, but she emphasized the importance of registering students every year. 

State laws can play a major role. Registrations plummeted last year, Zink said, after state lawmakers removed the ability of residents to sign an affidavit as proof of citizenship. She attributed the drop to students not regularly carrying their birth certificates or other documents proving citizenship with them.

“Even with education and posters that are hung up at school and announcements and letters home to parents — we still saw so many fewer students register to vote in 2025 due to that law,” Zink said.

In May, a federal judge blocked the New Hampshire law after a coalition of voting rights groups, including Open Democracy, challenged the measure. 

As part of her decision, Judge Samantha Elliott, a Biden appointee, found that Open Democracy registered fewer students in 2025 compared to 2023, even though the organization at that time didn’t have a full-time staff member dedicated to high school registration.

 Zink said that even in the first few weeks since the judge’s decision, she had heard of high school students once again registering by signing affidavits. 

Despite persistent barriers, Senecal cast the work of registering young people as critical. Each time someone votes, they’re more likely to vote again, she said.

“So the earlier we can engage those people, we really help create these lifetime habits of voting,” Senecal said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Borrowers who enroll in auto pay — the optional feature that allows a borrower to have their monthly loan payment automatically deducted from their checking or savings account — will see a reduction in their interest rate by one full percentage point from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2028. 

The change means a 6% interest rate would drop to 5%, for instance. 

Federal student loan borrowers currently enrolled in auto pay already receive an interest rate reduction of 0.25 percentage points from their servicer. Those borrowers do not need to take any additional action and will automatically receive an extra interest rate reduction of 0.75 percentage points, the department said. 

“This temporary incentive is designed to help borrowers pay down their balances more quickly, take full advantage of new repayment benefits, remain on track toward loan discharge opportunities and to strengthen the overall health of the federal student loan portfolio,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said during a Thursday call with reporters. 

Kent said the benefit is estimated to cost the agency $6 billion.   

Changes coming

The announcement came ahead of major changes for the federal student loan system — with many provisions slated to also begin July 1 — stemming from congressional Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed last year.

The overhaul includes new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system that gives new borrowers only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.

Meanwhile, millions of borrowers under the now defunct Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan will receive notices from their federal loan servicers starting July 1 that instruct them to enter into a legal repayment plan within 90 days. 

Auto pay enrollment halved

The federal student loan portfolio stands at a “staggering $1.7 trillion,” with about 37% of borrowers currently in repayment, according to Kent.

The under secretary noted that at the end of 2019, nearly 83% of borrowers were enrolled in auto pay but that the figure stood at just 40% by the end of 2025.

There are also 9.16 million borrowers in default as of April, per the latest available department data.  

Borrowers have until Sept. 30, 2026, to opt in to auto pay to be eligible for the two-year benefit. 

The benefit is open to borrowers whose federal student loans originated after July 1, 2012, the department said. 

Kent encouraged borrowers to “take advantage of this opportunity and enroll in auto debit as soon as possible.” 

Borrowers can enroll by logging in to their loan servicer account and selecting “auto pay” from a navigation bar, he said.

The department clarified that borrowers will need to stay in auto pay to continue receiving the reduced interest rate.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Juneteenth recognizes the final emancipation of enslaved African Americans on June 19, 1865, at the end of the Civil War. Former President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.

Ohio Legislative Black Caucus President and state Rep. Terrence Upchurch, D-Cleveland, said Juneteenth is a reminder that progress does not happen on its own.

“A right on paper means little if people cannot reach it in real life,” he said.

Caucus members linked the holiday to current trends in Ohio regarding voter access. A constitutional amendment that would require photo ID to vote will be on the ballot in November after Republican state lawmakers passed a ballot resolution last week.

State law already requires citizens to provide photo ID before voting. But putting the requirement in the state constitution would make it more difficult for future legislatures to change the requirements without passing another constitutional amendment, state Rep. Meredith Lawson Rowe, D-Reynoldsburg, said.

Some scholarly research indicates that voter ID laws disproportionately prevent otherwise eligible minority communities from voting, but other research has found that the data is inconclusive. The caucus supports expanding early voting and mail-in ballot access, as well as increased voter education, in an effort to protect “every lawful ballot,” she said.

“The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus believes elections can be secure and accessible at the same time,” Rowe added. “We can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time in Ohio.”

Caucus members also used the occasion to express support for the Ohio Organizing Commission after reports that the voting-rights organization’s Cleveland offices were searched by FBI agents on Thursday. 

Upchurch called the reports “troubling,” adding that they came at a time when voting rights, civic engagement and community organization are “under attack.”

State Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, said the reports reminded him of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black voting rights activist during the Civil Rights Movement who faced retaliation from white Southerners for trying to vote in Mississippi. Despite the attacks, Jarrells said Hamer continued to organize to increase Black voter turnout.

“We must protect the right to vote,” he said. “We must refuse to let fear decide who belongs in democracy and who does not.”

State Rep. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, said Juneteenth also celebrates Black freedom from the economic system of slavery. Brewer argued for a push for “economic freedom” to make everyday costs like healthcare, childcare and education more affordable.

State Rep. Latyna M. Humphrey, D-Columbus, criticized leadership in the state legislature for advancing legislation like the constitutional amendment requiring photo ID to vote instead of lowering costs.

“Ohioans have every right to ask why this legislature is moving faster to limit participation than it is to address the challenges everyday families face,” Humphrey said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Conserve Ohio, the grassroots organization behind the proposed constitutional amendment, said they are now hoping to make the 2027 ballot. The amendment would prohibit building data centers with a peak load of more than 25 megawatts per month, which would prevent most modern data centers. 

“We want to make it clear: we will not be stopping,” Conserve Ohio said in a statement. “Construction won’t be stopping, so signature gathering and community action will not be stopping.”

Conserve Ohio originally was trying to make this year’s ballot after the Ohio Ballot Board gave petitioners the green light to start collecting signatures in April, but they were up against a tight deadline. 

“The July 1st deadline was our best case scenario for the quickest possible action,” Conserve Ohio said in a statement. “Internally, we set that as our ideal target and it just didn’t pan out. We are not going to be submitting this year.”

The amendment would have needed more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1 to get on this year’s ballot. The signatures they have collected so far remain valid since they did not submit them to the Ohio Secretary of State. 

Conserve Ohio has collected more than 70,000 signatures as of June 18, according to their campaign. The counties with the most signatures are Lucas County (6,482), Stark County (6,329), and Butler County (4,030).

“We can’t change when we began, but we can determine how it ends,” Conserve Ohio said. “All is not lost. The end goal has not changed. Our resolve has not changed.” 

Conserve Ohio is only using volunteers to collect signatures, and they have more than 1,000 volunteers. 

Ohio has more than 200 data centers, the sixth-highest state in the country, according to Pew Research Center. Most of the data centers are in central Ohio. Cincinnati has 26 and Cleveland has 22, according to the Data Center Map. 

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

Ohio lawmakers have yet to pass any data center legislation. 

Ohio House Bill 646 would, among other things, limit the size of new sales tax breaks from 100% down to 50%. But this would not apply to any of the companies with existing contracts, like Meta, Google and Amazon.

The state provided almost $1.57 billion in sales-tax exemptions on purchases of data center equipment and construction materials last year, according to the Ohio Department of Taxation. 

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

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

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

Lawmakers in at least 14 states — Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin — have introduced legislation that would temporarily ban data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The childcare field has been in what has been described by state and national advocates as a crisis as facilities struggle with high demand, high turnover, low wages, and inconsistent levels of assistance from states.

Childcare advocates in the state are hoping to see changes to stem a budget shortfall both federally and statewide, even looking to the priorities of the candidates for governor this November as indication of the future. At the beginning of the year, child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio’s CEO, Lynanne Gutierrez, said the gap was $600 million, with a timeline of 2028 for the budget cliff to hit.

Ohio’s legislature has been trying to deal with the problem for years, through bills to split the cost for childcare between the state, employees, and employers; through different programs of assistance for low-income families; and through bills to include childcare employees in the list of Ohioans eligible for financial assistance.

Most recently, a host of bills advanced through the Ohio House Children and Human Services Committee, also including bills to lessen the regulatory burden for childcare facilities used by military families, and a bill guaranteeing eligibility for the Publicly Funded Child Care program to foster families and family members like grandparents and siblings taking care of children.

Before the General Assembly went on summer break, the committee advanced yet another bill related to childcare, this time a bill to enhance enforcement abilities for potential investigations into childcare fraud, which supporters and Republican co-sponsors of the bill say will help the state maintain its diligence and ensure funding for centers is going where it needs to go.

Ohio’s status on childcare

A study from the National Women’s Law Center said a majority of states in the country “made improvements in one or more key childcare assistance policies” between 2024 and 2025. Ohio was one of seven states to set their income limits for eligibility at or below 150% of the federal poverty level.

State legislators reaffirmed the limit at 145% for Publicly Funded Child Care in the most recent state operating budget, though advocates were hoping to see the limit boosted higher. A separate state program, the Child Care Choice Voucher program, allows those who are above the eligibility limit to apply for subsidies through the state, up to 200% of the federal poverty line.

According to the women’s law center study, Ohio was one of five states to reduce provider payment rates. The rating system for payments changed during the time period the study used, moving from a star system for the Step Up to Quality program, to a gold-silver-bronze rating system that began in July 2024.

According to the National Women’s Law Center, payment rates determine whether childcare centers “have the resources to support salaries and benefits that are sufficient to attract, retain, and offer financial security to childcare teachers.”

The study used Franklin County as an example of the base payment rates paid by the state. In that county, the monthly base payment for a four-year-old child attending a care center in 2025 was $1,005, which was $95 more than the monthly rate in the previous year. The per-month base rate for a provider to care for a one-year-old in 2025 was $1,277, $130 more than the year before.

Having a sufficient payment rate in place helps lower child-to-staff ratios, ensure facilities are safe, and provide materials and supplies for the children. Payment rates that don’t meet the needs of childcare centers can cause facilities to turn away families who receive assistance in favor of private payers, according to the women’s law center study.

“Providers that do enroll these families can be deprived of the resources needed to offer high-quality care to children and fair compensation to childcare teachers – and these providers can sometimes find it impossible to even keep their doors open,” researchers stated.

Under the most recent system, if a childcare provider is at the gold level, they receive 25% above the base payment rate from the state. A silver-level provider receives 15% over the base, and at bronze, a provider receives 10% more.

On top of the base payment and any tiered bonuses a childcare facility might receive, most parents are required to pay a “copayment” to the provider. In both 2024 and 2025, the women’s law center study found that the co-payment levels in Ohio represented 7% of a household’s income, if that household was at 100% of the federal poverty line. If the income was at 150% of the poverty line, the copayment amounted to 9% of the household income.

“Copayment levels matter because if they are high, they can place a serious financial burden on families or may discourage families from participating in the childcare assistance program,” researchers stated in the recent study.

While Ohio has made in-roads to funding and access to childcare, there is still more work to be done in the state and nationwide, according to researchers. It remains to be seen what cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will ultimately do to the childcare sector as well, though the National Women’s Law Center is less than optimistic.

“A number of states have made their own investments in childcare in recent years, but it is uncertain whether states will be able to sustain these investments given the budget pressures,” researchers from the center stated. “A significant commitment of federal resources is essential to create a strong childcare system that enables all children, families, and early educators throughout the country – and our nation’s economy – to thrive.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Douglass described in his 1845 autobiography how one of his enslavers, Mrs. Auld, began teaching him to read when he was a child. Mrs. Auld’s husband ordered her to stop giving Douglass lessons.

“Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Douglass writes. “To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master.’”

Congress enacted the 13th Amendment on Jan. 31, 1865, abolishing slavery. It was not until June 19, 1865, that word of the amendment reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, marking the origin of the Juneteenth holiday.

The Biden administration declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. Today, Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. But the story for formerly enslaved people continued to unfold in complex ways well after Juneteenth, including when it came to their educational journeys.

Juneteenth made clear that freedom was not just confined to someone’s physical enslavement, but mental enslavement as well, bound in the laws that barred enslaved people from receiving an education in Southern states.

Making learning illegal

In 1739, the Stono slave rebellion took place in South Carolina. Fearing that educated slaves would go on to plot future rebellions, South Carolina passed an anti-literacy law in 1740, banning slaves from being taught how to read.

Most Southern states soon followed with anti-literacy laws of their own between 1740 and 1834, in the hopes of preventing any further slave rebellions. These laws applied to both enslaved and free Black people.

Despite these laws, thousands of enslaved people still learned to read and write in the antebellum South. Literacy was a means of freedom.

Meanwhile, the first African Free School for Black children was established in New York City in 1787. The one-room schoolhouse began with 40 students, the majority of whom had parents who were formerly enslaved. Six additional, similar schools were created with public funding by 1824.

Juneteenth and the path to freedom

Juneteenth is a complicated story of formerly enslaved people’s faith and resilience, as well as white supremacists’ hate and resistance to formerly enslaved people experiencing liberation.

It also offers an important reminder that true freedom must also include the right to an education.

Formerly enslaved individuals had various responses to their newfound freedom in 1865, ranging from gratitude and joy to despair and loss.

Many formerly enslaved people decided to leave plantations and Southern states to reunite with family members and communities separated by slavery.

Others opted to remain where they had been enslaved, seeking to experience freedom in familiar surroundings. In fact, the vast majority of freed people remained in the South.

Regardless of their choices, the approximately 4 million formerly enslaved people challenged the U.S. to acknowledge their liberation and welcome them as equals.

Relentlessly, they endeavored to establish themselves as free citizens within the nation. One of these newly freed people’s primary goals was to receive an education.

Learning to read, write and more

After the Civil War, newly freed people gathered in churches, homes, cellars, sheds, meetinghouses and even under shade trees in the fields where they worked the crops to learn how to read and write. They also learned basic job skills, such as the ability to read and understand labor contracts.

Many of the teachers had no formal training, and some of them were local Black people who were self-taught.

Other educators included white teachers from the South and the North, sent by churches and aid societies.

White aid societies and religious organizations from the North, including the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association, sometimes funded these free schools for formerly enslaved Black people.

However, most of the money to fund these schools came from the newly freed Americans, who privately paid for their schools.

While about 90% of the Black population in Southern states were illiterate in 1865, this percentage dropped to 70% by 1880.

A journey into higher education

Newly freed Black people also began to have more options for higher education.

The first historically Black college and university, Cheyney University, was established in Pennsylvania in 1837, well before the Civil War. A total of four HBCUs were established by the end of the Civil War in 1865.

At this point, true liberation began, as a growing number of HBCUs offered academic freedom to Black Americans, who otherwise would have been prohibited from attending most colleges and universities.

In the 15 years following the Civil War, a total of 59 HBCUs had opened their doors to Black students.

In 1867, by act of Congress, Howard University was established in Washington, D.C. It provided not only basic college courses but also programs in law, medicine, education and pharmaceuticals.

A promise that requires education

A whole new set of challenges and opportunities greeted the formerly enslaved Black Americans who sought freedom in the North. Most arrived in cities such as Chicago and New York, where they found some humanitarian support but also racial discrimination and poverty.

Their lives were constantly filled with both legal and racial hostility.

Education ranked high among the free people as a priority, as they looked to gain new skills and advance in life. They learned not only the basics in reading and math, but also job skills, citizenship and advanced learning in professional careers, such as law, medicine, pharmacy and teaching.

Ultimately, Juneteenth offered a promise of freedom – but education was necessary to make it happen.

Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Reproductive health clinics use Title X federal grant money to provide birth control, cancer screenings and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections to people with little or no health insurance. Title X money cannot be used for abortions.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that Title X, which was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970, has prevented almost 20 million unintended pregnancies and 9 million abortions. It has also helped reduce child poverty, according to the group, which supports abortion rights.

But President Donald Trump has taken aim at the program, which has long been a target for abortion opponents. Since regaining the White House, Trump has temporarily blocked and then restored grants to certain reproductive health clinics, and proposed a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services budget with no funding for the program.

The department’s recently issued funding guidelines for Title X grants represent a significant mission shift.

Instead of expanding access to contraception, the focus of Title X will be “to strengthen family formation and assist clients in achieving healthy pregnancies,” according to the new guidance. That will align the program with the administration’s efforts to increase the U.S. birth rate.

The new rules say Title X will prioritize educating Americans about natural methods to avoid pregnancy and overcome infertility, and will promote “body literacy education” and “informed, preventive, and restorative approaches to reproductive health.” Some conservative groups tout an obscure alternative treatment for infertility called “restorative reproductive medicine,” which is based on the idea that the underlying causes of infertility can be treated through lifestyle changes and improving a person’s overall health.

The guidance directs Title X clinics to promote “fertility-awareness-based methods,” such as period-tracking apps, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says can be helpful for getting pregnant but less effective at preventing pregnancy. It also calls on clinics to offer counseling on male fertility issues and to address environmental causes of infertility, including pornography use. And it includes a prohibition on DEI efforts and warns grantees that federal money cannot be used to “facilitate or incentivize illegal immigration.”

Anti-abortion groups support the changes, but many health policy researchers say they will disproportionately harm low-income and minority women, who are more reliant on Title X services and are more likely to have unintended pregnancies. Researchers also say the new guidelines are unlikely to achieve the administration’s “pronatalist” goal of reversing declining birth rates.

Corinne Rocca, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said the way to do that would be to spend more on childcare subsidies and other social programs to help new parents.

“Policies that help people and families feel supported to meet their childbearing preferences … would actually help people who are open to the prospect of childbearing to do so,” Rocca said.

Rocca co-authored a study published in JAMA Network Open last fall suggesting Black and Hispanic women are less likely than other racial groups to be able to choose if, when and how to start a family.

Clinics must reapply for funding under these new guidelines by Jan. 9, 2027. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

During his first term, Trump banned Title X clinics from referring patients to other providers for an abortion or even mentioning it as an option. He also prohibited grantees from offering family planning services and abortions in the same building. As a result, many grantees quit the program, including about a dozen state health departments and all participating Planned Parenthood chapters.

The program served about 844,000 fewer patients in 2019 than it did in 2018, when it served 3.9 million patients, according to HHS. About 225,000 fewer patients received oral contraceptives; about 50,000 fewer received hormonal implants; and about 86,000 fewer received IUDs.

The reframing of Title X that is reflected in the new guidelines was a recommendation laid out in the controversial blueprint known as Project 2025, created by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation as a guide for the second Trump administration.

In line with Project 2025’s recommendations, HHS says Title X grantees will no longer be required to counsel or refer for abortions, and tells applicants that relationship counseling should encourage marriage as a precursor to having children.

“In a time when we are facing a rapidly declining birth rate that falls far short of the replacement fertility rate, we should be doing all we can to encourage and support family formation and fertility,” Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told MedPage Today in April.

“Women deserve accurate information about their fertility and their health — and this includes highlighting the many benefits of pregnancy and motherhood.”

Some abortion opponents have criticized Title X for promoting certain forms of contraception, such as IUDs, that they view as abortifacients. A spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee said the organization does not take a stance on contraception that prevents fertilization, “however, National Right to Life does oppose any device or drug that would destroy a life already created at fertilization.”

“If there is any doubt, we recommend that a woman speak with her doctor to determine if an agent would cause an abortion,” the spokesperson said in an email.

But Leonard Lopoo, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University who has studied fertility and family policies for the past three decades, said the federal government could help families achieve their family planning goals by expanding pregnancy prevention and infertility treatments at all income levels.

“When you’re trying to take away the funding for someone who doesn’t want to have a child, that’s not the same as providing funding to support someone who does,” Lopoo said.

As a Black woman and researcher focused on Black maternal health at Ibis Reproductive Health, Terri-Ann Thompson is better informed than most on the ways having children can be disproportionately more dangerous and less affordable for women who look like her.

But she says what she wasn’t expecting to uncover — during research for a study she co-authored in the journal Frontiers in Public Health this spring — is how much the fear of negative medical and criminal justice outcomes makes many Black women in Georgia and North Carolina scared of pregnancy.

“I was very surprised to see that folks were actually thinking about the context within which a Black child is born and raised well before they even contemplated starting a family,” Thompson said. “We had a lot of, just, stories of folks saying, ‘Why would I want to bring a child into this context; how does one prepare Black women to bring a child into this context?’”

Thompson said her team’s findings show how much Black women depend on low-cost access to long-acting reversible contraceptives such as IUDs.

“We have people who drove very, very far just to get a sliding scale to either get an IUD placed, an IUD removed, or to even get on birth control pills,” Thompson said.

“If the administration moves forward with these restrictions, what we are doing is we are removing access to contraceptives for a population that is at higher risk.”

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The complex is named after Matt and Theresa Dysard. Matt Dysard is a 1987 Calvert alumnus. The facility is expected to be completed by the end of November 2026, according to school officials.

Designed to support a range of programs, the complex will include space for football, track and field, baseball, softball, cheerleading, marching band, and other athletic and extracurricular activities. School officials said the facility will also be made available for community events.

“This is a moment of incredible excitement and gratitude for our school community,” said Dr. Jeremy Marinis, head of school at Calvert Catholic Schools. “What began as a vision and countless conversations has now become a reality. This project represents so much more than a building; it represents the belief in our mission and the future of Calvert Catholic Schools.”

The project was funded through contributions from individuals, families, and organizations, according to the school. Calvert Catholic Schools said construction will primarily involve local contractors and partners.

“We are profoundly thankful for the generosity of those who stepped forward to support this vision,” Marinis said. “Their belief in Calvert and in the future of Catholic education in Tiffin made this possible. This project would not exist without their partnership, trust, and dedication to our students and community.”

More information about Calvert Catholic Schools is available at calvertcatholic.org.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Night Farmers Market, hosted by Common Grounds, will run from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. and feature local vendors offering fresh products, handmade items, and more. The market leads directly into the evening concert.

At 7:00 p.m., Out of Eden – A Tribute to the Eagles will perform at the East Green Amphitheatre in a three-hour set. The concert is free and open to the public. Organizers encourage attendees to bring lawn chairs. Food and beverages will be available throughout the evening.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/downtown-tiffin-summer-kickoff-eagles-tribute-night-farmers-market/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

As part of the leadership change, Tracie Tyree has been named School Director. Tyree will oversee educational programming, faculty support, and student development.

Tschanen said the opportunity aligned with her long-term plans and interest in supporting cosmetology education.

“The academy has a long history in the community, and I look forward to working with the staff and students as we begin this transition,” Tschanen said. “Our initial focus will be on learning the business, supporting the team, and maintaining continuity for students.”

According to the school’s announcement, Tschanen is a licensed cosmetologist and Mohawk High School and Ohio State University graduate who currently owns a salon in Upper Sandusky and works in the animal health industry.

The school will continue operating under the Tiffin Academy of Hair Design name. Programs, services, and operating hours are not changing. The new leadership team said it plans to spend the first year focused on operations before evaluating future opportunities for facility improvements and technology upgrades.

Tiffin Academy of Hair Design offers cosmetology and advanced manicuring programs and is accredited by the National Accrediting Commission of Career Arts and Sciences (NACCAS), recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The school serves students from throughout the region.

More information is available at tiffinacademy.com or by calling (419) 447-3117.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Cameron Hamilton, who worked as acting head of the agency before being fired and ultimately nominated for Senate confirmation by the president, faced criticism from members of both political parties about the agency’s response time.

But it was Democrats who repeatedly pressed Hamilton about whether states controlled by Republicans should receive a disproportionately higher number of disaster declarations than blue states. 

“I certainly appreciate your concern,” Hamilton said. “What I can tell you is that if confirmed, my focus will be to ensure that FEMA is objective, is fair and reasonable, follows the law, and is consistent in the approach to how we adjudicate and process claims and requests for disasters.”

Hamilton was the acting head of FEMA earlier in the Trump administration but was ousted after he testified before Congress that he didn’t believe the agency should be eliminated. 

Almost exactly a year after being pushed out, Trump formally nominated Hamilton to become the FEMA administrator by sending his paperwork to the Senate without any fanfare. 

Trump has repeatedly raised grievances with how the federal government prepares for and responds to natural disasters during his second term, saying he believes much of the responsibility should be moved to states. 

“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June 2025. “We’re moving it back to the states so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”

A review council established by Trump to propose overhauls to FEMA released its recommendations in May, calling on state governments to carry more of the responsibility. Lawmakers, so far, haven’t taken any significant actions to implement any of the proposals. 

Red state favoritism?

Senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee didn’t ask Hamilton about his ousting during the confirmation hearing, though they did question him about staffing reductions at FEMA and why the Trump administration seems to favor Republican states. 

Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, the committee’s ranking member, referenced a news article Politico published in March that concluded Democratic states had 23% of their disaster funding requests approved, compared to 89% for Republican-controlled states.

“No other president has created such a disparity in states that receive federal disaster aid,” Peters said. “Denying over 75% of requests from states that are led by representatives of another party is unconscionable.” 

New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan also questioned Hamilton about the disparity, saying it’s “unacceptable” that federal disaster aid would be approved based on how people voted. 

“The idea that Americans, who need help in the wake of a tornado, or a flood, or a hurricane, should be treated differently based upon politics is shameful,” she said. 

Hassan then asked Hamilton if he agreed “that politics and partisan considerations should play no part in approving disaster assistance.”

Hamilton said he did, later adding that he doesn’t believe Trump would withhold disaster declarations or aid for political reasons. 

Hawley finds FEMA ‘slow’ and ‘often ill-informed’

Democrats weren’t the only members of the committee to voice frustrations with FEMA during the confirmation hearing. 

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley showed an enlarged photograph of St. Louis following tornadoes, saying it took FEMA far too long to provide aid for residents. 

“As you can see, the devastation is absolutely unbelievable,” Hawley said. “I walked these streets myself. You’ve got buildings completely destroyed, homes absolutely razed to the ground, churches whose roofs were lifted off, whose sanctuaries were completely destroyed, streets that were ripped up. And the problem is that many of these neighborhoods don’t look a lot different now because in some cases they’re still waiting for relief.”

Hawley said that wasn’t an isolated incident and that he finds FEMA’s response to natural disasters is “slow” and “often ill-informed.”

Hamilton said he believes the agency’s “disaster declaration process and also the federal mentorship that goes into it needs to be improved.” 

“I believe states need to receive better customer service. I have full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce, but we can do better,” Hamilton said. “And there’s a significant amount of areas where that process should be simplified, better understood and we owe you answers, I think, much faster.”

Positions being restored

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal pressed Hamilton about whether staffing reductions “jeopardize the response of FEMA.” 

“I think certainly FEMA operates in a unique environment where there are challenges and setbacks that impact our ability to respond,” Hamilton said.

Blumenthal then asked whether Hamilton believed there are enough employees at FEMA and whether lower staffing could lead the agency to lose more people. 

“I would agree that the FEMA workforce needs to be scalable in such a way to best meet the needs of the agency and the execution of the program and mission,” Hamilton said. 

Blumenthal pressed again, asking whether agency leadership needs “to restore the staff levels essential to their morale as well as their responsiveness.”

Hamilton said that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had approved bringing back nearly 350 positions “to fill critical vacancies in key program offices and key responsibilities.”

Western states need different approach 

Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego urged Hamilton, if confirmed, to approach aid to Western states that hold large swaths of federal land differently than states on the East Coast.

“I just want to make sure I emphasize, the one-size-fits-all approach to disaster response just is not working for the West,” he said. “And this is not a red state versus blue state or anything like that.”

Gallego urged Hamilton to ensure the agency considers states’ special characteristics, saying when his state gets hit by a wildfire, it needs FEMA to replant trees so there isn’t severe flooding. 

“Sometimes FEMA does not pay for the replanting and reseeding of our forests, which end up causing even greater disasters a year from now,” he said. 

Hamilton said that he understood the “unique paradigm” some states face since he grew up on the West Coast and has “family who’ve lost homes from fires and other significant natural disasters out West.”

Hamilton said he believes FEMA’s pre-disaster grants, which are intended to reduce risk and prepare states for future natural disasters, “should be uniquely suited to handle the challenges and threats facing each state on the nuanced issues.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The administration’s use of fee revenues to pay for fountain repairs, statue upgrades and fireworks shows in preparation for America’s 250th birthday on July 4 diverts money from national parks in desperate need of billions of dollars in maintenance, lawmakers wrote in two separate early-June letters to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

“The public deserves to know how their park fees are being spent, and Congress cannot conduct appropriate oversight without basic information about these transactions,” Rep. Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico and seven other Democratic representatives wrote in their letter, dated June 12.  

A group of 11 Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Adam Schiff of California, sent a similar letter to Burgum on June 10. 

According to a DOI spokesperson, the National Park Service “has not only been focused on beautifying the district but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” pooling money from “endowment funds” and the sale of park passes. 

How the funding stream works

The National Park Service, housed within Interior, gets a portion of its funding from entry fees and visitors’ purchase of recreational passes. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, at least 80% of the fee money must go back to the national park where it is collected. 

The remaining 20% is available for overall Park Service use, a policy meant to help support parks that do not charge entry fees or only make a small amount of revenue, according to NPS. Just over 100 parks charge an entrance fee out of the more than 400 that make up the National Park System.  

The National Mall in Washington and various memorial sites are part of the crop that do not charge visitors to enter, meaning it is legal for the DOI to spend leftover revenue on projects in its own backyard. 

But the amount the department has allocated to renovations so far this year appears to greatly exceed how much it has put toward maintaining the district’s public spaces in the past, according to Tony Irish, a former Interior senior attorney under Trump and attorney under earlier presidents who is now senior counsel with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Reflecting pool repair

Multiple news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, reported NPS is using at least $60 million in fees paid by parkgoers to fund the repair of nine ornamental fountains across Washington, D.C.

Documents showed an additional $7 million was redirected to help pay for the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, while more will be put toward funding a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display. 

“While other administrations have let the city fall into decay, President Trump has made Washington, D.C. Safe and Beautiful again and we should all be grateful,” the Interior spokesperson said in an emailed statement on June 16.

In their letters to Burgum, lawmakers also demanded clarity on the reported use of revenue from the sale of digital park passes—called “America the Beautiful Passes”—as there is no current law that requires those funds be spent in a specific place. 

“Credible sources with direct knowledge of these matters have now reported to Congress that much, if not all, fee revenue from online America the Beautiful Passes is being used to fund the President’s ‘beautification’ projects in Washington,” they wrote. 

Along with Vasquez, the House letter was signed by Reps. Sarah Elfreth of Maryland, Darren Soto of Florida, Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, Dina Titus and Susie Lee of Nevada, Joe Neguse of Colorado and Jill Tokuda of Hawaii.

Joining Schiff in signing the Senate letter were Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Luján of New Mexico, Angus King of Maine, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Ron Wyden and Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado. 

Delayed park maintenance

Many critics are pushing back against the Trump administration for not channeling fee funds back into the national parks that need them, including popular travel destinations such as Grand Teton and Yellowstone.

“Last month, I was in Joshua Tree exploring one of our beautiful national parks and was again reminded what a treasured legacy these lands represent,” said Schiff in a June 17 statement to States Newsroom. 

“This is just the latest scheme by the President to put himself before the American people, and it will have devastating impacts on parks that millions of people visit every year,” he added. 

The National Park System is backlogged with about $24 billion worth of repairs to buildings and infrastructure, according to NPS.  

Vasquez said New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which runs through his district, “has over $45 million in deferred maintenance” alone. 

“The Administration is choosing to let roads, trails, and wastewater systems in the park fall into disrepair amidst the peak summer visitor season so it can paint statues gold in Washington,” he said in a June 15 statement to States Newsroom. “This is unacceptable, and I am demanding action from the Department of Interior to correct course.”

Irish also said the DOI’s current use of fee revenues for D.C.-area renovations could lead to more money being spent in the long run because of the rush to complete some projects, like the $14 million reflecting pool. Completed just at the beginning of June, the reflecting pool has already amassed clumps of green algae. 

“Not only are we displacing higher-priority needs right now, but we’re still going to have unmet needs in the future at an additional cost to the taxpayer, the fee payers within that,” Irish said.   

Vasquez and his colleagues in their letter asked that NPS restore funding to national parks to help preserve them for future generations. 

U.S. senators went even further, including a list of detailed questions about park funding in their letter for the DOI to respond to by June 23. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Condemnations by other rights groups of the searches and seizures continue to flood in. They accuse the Trump administration of trying to suppress voter-registration efforts.

Federal law-enforcement hasn’t given any on-the-record explanation of its actions or produced any legal documents justifying them.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative has mostly been mum as well. And federal search warrants often remain under seal while any investigation is ongoing, meaning court documents explaining the suspicions behind the searches are not right now publicly available.

Last Thursday, agents searched a Cleveland office used by the collaborative and fanned out to question people associated with the group. In some cases they seized laptops and cell phones, multiple news organizations reported.

The actions raised suspicion among voter rights advocates because it’s election season and the group that was searched helps people to register to vote. The organizing collaborative focuses its efforts on communities of color and people with low incomes.

The organizing collaborative also joined the Brennan Center for Justice in a 2021 lawsuit against the Republican-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission in an attempt to end the state’s extreme partisan gerrymandering.

While voter rights groups have alleged the searches were politically motivated, law enforcement officials have not made any public statement justifying the searches and seizures. 

The FBI field office in Cleveland and headquarters in Washington, D.C., haven’t responded to requests for comment. 

The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Ohio responded, but it didn’t say much.

“Thank you for reaching out, but the USAO is unable to provide more information,” a spokeswoman, Jessica Salas Novak, said in an email Tuesday.

Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine was asked about the FBI search of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative during an unrelated press conference on Tuesday.  

“Don’t know enough about it,” DeWine said, declining to comment further.

Rob Weiner, voting rights director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the second Trump administration has repeatedly used the Justice Department to go after Trump’s perceived enemies.

“The FBI and Justice Department are unfortunately establishing a track record of using law enforcement power against political opponents,” Weiner said.

“They’ve done this with indictments” including those of former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated Trump’s ties to Russia, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted the Trump Organization for civil fraud. 

Weiner said other actions by the Trump Justice Department also make the Ohio searches and seizures suspicious.

It seized “voting records in Fulton County, Ga., based on ridiculous theories about the 2020 election,” he said.

“So when the FBI goes into a voting-rights organization that registers to vote people of color or who are low-income it looks like an effort to suppress the organization’s activities. It makes people know they are susceptible to retaliation for the kinds of activities that all the rest of us regard as good citizenship.”

Founded in 2007, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and an affiliated political group, the Ohio Organizing Campaign, took in more than $50 million between 2020 and 2024, the most recent year for which tax records were available.

It works on voter-registration drives and ballot issues, and gives to other social service organizations.

An analysis by Signal Statewide found that it had received large donations from the Gund Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and two groups with ties to progressive philanthropist George Soros.

While the Trump administration stays quiet about its reasons for targeting the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, other groups are offering explanations of their own. 

After years of Republican rule, Ohio this year seems headed for close elections for U.S. Senate and governor. Trump is running scared, said Katie Paris, executive director of Red Wine & Blue, a national women’s organization opposed to extremism.

“Ohio is going to play a critical role in the 2026 midterm elections,” Paris said in a written statement. “With these races so close, it’s no surprise that this administration is choosing now to use political intimidation — afraid of what Ohioans might do at the ballot box.”

She added, “No matter your political affiliation, an attack like this — trying to create fear about the simple act of voting — matters to ALL of us because it concerns ALL of us. Black or white or Brown, urban or suburban or rural, we stand together, and that’s exactly what scares them. They’re trying this state by state, and state by state, we’re going to stand up to them.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

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

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

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to make a decision either by the end of June or early July on whether the Trump administration can end the Temporary Protected Status program for Haitian and Syrian nationals.

Oral arguments for the case were made in April. 

“If (TPS is) terminated, they will essentially immediately lose their work authorization in most states, their access to driver’s licenses, and then also protection against deportation, and they could be put in removal proceedings and subject to deportation,” said Emily Brown, director of the Ohio State University law school’s Immigration Clinic. 

Attorneys for Haitian TPS holders filed a motion this week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the case, saying new evidence has come to light that shows the Trump administration unlawfully attempted to revoke TPS, according to the Springfield News-Sun. 

“This new evidence raises profound concerns about the integrity of the process that put our Haitian neighbors at risk,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church. 

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

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

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

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

Many of the Haitian refugees in America have no homes to return to in Haiti, and are fearful for their families’ safety if forced to return.

“If TPS goes away, I don’t think most of them want to just get back on a plane and go to Haiti because the violence there is so severe at this point that they think anything is going to be better than going back there,” Brown said. 

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

“They’re certainly fearful,” Ruby said. 

Haitians can apply for asylum, but the Trump administration put an indefinite freeze on processing all asylum applications at the end of 2025. 

“It’s not really like a solution for most people,” Brown said. 

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, came to the United States from Haiti in 2020. 

“No matter what happens, I would be the last person to leave because so many people in the community are relying on me from both sides — from the Haitian community and from the American community,” said Dorsainvil, who is also a masters student at Wright State University. 

He sees the U.S. Supreme Court ruling going one of three ways.

The justices could rule in favor of TPS holders, but he said that could still have consequences. 

“There might be a possibility for the Trump administration to develop new policies to continue to make the lives of the immigrants miserable, so that they can leave or they can self-deport,” Dorsainvil said. 

A decision could come down that gives the Trump administration a certain number of months to end TPS, he said. 

“In that period there will be some disturbance in the community, and folks will still be in limbo,” Dorsainvil said. 

If the Supreme Court rules against TPS holders, “there will be some type of humanitarian crisis in the community,” he said. 

“The schools will be disturbed, the manufacturers will be disturbed, and the whole economy of Springfield will be impacted,” Dorsainvil said. 

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue is “not providing any statements or interviews on the matter at this time,” a spokesperson for the mayor said in an email response to the Capital Journal.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, has spoken several times about how the Haitian people are helping Springfield’s economy. 

“I’ve made myself pretty clear in regards to policy on what I think it’s best for Ohio and best for Springfield and these people who are working and helping the economy of Springfield moving forward and doing the things that we like people to do, which is their work,” DeWine said this week. 

The DeWines helped support the Becky DeWine School in Haiti, named after their late daughter, but the school had to close due to gang activity in 2024.  

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

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

Haitians have been making arrangements for power of attorney and custody of their children in case TPS ends, Brown said. 

“If TPS does end, everyone expects that ICE will do big raids in Columbus and Springfield and other parts of the country where there are large pockets of Haitians, so you could really see this kind of indiscriminate policing … People are really, really scared about that, and knowing that it could come at any time,” she said. 

Ruby said he expects targeted raids from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Springfield and other cities with a big Haitian population if the Supreme Court rules against TPS holders. 

“I think (the Trump administration is) going to rely more on unemployment and trying to get people to self-deport,” Ruby said. 

“We think a more likely scenario is we’re going to have a humanitarian crisis with people just out of work and not being able to pay the rent and not being able to buy food.”

To prepare for that possibility, nonprofit agencies in Springfield are trying to anticipate the need for rental assistance and food, Ruby said. 

“We’re trying to equip churches to be ready to respond, we are asking churches to provide sanctuary,” he said.

He said they are discouraging people from going to immigration check-ins by themselves. 

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

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

“People were so scared leading up to Feb. 3, and I think it’s just the same thing now, but even worse because the Supreme Court, we can’t necessarily depend on them to do the right thing,” Brown said. 

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

The Trump administration has revoked TPS status for 13 countries — Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.  

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.

Submetering companies serve apartments or condos and make a profit by purchasing power at wholesale prices while selling at retail rates. Tenants have long complained that submetering companies charge inflated rates, shut off power without warning, and offer barebones customer service. The arrangement also means residents can’t shop for better rates or take advantage of payment assistance programs.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle took notice and began working on legislation.

Last week, one of those proposals, Ohio House Bill 173, made it through the General Assembly. But despite its new protections, the bill stands at odds with a recent Ohio Supreme Court ruling, and its passage comes over the objections of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.

In a letter to Gov. DeWine, Ohio state Reps. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, and Sean Brennan, D-Parma, warned the bill risked “a potential backslide in consumer protections that Ohioans have been asking for for over a decade.”

Meanwhile the bill’s sponsor, Ohio state Rep. David Thomas, R-Jefferson, defended the measure as a way to set a definitive policy rather than leave it to state regulators.

“The joke is that none of the bills I pass make anybody happy,” he said with a chuckle, “but I actually take that as a compliment, because that typically means that we’ve struck the right balance.”

What’s in?

Ohio House Bill 173 caps the amount submetering companies can charge tenants at 3% less than the typical utility rate.

“In testimony,” Ohio state Sen. Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, explained, “we heard ‘we are a value add to properties,’ and we said if you are a value add there has to be a monetary value add that goes to the tenant.”

The bill requires submetering companies to follow the same steps as ordinary utilities before disconnecting a tenant, create alternative payment plans, and accept payments from Ohio’s Home Energy Assistance Program.

The measure also directs the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to draft rules setting minimum standards for submetering companies.

“But it still doesn’t put submetering companies on the same playing field as the utilit(ies),” Ohio state Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, argued, “which is what the Supreme Court said in their ruling last month,”

In that ruling, a unanimous court determined “there is little question” the submetering company Nationwide Energy Partners meets the statutory definition of a utility and should be regulated as such.

But to Thomas, critics of the bill are missing the point — the only reason the supreme court weighed in is because lawmakers had done nothing.

“So, us not acting just perpetuates more of that,” he said. “I don’t think we should have an industry directed by supreme court order with unknown rules from the PUCO.”

He added that the ruling spurred lawmakers to be more receptive to consumer protections.

“Bills were either far too friendly to the utilities, or far too friendly to the (submetering) industry,” he said, “and this hit at the ledger book of pretty much everybody in the benefit of the consumer.”

Although DeMora praised the protections that made it into the bill, he couldn’t ignore the ones that didn’t.

“I know there’s administrative burden, but we need to require (Ohio’s Percent of Income Payment Plan); this bill doesn’t do that.” he said. “We need to allow consumers to shop for energy; this bill doesn’t allow for that.”

Calling for a veto

Monday, seven members of the Ohio Senate Democratic Caucus signed on to the same letter that Reps. Rader and Brennan had already sent to governor.

In a press release, Rader said court agreed with “what many of us have been saying about these submetering companies for a long time: they need to be regulated as public utilities.”

Brennan added that H.B. 173 “threatens to reverse that important progress.”

“Ohioans living in apartments, condominiums, and other multi-family housing deserve fair rates, clear billing practices, and meaningful consumer protections regardless of who sends them the utility bill,” he added.

Thomas said it was too complicated to include the percent of income payment plan as part of the bill, but he’s ready to work on the program separately. While Thomas acknowledged individual tenants can’t shop for power, the overall property can. And with the new cap on rates, tenants get more of the benefit from a submetering company buying power in bulk.

“They’re getting (to pay) even less than what the standard Ohioan would be paying because they are a submetered property,” Thomas said.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Americans don’t necessarily think about Ohio as a leading state in the move toward decarbonization of our energy system, but Ohio emitted 86 million fewer metric tons of carbon in 2023 than in 2003.

How did the state’s energy system do this?

The answer is largely a story about a see-saw in energy consumption in Ohio from coal to natural gas.

Coal consumption in Ohio fell by 71% from 2003 to 2023 while natural gas consumption increased by 65%.

While natural gas is not carbon-free, its 30 million additional metric tons of carbon emissions over the past two decades was far outbalanced by the 100 million fewer metric tons emitted by Ohio’s abandoning of coal as an energy source over that time period.

The balance of the carbon emission reductions came from reductions in use of petroleum for energy generation.

Ohio’s natural gas boom has also come with concerns about local extraction of natural gas.

The reason Ohio has adopted natural gas so rapidly is because of a well-documented boom in natural gas drilling driven by “fracking” technology deployed in Ohio’s eastern Appalachian region.

This has led to frequent clashes between environmental advocates who worry about the broader environmental and health impacts of natural gas drilling and companies looking to tap into this natural resource.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 1,200 different chemicals have been used for hydraulic fracking.

The United States Department of Energy maintains a database of wells across the United States and disclosed chemicals used within these wells.

A 2016 United States Environmental Protection Agency report found that issues such as water withdrawals, spills, poor well integrity, direct injection into groundwater, inadequate wastewater treatment, and unlined pits can lead to drinking water impacts, potentially causing public health hazards for residents local to drilling projects.

Earlier this month, Northeast Ohio state Reps. Derrick Hall and Sean Brennan introduced legislation to beef up oversight of the chemicals used in oil and gas wells.

Ohio House Bill 958 would require more detailed chemical reporting by well owners, add disclosure for chemicals used to stimulate wells, create a state-level chemical disclosure database, and ensure the accuracy of chemical disclosures with random wastewater testing across the state.

This new oversight regime would move past the current level of reporting in the Department of Energy database by providing information about chemical use throughout the drilling process.

It would also create a testing regime and impose penalties for inaccurate disclosure, ensuring the fidelity of chemical use disclosure.

It would also allow medical professionals access to exact chemical compositions when exposures occur, allowing for better treatment and potentially better health outcomes for people exposed to chemicals.

Functioning energy markets, like any other market, are based on proper disclosure and flow of information.

This matters for consumers of energy, but also to third parties such as people whose drinking water may be contaminated by oil and gas extraction.

As long as disclosure requirements are not designed to be so onerous that they impede development of safe wells, requirements like this can be an effective tool for making energy markets more efficient and safeguarding environmental and public health.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“We have to adapt just like everybody else,” Executive Director Angela Gabel said about rising grocery prices.

Last year, Ritenour spent about $120,000 on food. The pantry budgeted $180,000 for this year, though Gabel said that may not be sufficient.

And the number of people looking for food has increased: The pantry signed up seven new families on a recent weekday morning and expected to add 15 by the end of the day. Gabel said more people are traveling further to visit multiple food pantries each month to stock their shelves.

Families are facing rising grocery prices at the same time that many of the most vulnerable are losing access to the nation’s largest food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. More than 4 million Americans lost SNAP benefits between February 2025 and this February, according to analyses of the most recent federal data. The numbers are expected to increase as states whittle the rolls further as required by the broad tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last summer, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“I’m absolutely terrified,” Gabel said. “We will absolutely do our best, but I think we were meant to supplement SNAP or to help in emergency situations. I just don’t think we can replace the government.”

Since the fall, states and counties that administer SNAP have been notifying residents who rely on food stamps that they must meet new work requirements or lose their food assistance. The federal tax and spending law ended exemptions to work requirements for older adults, homeless people, veterans and some rural residents, among others. The changes will put more pressure on states, likely leading to further benefit cuts as they reevaluate eligibility and begin paying for more program costs. The new rules also will further stress the already-stretched charitable food system.

Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to combat hunger, noted that children, older adults and people with disabilities are most reliant on the program. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated the average benefit per person this year would be $188 per month, or $6.17 per day.

“And a majority of them are making less than $1,100 a month,” she said. “So when you lose your SNAP benefit, it really does exacerbate your situation of having to choose between shelter, food, and other basic needs.”

Rising need for food

National data on hunger is limited since the Trump administration terminated the annual Household Food Security report last year. But other measures indicate that more people are missing regular meals.

In May, the federal Reserve Bank of New York found a “remarkable” increase in food insecurity across the country, with more people struggling than during the peak of the pandemic. Its national surveys last October and this February found more households dipped into savings accounts, relied on food donations or had trouble finding enough food to eat or had kids who missed meals.

Democrats and anti-hunger advocates have been urging Congress to rescind SNAP cuts for months. Current negotiations over reauthorizing the federal farm bill, which includes SNAP, have put the issue front and center in Congress. The House has passed a version of that legislation that won’t reverse the cuts.

Republicans have downplayed the effect of the changes and defended the SNAP cuts, arguing they are aimed at rooting out fraud and abuse.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, said he was raised in “abject, rural poverty,” by a single mother who relied on food stamps, subsidized lunches and government cheese.

But in late April, he urged support of the farm bill that cements cuts to the food stamp program.

“We do have to know that there is a tremendous amount of fraud that takes place in SNAP,” he said on the House floor, “and we want to make sure that every single dollar that is allocated to go to a hungry child or a veteran or one of our senior citizens goes to them.”

Last week, 23 state attorneys general wrote to Senate leaders who are now considering the farm bill, saying the Senate has an opportunity to “reverse course and reaffirm a bipartisan commitment that no American should go hungry because they cannot afford food.”

In Nebraska, where SNAP participation has dropped by about 11%, state lawmakers this year proposed legislation to ask the federal government for waivers from some of the new restrictions. Those bills, which did not advance, sought to protect benefits for veterans, former foster youth, homeless people and refugees.

But the problem demands a federal response, said Megan Hamann, the senior community organizer for food and nutrition access at Nebraska Appleseed, an advocacy nonprofit that works against poverty and discrimination.

“We’re going to be working with patchwork solutions in the meantime,” Hamann said. She described “a real reckoning as a result of loss of federal support and programming that has for a long time in our state and others offered stability and consistency that is no longer present.”

She said putting food on the table has become a widespread challenge for many in Nebraska as the price of housing, utilities and other everyday necessities squeezes household budgets.

“I talk to people on the daily who say, ‘I’m worried about the price of groceries, I’m worried about the price of gas, I feel like everything except for my wage is going up,’” she said.

Though generally focused on housing, the Omaha organization Restoring Dignity has launched a new food assistance program to help refugees who lost SNAP benefits late last year.

“A big chunk of what we do now revolves around food,” said founder and executive director Hannah Vlach.

Community donations allow Restoring Dignity to provide grocery store gift cards to those refugees. But the organization, which generally serves about 5,000 refugees per year, is helping only about 200 of the most vulnerable.

“Right now we’re just focused on the families who absolutely will be evicted and will be on the streets if they don’t get any assistance,” she said, “and I have no idea how those other families are surviving.”

Vlach emphasized that the federal government has specifically sanctioned the arrival of refugees her organization serves, many of whom served with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“This can’t become our new normal — this just can’t,” she said. “It’s unethical, it’s immoral.”

States triaging needs

West Virginian Raine Gibbons said she relies more on cheap staples such as pasta and pasta sauce, trimming the amount of meat and treats she buys.

She said her family of five recently saw a reduction in monthly SNAP benefits, which now provide just over $300 per month.

Gibbons supervises an in-home education program for parents at one of the state-run Family Support Centers, which provide parenting classes, baby supplies such as diapers and emergency food aid.

Aside from grappling with higher prices and reduced SNAP eligibility among clients, the West Virginians who rely on those 57 federally funded centers face an uncertain future because of unresolved state contracting issues.

“It’s really, really stressful,” Gibbons said. “It’s so hard to stay present and be the parent that you want to be when you’re worried about those daily struggles of just how to feed your family.”

Gibbons said SNAP is not a luxury, but an essential support for many families.

“It’s really what’s keeping families like mine — who do work outside of the home, who do have a full-time job — afloat to be able to feed our families and our babies, and try to just get through this economy.”

California lawmakers are trying to help fill some of the federal void in their state. Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee is pushing to add $100 million to a state program that doubles the purchasing power of SNAP when used for fresh fruits and vegetables. Separate pending legislation would petition the federal government for a waiver, allowing California to maintain an exemption from work requirements for former foster youth.

In California, nearly one-third of all families with young children struggled to put food on the table between July 2024 and January 2026, according to survey results from the Stanford University Center on Early Childhood.

“States are in a position of trying to triage what is the most important need for families, when really families have all of these needs that are considered pretty basic,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, managing director of the center. “It puts states in an untenable position to try to make decisions of which gaps to fill and for whom.”

Stewart-Kahn said many families face immediate decisions of which bills to pay and which needs to forgo, but that the parental stress and childhood distress will have long-term consequences for society.

“Every time we make a policy change that potentially increases stress in the lives of a child, we are deciding as a society that we’re okay with harming their healthy development, so that the next generation will struggle further with everything from educational attainment to mental health challenges,” she said.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

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

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The Department of Health and Human Services will administer programs under the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, while civil rights enforcement under Education’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, will be transferred to the Department of Justice. 

The move follows 10 earlier interagency agreements, or IAAs, with the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior, State and Treasury that transfer several of Education’s responsibilities to those agencies.

The Education Department clarified in fact sheets that in the agreements announced Tuesday, it “will continue to perform all statutorily required duties and responsibilities.”

“The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Tuesday.

The administration has sought to do away with the 46-year-old department as part of Trump’s quest to return education “back to the states.” That push continues despite much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurring at the state and local levels. 

Congress created the Department of Education, and only Congress has the authority to abolish the agency. 

Special education

On a background call with reporters, a senior department official said OSERS “will maintain its independent statutory functions without interruption to vigorously enforce compliance with all of OSERS programs.” 

OSERS is responsible for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. The umbrella unit OSERS includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration. 

The official added that “students will not lose any rights, including their right to a free appropriate public education,” adding that “no agreement can alter the rights that students with disabilities are afforded under federal law.” 

“In coordination with and at the direction of OSERS, HHS will support meaningful stakeholder outreach; grant administration; enforcement, compliance, and monitoring activities; annual performance determinations and assessments; collection, reporting, and analyzing of data for monitoring compliance; and drawdowns of Federal funds,” according to a fact sheet. 

Civil rights oversight

Meanwhile, Education’s agreement with the DOJ is intended to “support and bolster the federal government’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws,” a senior department official said. 

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, is tasked with investigating civil rights complaints from students and families. 

Under the agreement, “OCR will utilize the Civil Rights Division to evaluate, investigate and resolve complaints filed under the laws enforced by OCR,” the official said. 

The official also stressed that under the interagency agreement, OCR “retains management and leadership of OCR in accordance with federal law.” 

Education will also partner with the DOJ on student privacy protection, in which the Justice Department will “review complaints alleging privacy act violations, conduct necessary investigations and recommend potential resolutions,” per a fact sheet.

In another agreement, the DOJ will “provide technical assistance” in training and advisory services regarding the desegregation of public schools, according to a fact sheet.  

‘This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos’

The announcement sparked fierce condemnation from Democratic members of Congress, labor unions and advocacy groups Tuesday. 

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union representing Education Department workers, said the interagency agreements regarding special ed programs and civil rights enforcement “will leave our most vulnerable students and families who have been shut out of our education system without the services they need and without protection when they face discrimination,” in a Tuesday statement. 

“This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos,” Gittleman added. “Secretary McMahon is yet again targeting historically underserved students, eroding public trust, and sowing dysfunction for the federal employees who are trying to do their jobs on behalf of the public.” 

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that “instead of helping kids get a great education, this administration is spending its time, energy, and taxpayer resources fixated on where employees sit and illegally trying to shutter the Department of Education,” in a Tuesday statement.

“It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students,” Murray added. “More kids with disabilities will be denied the education they are entitled to by law, and more college students who were harassed or assaulted will go without the justice they are owed.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country, said the decision “will have dire, real-world consequences.” 

“Congress — the only body that can legally take such actions — has refused to follow the whims of the White House when it comes to abolishing the Education Department,” Weingarten said. “And parents, educators, students, and the disability and civil rights communities are rising up — and will fight in every way possible to reverse this in the courts, at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.”

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said administration officials have signaled they expect to share the text of the memorandum of understanding with lawmakers, though he didn’t know when. 

“Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later,” he said. “But, you know, obviously it sounds like they’re not going public with it until later in the week. So we’ll see.”

Thune said he’s heard the deal sets up a 60-day framework for negotiators to reach agreement on more specifics, including about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. 

“I think at the end of the day the goal here is to make sure that Iran ends its nuclear program and whatever financial incentives they have should be conditioned upon that,” he said. “But we’ll see when we know more.”

President Donald Trump, speaking from the G7 convention in Europe, said he may hold a press conference in “a couple days” to release the text of the memorandum of understanding and appeared ready for a vote in Congress.

“What I would like to do is send it to Congress, saying you shouldn’t approve it. And I will get it approved. Whatever I say, they want to do the opposite,” he said. “It is not working too well for them, by the way.”

North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven said he believes the plan is to vote to approve the Iran agreement at some point. 

“I think anytime you have Congress ratify something, it gives it longevity,” Hoeven said. “You can’t have the next president come in and change it with an executive order. So I think that’s a benefit. I think it helps strengthen it.”

Hoeven said he hasn’t heard from administration officials why they haven’t shared the text of the memorandum of understanding with senators, even in a classified setting. But he said he’s more focused on U.S. enforcement of agreements on Iran’s nuclear program in the long term. 

“The real issue is that we have something that we can enforce and that’s hard with Iran because they don’t honor any agreement,” Hoeven said.  

Is the agreement a treaty?

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said he believes an agreement with Iran would represent a treaty and be subject to Senate approval. 

“It sounds like a treaty,” he said. “And if it’s a treaty, it certainly seems like it.”

That would require strong bipartisanship, since the Constitution sets a two-thirds threshold for the Senate to approve a treaty. 

Cassidy added it appears the administration will need the Israeli government — which initiated the attack on Iran with the United States — to stop its war in Lebanon in order to reach a final deal with Iran during the next two months.

“To make a deal, it takes two sides. In this case, maybe three, maybe four because you have Hezbollah and Israel,” Cassidy said, referring to a powerful Lebanese political party and militant group opposed to Israel. “Hezbollah can just stir it up with impunity if they want to under certain circumstances. So you tell me, I mean, it takes two to dance, and so now it takes four to dance. Can you pull it off in 60 days? I don’t know.” 

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said the administration needs to be as transparent as possible about what exactly is in the memorandum of understanding it’s reached with Iran. 

“Minimally, there has to be maximum transparency,” he said. 

Tillis said it “makes sense” for the Senate to approve any final deal, saying President Barack Obama made a mistake when he didn’t have lawmakers ratify the agreement his administration struck with Iran in 2015. That deal was named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. 

“I’ve said repeatedly Obama made a mistake when he didn’t do the work to have it rise to the level of a treaty, and I believe that we should here,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s only good for two and a half years.”

Tillis said he wasn’t concerned Congress hasn’t received the text of the memorandum of understanding yet, but that it’s imperative the administration share those documents.

“Trust but verify,” he said.  

‘Essentially a surrender’

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said he “doubts” the memorandum of understanding is actually real, but that if it is, lawmakers should expect there are “side deals” the administration may not share. 

“If what’s reported is real, it’s Iran’s terms. I mean, it’s essentially a surrender. But I think that’s the only play we can make at this point,” he said. “We have to end this war and stop wasting money and stop killing Americans and civilians and stop driving up prices. So it’s a bad deal but he’s not going to get a better deal. So we just have to accept the humiliation. But I don’t even know if it’s real.”

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said that lawmakers need to see the memorandum of understanding so she and others can “express our opinions.”

“But right now we can’t because it’s not fully out there,” she said. 

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va., said he hadn’t seen the text of the memorandum of understanding or been briefed by administration officials. But he does believe the administration needs to submit it to lawmakers within five days, as outlined in a 2015 law. 

“My fear is that the details are not going to be as good as the president represents,” Warner said. 

Law requirements

Congress approved legislation in 2015 that requires any presidential administration to submit the text of a deal addressing Iran’s nuclear program within five days. Those documents don’t need to be sent to every lawmaker but are supposed to go to the congressional leaders as well as eight committees with jurisdiction. 

That transmission creates a 30-day review period for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold hearings and briefings. 

The law created a pathway for Congress to approve a joint resolution of disapproval for any Iran nuclear deal. The House and Senate would likely need the support of at least two-thirds of members in order to override a likely veto from Trump. 

Congress overriding a presidential veto of a disapproval resolution would block the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on Iran, though that seems an unlikely scenario given both chambers are controlled by Republicans. 

A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says a joint resolution of disapproval taking effect “would not invalidate the agreement itself but would affect only the possibility of presidential sanctions relief to Iran; nevertheless, precluding the President from providing such relief would almost certainly result in a dissolution of the agreement by Iran.”

The law, officially titled the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, also clears the way for Congress to approve a joint resolution of approval. 

The CRS report says that “would, upon enactment, allow the President to waive sanctions, apparently even if the review period had not yet elapsed.”

Congress taking no action during the 30-day review period would allow the administration to begin sanctions relief as soon as that deadline passes. 

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lakanwal, an Afghan national, pleaded not guilty to 17 counts.

He appeared before federal Judge Amit P. Mehta, whom former President Barack Obama appointed in 2014, for a status hearing in the District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Department of Justice attorneys said the Trump administration is pursuing the death penalty, but could not give Mehta a timeline on the proceedings. 

The two guard members were attacked the day before Thanksgiving while on duty in a downtown Washington neighborhood blocks from the White House. 

U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died as a result of her injuries, and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 25, was severely injured but survived. The guard members were in the district as part of the president’s crackdown on crime, despite a continued decrease in violent crime.

The new indictment will replace the nine charges initially filed in December, to which Lakanwal also pleaded not guilty. 

Lakanwal used an interpreter during Tuesday’s status hearing and was flanked by two members of the U.S. Marshals Service. He used a wheelchair and appeared gaunt, compared to his previous appearance in court in February.

The next hearing is at 9 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 16.

Lakanwal’s charges include:

• Count 1, of Beckstrom’s murder while she was assisting Wolfe.

• Count 2, of the attempted murder of Wolfe.

• Count 3, of the attempted murder of a person assisting an officer and employee of the United States, who is referred to as R.R. in court documents.

• Count 4, of the attempted murder of a person assisting an officer and employee of the United States, who is referred to as E.S. in court documents.

• Count 5, of transporting a firearm and ammunition in interstate commerce with the intent to commit a felony.

• Count 6, of using a firearm during a crime of violence and causing the death of a person with a firearm.

• Counts 7, 8 and 9, of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. 

• Count 10, of first-degree murder while armed.

• Count 11, of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.

• Count 12, of assault with the attempt to kill while armed of Wolfe.

• Count 13, of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.

• Count 14, of assault with the intent to kill R.R. 

• Count 15, of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.

• Count 16, of assault with the intent to kill E.S.

• Count 17, of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.

Asylum granted

Lakanwal was granted asylum last year after he came to the United States through a special humanitarian program for Afghanistan allies who served along with American forces. The allies fled the country after the Taliban took it over following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021. 

November’s shooting also spurred President Donald Trump’s administration to direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to halt processing legal immigration paperwork for nationals from Afghanistan, along with a dozen other countries. 

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Rhode Island struck down several Trump administration policies that ended processing for asylum seekers following the shooting in Washington. 

Last week, the Trump administration submitted a court document describing steps the government was taking to comply with resuming the processing of immigration applications. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“It is impossible today to make the case that the death penalty is a deterrent,” DeWine said. “I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. … The most effective thing to deal with violent crime is to go after the repeat violent offenders and lock them the hell up, that’s what’s effective.”

DeWine is calling on Ohio lawmakers to either take action legislatively or have the death penalty on the Ohio ballot for voters to decide, but DeWine said he does not want to lead a citizen-initiated statue. 

“I don’t think (a citizen-initiated statue) is an effective pathway,” DeWine said. “It seems to me these things, the legislature decides if it gets on the ballot because the legislature pushed it on, unless there’s a whole bunch of money behind it.” 

Ohio lawmakers have introduced bills — Ohio Senate Bill 133, Ohio Senate Bill 134, and Ohio House Bill 72 — that would end the death penalty, but none of the bills have received a hearing. Any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered. 

Ohio’s death penalty was reinstated in 1981 after a law DeWine helped write passed and was signed into law. 

“I believed that in some cases capital punishment could serve as a deterrent to keep some people from killing,” DeWine said. “For me, it was the moral justification for having a death penalty. …  I’m responsible for that decision.” 

DeWine is in his final months in office as he is term-limited and said he has not talked to Ohio Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy about the death penalty. 

“I felt that I had an obligation to explain to people why I now believe that the death penalty is not a deterrent, and why I believe that we should abolish the death penalty,” DeWine said. 

Ohio’s last execution was in July 2018, months before DeWine was elected governor. DeWine put a hold on all capital punishment due to not having enough lethal injection drugs to carry out the execution at the end of 2020. 

Ohio has 113 inmates on death row, the nation’s fifth-largest death row population, according to former Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s Capital Crimes report that was published in April. 

Of the 337 people in Ohio who have received a death sentence since 1981, 56 people have been executed. Forty-one died of either natural causes or of suicide on death row, and 89 death sentences were overturned, DeWine said. 

Certainty and swiftness are the two things DeWine said he looked at when determining whether capital punishment is a deterrent — will the death penalty be carried out and how long does it take from sentencing to execution? 

“It would seem that if the death penalty were an actual deterrent for some people, it would need to happen quickly,” DeWine said. “Statistically, the odds of the death penalty actually being carried out are very low, and if it is carried out, it is all but guaranteed it will take a long, long time for that execution to happen.” 

The elapsed time between sentencing and execution ranged from 14 to 32 years for the last 10 people who were executed in Ohio — averaging 21 years, DeWine said. Those statistics omit the people who have died waiting to be executed or whose case was overturned.  

“The truth is that there is no prospect that these long delays will be substantially changed in the future,” DeWine said. 

Ohio averaged 14.25 death penalty sentences each year in the 1980s, and 13.6 death penalty sentences per year in the 1990s, a little more than five death penalty sentences per year in the 2000s, less than four death penalty sentences per year in the 2010, and only two people have been sentenced to death since 2020, DeWine said. 

“The odds of a murderer being indicted for capital offense are dramatically less today, and the odds of them being sentenced to death are even more remote,” DeWine said. 

“Throughout my career, I’ve always stated that the most important way to protect the public is to lock up violent criminals and to keep them out of society. That is a proven way of saving lives and protecting our citizens.”

DeWine also talked about the victim’s families. 

“One feeling, however, seemingly universally held by victims’ families is that the long, long wait to see if the death penalty is carried out is frustrating and very hurtful to these victims,” he said. 

“Any decision to officially end the death penalty in Ohio can not change the hurt and anger that we all feel in regard to these murderers, nor the deep sorrow we feel for the victims, and for the pains. These murderers ended the life of a precious human being.”

Death Penalty Action Executive Director Abraham Bonowitz said DeWine’s call to abolish Ohio’s death penalty is well-reasoned. 

“The legislature already knows this cannot be fixed, and if we can’t fix it, we must end it,” he said in a statement. 

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, said he supports the death penalty in Ohio for the “most heinous crimes.”

“While I respect Governor DeWine’s perspective, I disagree with his conclusion that the General Assembly should eliminate capital punishment altogether,” he said in a statement.

DeWine said he respects Huffman’s opinion.

“Reasonable people for centuries have come down on both sides of this issue for thousands of years,” DeWine said. “There are good people on both sides who have thought it through and tried to figure out what is the right thing.” 

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, thanked DeWine for his support in trying to end the death penalty. 

“I have talked with countless families and advocates and have come to understand an absolute truth: the death penalty is not justice, but rather a component of a broken justice system,” she said in a statement. 

“Capital punishment is not the answer for Ohio. We must abolish the death penalty and seek justice for families by instituting life sentences without parole, ending their recurring trauma of the appeal process.”

Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, told reporters in April that the death penalty is a very complicated issue. 

“(It) elicits a lot of emotions from a lot of people, but I would imagine that if it were to come up for a vote, we would not have the votes in our Republican caucus to pass it,” he said.

He said he personally is “in the middle” when it comes to his own personal stance on the death penalty and sees some cases where the death penalty seems appropriate.

“I look at other cases where we’ve seen individuals who are on death row who end up being exonerated later on because there was exculpatory evidence that maybe was withheld, and you’d hate to see somebody go through the entire death row process and wind up being executed. … That’s a very small minority of those cases.”

Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. do not have the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

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

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Republicans, Democrats and independents said corruption was a big problem permeating every government institution. More than 90% of respondents in each group said that was true — as did 92% of all respondents.

The poll was conducted among 2,000 registered voters between April 28 and May 6.

Perhaps the biggest surprise among its findings is that there’s so much agreement in an era of partisan polarization. For example, 65% of Democrats, 66% of independents and 56% of Republican respondents agreed that corporate political contributions were a major cause of corruption.

Perhaps less surprising is that corruption is surging to the fore because voters see it as related to their other top concerns. 

Respondents were asked if they agreed that, “Corruption is responsible for policies that benefit billionaires and big corporations at the expense of the American people.” Eighty three percent of Republicans agreed, as did 90% of independents and 95% of Democrats.

Those and many other responses indicate that large bipartisan majorities believe that many things that are perfectly legal in the United States are nevertheless corrupt.

“As for what qualifies as corruption, voters across party lines are in agreement,” the Brennan Center said in a written statement. “They understand corruption broadly, centered in part on the perception that government primarily works for the ultrawealthy and well-connected and doesn’t prioritize the interests of most voters. The poll finds that while 97% of voters say that a government official using their office for personal gain is corrupt, almost as many (89%) say the same about billionaires and big corporations having an easier time being heard than the general public.”

The poll’s findings might be corroborated by actual elections.

In Festus, Mo., in April, voters cast out four incumbent city council members just after they voted to allow construction of a hyperscale data center. Residents and opposition candidates told Politico the backlash was powered by voters who felt like they didn’t have any say in the project.

In Georgia, incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, is trying to turn corruption — and its ties to economic pain — into a centerpiece of his campaign as he seeks reelection. 

“Voters link corruption directly to kitchen-table issues and the problems with government they experience daily,” the Brennan Center said. “Eighty-eight percent blame corruption for the persistence of today’s biggest problems that government has failed to solve, and 83% say corruption is responsible for public services not working properly.”

While respondents broadly agreed that corruption is a huge problem and that it’s rooted in government indifference to voters, there still were some stark partisan disparities.

For example, 97% of Democrats and 76% of independents agreed that President Donald Trump is corrupt. Just 34% of Republicans did.

But while there are such differences, huge, bipartisan majorities agree that much stricter regulations on how campaigns are financed are needed so that voters’ voices can be heard. 

“An overwhelming majority of voters across party lines support campaign finance reforms,” the Brennan Center said. “These include legislation to end “dark money,” or funds from groups that do not disclose their donors (85% overall, with 88% support among Democrats, 84% among independents, and 85% support among Republicans) and a constitutional amendment to overturn Supreme Court rulings that have struck down limits on money in elections (79% overall, including 84% support among Democrats, 81% support among independents, and 75% support among Republicans).”

It added that support for those measures extends across the country and through cities, towns and the countryside.

“Supermajorities in regions across the country support amending the Constitution to restore campaign finance limits, with backing from more than three-quarters of voters in the West (82%), South (78%), Northeast (81%), and Midwest (76%),” it said. “The same is true across the urban (81%), suburban (79%), and rural (76%) divide.”

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Tina Koumoutsos was inside a downtown events space organizing postcards about voting rights for the women’s issues group she leads for the county Democratic Party when she noticed a familiar face on the big screen Sunday night.

“Oh, that’s Jane Fonda!” Koumoutsos said as the actor and longtime liberal political activist kicked off “Rise Up, Sing Out,” an event honoring free speech that was livestreamed during President Donald Trump’s birthday cage matches.

“They come for one of us, by God, they come for all of us!” Fonda said — and Koumoutsos joined the chorus of cheers and applause at a Springfield viewing party, where women outnumbered men by 10-to-1.

The Springfield watch party was one of hundreds held across all 50 states as counter-programming to the cage fights that President Donald Trump hosted on the White House lawn to mark his 80th birthday and the country’s 250th. More than 1 million tuned into the livestream, according to a “Rise Up, Sing Out” spokesperson, whether on their own or as part of a group, like the 70 or so who gathered in Springfield. Many of the watch parties were coordinated by leaders of local Indivisible chapters and organizers of No Kings protests — two intertwined movements where women are playing outsized roles opposing the president.

“Rise Up, Sing Out,” was hosted by Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment at  New York City’s Town Hall, a venue founded by suffragists who fought to pass the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, establishing women’s right to vote.  Fonda relaunched the committee in October as a vehicle for Hollywood to oppose Trump administration efforts to restrict free speech. Its first iteration was in the 1940s, when prominent Hollywood figures wanted to counter the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and its investigations of allegedly disloyal Americans.

Many of the Ohio women who watched the women-heavy lineup in New York are central figures in their community’s response to Trump administration policies impacting this city of 60,000, where the termination of an immigration program has left thousands of Haitian immigrants in existential limbo and unsure of whether they will be able to remain in the country.

Jen Casto, the leader of Springfield’s Indivisible chapter, said that she and Amy Young, the leader of nearby Indivisible Westside Columbus, organized the viewing as a chance for some of Springfield’s most committed volunteers to convene for an event more intimate than a protest and more social than their day-to-day mutual aid efforts.

“I think it’s important for people to know that there is joy in resistance, that joy is resistance, and music brings people together,” Casto said.

As attendees walked in, they came upon a table with lyric books for the songs in the “Rise Up, Sing Out” program, literature about how to “stand with immigrant families” and colorful cards for them to write notes of encouragement to their Haitian neighbors. A few feet away, potluck offerings that included fried chicken, fruit salad and brownies were available to all.

More than 400 miles away, the scene at the White House Sunday night depicted a version of masculinity celebrated by the president, with displays of physical strength, violence and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

Trump and Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which organized the cage matches, walked out to the metal song “Bodies,” with the refrain, “Let the bodies hit the floor.”  “Shout out to Trump for having the balls!” fighter Josh Hokit said in an interview at the White House with popular manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan after winning the fourth bout. “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right, America?” Hokit continued, repeating a transphobic, far-right conspiracy theory about the Democratic former first lady.

In the final fight of the night, Justin Gaethje beat his opponent’s face “to such a bloody pulp that he was declared incapable of continuing,” according to a White House pool report.

In New York, meanwhile, actors like Julia Roberts and Lily Gladstone, the punk rocker Patti Smith and the queer singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright offered a different version of what the country should celebrate.

Roberts urged the crowd to “take a really deep breath” before reading a poem by Amanda Gorman honoring a Minneapolis woman killed by federal immigration agents earlier this year. “Renee Nicole Good is not a symbol. She is an American woman, a queer woman, who was doing the very best she could do to be good in an unjust world,” she said.

Gladstone, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, praised the bison native to her tribe’s ancestral lands as a model of resilience in the face of adversity. They are “only animals able to calve in sub-zero temperatures,” she said, and “in spite of ongoing campaigns and policies to erase both the Blackfeet and the buffalo, we are both, in fact, still here.”

The entertainer Peppermint, a drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist, said that trans youth are facing “a government that cares more about censoring their bodies than feeding them.” Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown sang a Civil Rights Movement anthem and warned that when it comes to voting rights, “Everywhere is the South right now, y’all.”

Near the end of the “Rise Up, Sing Out” program, Wainwright stood in front of a large photograph of hundreds of individuals waving rainbow Pride flags and performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“Jane told me that she wanted me to say before singing this song that the person who made it famous, the woman for whom it was written, Ms. Judy Garland. She was a member of the [original] Committee for the First Amendment. And the man, the incredible lyricist Yip Harburg, who wrote the words … he was actually blacklisted,” Wainwright began.

By the time Wainwright reached the third verse, when “troubles melt like lemon drops,” the crowd in Springfield was swaying to the music. As he wrapped, Springfield delivered its loudest applause.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Not after more than 100 FBI agents raided an Ohio voter registration group that has been successfully registering racial minorities, the formerly incarcerated, and college students to vote for two decades.

Not after Trump leaned on Ohio Republicans to make voter ID a midterm issue in a state with one of the strictest state voter ID laws in the country — and GOP lawmakers did by rushing a pointless constitutional amendment to the Nov. 3 ballot to set that law in stone for purely political reasons.

Not after Trump’s Department of Justice intervened in a federal lawsuit to defend Ohio’s law requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) when they register — which voting rights advocates say will keep thousands of eligible citizens from casting a ballot. And that was just last week.

It has started. The federal government is being wielded as a partisan weapon to neutralize electoral threat ahead of the midterms.

In red Ohio. Where Trump won three times in a row with shapeshifter JD Vance, an Ohio U.S. senator for five minutes, as his running mate.

Where Republicans have a lock on every lever of power in state government from gerrymandered supermajorities in the legislature to all statewide offices and a 6-1 supreme court majority.

Conventional wisdom holds that the party in control of the White House is likely to lose seats in Congress in the midterm elections because those contests generally serve as a referendum on the president’s performance. But a solidly right-leaning, MAGA-loving Ohio should be in the bag for Trump, as well as those doggedly loyal to him, right?

Ask Ohioans who are paying up to 50% more for gas compared to last year, or more of their paychecks on food year-over-year.

Ask families squeezed by housing costs, out-of-pocket medical fees, steep hikes in electric bills, or the childcare crisis. 

Ask voters — who were promised a “golden age” of prosperity and peace (“no new wars”) from the Trump-Vance campaign in 2024 — about inflation rising to a three-year high on spiking gas prices caused by Trump’s futile war with Iran.

Maybe the reason the FBI raided the Cleveland-based Ohio Organizing Collaborative, seized its computers and phones, and showed up at the homes of its staff members across the state to interrogate and intimidate is because Ohio has emerged as a highly competitive battleground state in 2026.

A U.S. Senate seat, governor’s race, and newly gerrymandered congressional districts are suddenly in play.

Maybe that’s why Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, wrote an opinion column and picked an issue that polls well (voter ID) to exploit, and got Republican legislators to collude with him by approving a needless voter ID amendment for the fall ballot in less than a month.

Maybe the DOJ completely reversed its decades-long defense of voting rights to support voter suppression efforts in Ohio with the documentary proof of citizenship law precisely to disenfranchise thousands of Ohioans who lack ready access to documents like birth certificates or passports.

Maybe a surprise attack by federal law enforcement on community organizers, a redundant voter ID amendment, and the DOJ’s intervention against voting rights are all of a piece to manipulate the outcome of one election.

Maybe anything goes in election subversion to minimize risk to the status quo in the midterms. 

Look, the president’s approval ratings are at record lows and getting lower.

Trump insists he “doesn’t care about the midterms” but he does care about his wings being clipped by a Congress with majorities that check his power and hold him to account.

So when the twice impeached, convicted felon isn’t falling asleep in the Oval Office, he is conspiring to undermine the midterms, laying the groundwork to contest legitimate outcomes that don’t go his way. Like he did in 2020. Trump amplifies the same evidence-free claims about “rigged” elections he made six years ago or invents fraud allegations about vote tabulations that take too long. 

The man who plotted to overturn an election he lost and incited a violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol with a lie that he won is determined to keep his unchecked supremacy with preordained midterm results.

Trump has made it clear he will do whatever is necessary to rig the rules and guarantee outcome. To that end he pressured Ohio Republicans to advance an election year voter ID gambit to boost turnout in the fall and even ram through last-minute legislation to suppress mail-in voting next year.

The pretext of disenfranchising voters through unwarranted restrictions is always (unsubstantiated) voter fraud. Trump lying about elections, with complicit Ohio Statehouse Republicans, is one tactic to sow baseless doubt before a single ballot is cast.

Targeting high-profile opponents is another.

But going after under-the radar groups, like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, doing the work of democracy, registering voters, speaking for disadvantaged communities, battling injustice, is a new level of noxious from an authoritarian regime. 

It stokes fears of more trumped-up crackdowns ahead of the midterms. It chills activists fighting to make sure marginalized Ohioans have access to the ballot. And it confirms that the specter of the federal government used as a partisan weapon in service to a malignant narcissist is no longer conjecture in Ohio. 

It has started. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The SpaceX IPO made the world’s richest man even richer, grabbing headlines worldwide. But it is merely the most vivid illustration of a U.S. trend that has been accelerating since 2022.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%.

The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies.

Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Using different methods than the Fed, French economist Thomas Piketty has asserted that the richest 1% of Americans held nearly half the nation’s wealth in 1928 and 1929, just before the Great Depression. Their share declined after that, during a period of high marginal income tax rates (the percentage of tax you pay on your last dollar of income) and widespread discomfort with astronomical pay for executives. Instead, corporations plowed their profits into expansion and higher wages for workers.

But the share of wealth held by the top 1% began rising again in the 1970s, according to the Piketty data.

Piketty, who theorizes that unfettered capitalism always leads to high concentration of wealth, told Stateline in an email that “there’s nothing natural about this — it’s all due to policies.”

“If the super-rich capture the state and pay little tax, then it’s easy to accumulate a lot, but history suggests that politics can revert quite quickly,” Piketty wrote.

Another prominent economist who recently studied the wealth of California billionaires, Emmanuel Saez, described the current spike in the share of wealth held by the top 1% as driven primarily by the stock market boom. Saez is director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley.

New taxes proposed

In at least a dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia, lawmakers have proposed new taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers. Some of the proposals would tax annual incomes above a certain threshold while others would tax capital assets, including high-value stocks and real estate.

In California, advocates in April announced they had gathered enough signatures for a November ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on billionaires. The state’s billionaires held about $2.3 trillion in wealth as of June 10, assets that could generate almost $101 billion from the proposed tax.

This year, at least 12 billionaires left California. They include Lynsi Snider, who inherited the In-N-Out hamburger chain and moved to Tennessee, and car loan magnate Don Hankey, who moved to Nevada. However, moves into the state and new wealth created 23 new California billionaires this year. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has vowed to stay in California despite a potential $8 billion one-time tax bill.

There are no state-level statistics on the top 1%, though Census Bureau estimates from 2022 show the states with the highest shares of households with more than $500,000 in net worth are Hawaii (48%), the District of Columbia (47%) and Washington state (43%). Hawaii also has the highest average net worth at more than $1 million, mostly because homeowners in that state have an average of $600,000 of equity in their homes. The states with the next highest average net worth are California ($792,000), and Massachusetts ($751,000).

Conservative and liberal experts agree that a soaring stock market and business profits have made it a good time for the wealthy, while middle-class and lower-income people are doing less well, especially as inflation gobbles up wage increases. There’s also widespread agreement that Trump’s tariffs (since struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court) disproportionately harmed lower-income and middle-class people, and that the tax cuts in the broad tax and spending measure Trump signed last summer (commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) will disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

Chuck Marr, the center’s vice president for federal tax policy, pointed to the law’s extension of  a deep corporate income tax cut that dates from Trump’s first administration.

“Trump’s whole policy has really leaned into increasing this disparity,” Marr said. “You’ve got AI coming and globalization has shifted income and wealth upward, and instead of pushing back against that, Trump and others have leaned into it.”

Nevertheless, Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the U.S. government’s tax and spending policy is “still highly progressive in that low-income households receive benefits from the high-income households paying taxes.”

“It’s a little less so than it was prior to the passage of the (Trump tax and spending law) and the tariffs, but it’s still the case. It hasn’t changed the story that much,” Pomerleau said.

Marr agreed that the federal tax system is basically progressive, in that it uses taxes on high income earners to pay for the needs of low-income residents. But tax collections are low in the United States compared with other wealthy countries: Of the 20 wealthiest nations, only Ireland collects less government revenue as a share of GDP.

“Compared to other countries, inequality is high because we redistribute so much less money,” Marr said. “It’s a progressive tax system but it doesn’t raise a lot of money.”

Inflation divide

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, an accounting of national economic conditions released June 3, found a divide in how inflation, which has increased as a result of the war in Iran, has affected American spending.

“Higher-income households remained resilient and less sensitive to price increase, while middle-income households were described as ‘squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,’ and low-income consumers showed greater financial strain,” the report said.

The “squeezing” analogy for the middle class came from a roundtable discussion of hospitality executives in the Kansas City, Missouri, area in late May, said Jeremy Hill, a regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Hill said there was a gasp in the room when one high-end restaurant chain executive said the chain could raise prices at will and keep expanding, hampered only by a shortage of high-end chefs to staff locations. Meanwhile, hotels, bars and restaurants serving the middle class are struggling to get people to come in and spend.

“It’s not that they (wealthy people) don’t care about inflation. They’re worried about what it might do to future demand or their own stocks,” Hill said. “But today, it’s not impacting the way they spend.”

The stock market’s recent run has contributed the most to the consolidation of wealth at the top. Rising real estate prices also have also added to wealth, especially for longtime homeowners.

“This has disproportionately helped those who already hold assets while the average American pays higher prices for everyday essentials,” said E.J. Antoni, chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In other words, Wall Street got rich while Main Street got inflation.”

White Americans own outsized shares of assets such as stock and real estate, according to the federal statistics. White people are 57% of the population but own 82% of the assets, while Black and Hispanic people, who make up a combined 24% of the U.S. population, have less than 7% of assets. Asians are included in an “Other” category, which is about 9% of population and holds about  11.3% of the nation’s total assets.

By generation, Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 hold almost half of wealth, while Millennials and Gen X hold the lion’s share of liabilities, such as mortgages and consumer debt, that detract from net worth. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) have about 42% of liabilities and Gen X (1965-1980) have 35%, compared with 22% for Baby Boomers.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for young people to be in debt as they build careers and pay off student loans, said Pomerleau, the American Enterprise Institute economist.

“Doctors with $450,000 in medical school debt might be in the bottom 10%, yes, but that person is going to be in the top 1% of wealth at some point in their lives,” Pomerleau said.

“You enter the labor force with a net liability, but you save over time, that liability is paid down, you’re paying off your mortgage, and that’s when your wealth starts growing.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The court accepted a case, Genalo v. Black, from New York state involving a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic arrested by immigration enforcement after an assault conviction and held for 21 months during deportation proceedings. 

An appeals court ruling in the case found that an “unreasonably prolonged” detention requires a bond hearing in which the government must show “clear and convincing evidence” that the immigrant would be a flight risk or a danger to the community if released. 

The Supreme Court on Monday also asked attorneys for arguments about whether the immigrant’s 2020 release makes the case moot. 

Indefinite Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for immigrants either with criminal convictions or a record of illegally crossing a border has become legally controversial. Some appeals courts have upheld the Trump administration detention policy, while others have declared it unconstitutional. 

Individual judges have mostly ruled that non-criminals in immigration detention are entitled to a bond hearing or should be freed outright. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The report, which analyzed a sample of 171 mass public shootings in the United States between 1999 and 2024, such as those at workplaces, schools or shopping malls, found that these attacks are rarely sudden or unpredictable. Instead, researchers describe them as the result of cumulative stressors, concerning behaviors and communications of intent that, if connected, could offer opportunities for earlier intervention.

An overwhelming majority of perpetrators, nearly 86%, communicated violent thoughts or intentions to at least one other person before carrying out an attack, a pattern researchers refer to as “leakage.” These disclosures most often occurred through in-person conversations or text messages and were typically made to people within the perpetrator’s immediate social circle, including friends, family members and coworkers. 

On average, warning signs were spread across more than two different groups of observers, meaning no single person had a complete view of the escalating threat, according to the report.

The researchers also found that perpetrators tended to experience multiple overlapping stressors rather than a single triggering event. On average, people had five distinct stressors prior to an attack, including mental health challenges, job-related difficulties and family problems. Researchers also identified an average of 6.6 concerning behaviors per perpetrator, including suicidal ideation and other forms of emotional distress or aggression.

Planning often unfolded over an extended period. The report’s authors found that perpetrators spent an average of nearly 10 months preparing for attacks, including researching locations and studying prior mass shootings. 

Firearms were most often obtained through legal channels, with nearly 60% purchased from federally licensed dealers. About one-third of perpetrators had at least one factor that would have legally prohibited them from possessing a firearm, according to the report.

Researchers also found that nearly two-thirds of perpetrators had prior contact with law enforcement, underscoring what they describe as missed opportunities for intervention when warning signs appeared across different systems but were not fully connected.

“Warning signs are regularly present, observable, and known to people in the perpetrator’s social network long before the first shot is fired,” Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the consortium and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “By understanding how these indicators cluster and by building robust pathways for everyday bystanders to report what they see, we can connect the dots and intervene before a crisis turns into a tragedy.”

The report argues that improving communication between schools, law enforcement, mental health providers and community members could strengthen efforts to identify and respond to potential threats. It also highlights the need for clearer pathways for reporting concerning behavior and better systems for assessing risk when multiple warning signs emerge across different settings.

Alongside the findings, the consortium is developing an open-source database and training tools aimed at helping threat assessment professionals and community members recognize pre-attack behaviors and communication patterns. 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The meeting had been fabricated — arranged through weeks of text message exchanges with Columbus-based progressive blogger D.J. Byrnes, who posed as a fictional Ohio State football staffer in his newsletter, The Rooster. Ramaswamy is now the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, having won the May 5 primary with more than 82 percent of the vote. He faces Democrat Amy Acton, a physician and former Ohio Department of Health director, in the November general election.

How the prank unfolded

According to Byrnes’ account, published August 25, 2024, the scheme began after a Republican political acquaintance shared screenshots of a prior exchange in which someone had already posed as Day via a Google Voice number and received a cordial response from Ramaswamy. Byrnes decided to attempt his own contact.

On Monday, August 5, 2024, Byrnes texted Ramaswamy directly, introducing himself as “Tim Chitter” — a misspelling of the alias he intended to use — and claiming to represent the Ohio State football program. According to Byrnes’ published account, Ramaswamy responded within minutes. Text message screenshots published by The Rooster show Ramaswamy writing that he would “love to talk to the guys, very proud of them,” and immediately offering to connect Byrnes with his assistant to coordinate logistics.

Later that afternoon, Ramaswamy’s assistant confirmed a meeting for Friday, August 23, 2024 at 2 p.m. at Raising Cane’s at 2823 Olentangy Road — a restaurant Byrnes had proposed as a staging point before the group would supposedly head to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center together. Screenshots published in The Rooster show the assistant confirming the arrangement and noting that Ramaswamy is vegetarian.

On the morning of August 23, a screenshot in Byrnes’ account shows Ramaswamy sending a message at 6:03 a.m. stating he was “looking forward to meeting you today.” Hours later, according to the same screenshots, Ramaswamy asked what themes he should hit in his remarks to the team.

According to Byrnes, Ramaswamy also remained in contact with the Google Voice number he believed to belong to Day throughout the period leading to the meeting — a separate prankster Byrnes says he had no direct coordination with.

The meeting

Ramaswamy arrived at the Raising Cane’s parking lot that Friday, his security escort in tow. Byrnes documented the encounter on video. After a brief exchange — during which, according to Byrnes, Ramaswamy initially called him by the wrong name — it became apparent to the entourage that no coaching staff or team access awaited them. Ramaswamy subsequently attempted to reach the Google Voice number he believed to be Day’s, according to screenshots published in The Rooster.

The Rooster’s account of the prank, published three days after the meeting, included photographs, video, and the text message screenshots documenting the exchange.

The Rooster, the arrest, and Ramaswamy’s response

Byrnes and Ramaswamy have continued to cross paths in the nearly two years since. The Rooster reported in May 2026 that Ramaswamy was turned away by security when he attempted to enter the New York Knicks’ locker room following a playoff game in Cleveland. Ramaswamy denied the report and, in response to Byrnes’ coverage, characterized him as a “leftist blogger with mental health issues,” according to Signal Ohio. His campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, called the report “100% fake” and Byrnes “a mentally unstable and unhinged left-wing blogger who may suffer from delusions,” according to the Daily Beast.

Byrnes was arrested on Tuesday, June 2 at the Ohio Statehouse while attending a legislative hearing on data centers and held for 23 hours in the Franklin County Jail. As TiffinOhio.net reported, Ohio state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, emailed Kirtland Police Chief Jeremy Fisher in May requesting criminal charges against Byrnes over text messages Byrnes sent him, which included political commentary and a digitally altered image of the cartoon character Shrek. An affidavit in Byrnes’ arrest record describes the image as depicting Shrek “fully nude with an exposed and erect humanlike penis engaged in an act of masturbation.” Byrnes faces a first-degree misdemeanor charge of telecommunications harassment. The arrest warrant was signed by a judge Cirino had previously endorsed.

Cirino initially told reporters he “did not request any such thing” when asked about the arrest. Records reported in the days following the arrest contradicted that denial, showing he had emailed the police chief requesting charges. Cirino declined further comment. A spokesperson for Ohio Senate Republicans said the caucus would not comment due to the ongoing investigation.

The backlash was immediate and crossed party lines. Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin, a Democrat who has himself been a frequent target of Byrnes’ criticism, posted on X: “Didn’t realize having the Rooster thrown in jail for annoying me was an option this whole time??? Seems like censorship to me, unacceptable.”

In a statement, Byrnes said: “I believe that the facts presented in court will show that I’m innocent of the misdemeanor charge of telecommunications harassment.”

A pattern of vetting failures

Questions about Ramaswamy’s vetting of the people in his orbit extend beyond the 2024 prank.

As TiffinOhio.net reported in June, campaign finance records filed with the Ohio Secretary of State show Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign paid $14,000 to its contracted security firm, ARK Protection Group, in the weeks following the December 30, 2025 federal arrest of the firm’s employee Justin Salsburey — Ramaswamy’s personal family bodyguard — on charges of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and methamphetamine. A final $2,000 payment was made to ARK Protection four days after the campaign publicly announced it was severing ties with the firm. ARK Protection Group closed on January 21, 2026, one day after that final payment cleared.

Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to questions about the post-announcement payment at the time of that report.

Ramaswamy, 40, is a Cincinnati-born biotech entrepreneur who ran for president in 2024 before briefly co-leading the Department of Government Efficiency. He resigned from that role ahead of President Trump’s inauguration and launched his gubernatorial campaign in February 2025.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Outstanding Biology Teacher Award, presented annually by the NABT, recognizes educators in grades 7–12 who demonstrate excellence in biology instruction, classroom innovation, professional leadership, and a commitment to advancing scientific literacy. Griffin was selected from candidates across Ohio following a competitive review conducted by biology educators from across the United States.

At Seneca East, Griffin teaches Biology, Anatomy & Physiology, College Credit Plus/AP Biology, CCP Marine Science, and Forensic Science. Her instruction centers on inquiry-based learning, hands-on investigations, scientific reasoning, and real-world applications that help students connect biological concepts to everyday life.

“My goal is for students to see biology as more than a collection of facts,” Griffin said. “I want them to understand how biological concepts connect to one another and to the world around them so they can use science to make informed decisions throughout their lives.”

A defining feature of Griffin’s teaching is spiraled, phenomenon-based instruction—an approach that revisits biological concepts throughout the year with increasing depth and complexity. Students in her courses regularly design investigations, analyze data, evaluate current scientific research, and apply their learning to authentic problems and case studies.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/brooke-griffin-seneca-east-ohio-biology-teacher-year/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.

The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.

The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.

“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First-ever national voter list

The order and the rule require states to provide lists of mail-in voters if they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a national voter list. 

Mail ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies have to compile lists of voting-age citizens to share with each state in an effort to root out noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

The Postal Service didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency has said the rule “will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May declined to halt it, partly because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is weighing a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the ramifications of it and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t have, currently, a list of sanctioned, authorized voters to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, operated by the National Association of Election Officials.  “That’s a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Sweeping changes very quickly

In court papers filed in May, local election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. Implementation of the order’s requirements will largely fall on local election officials, they argued.

Byrum was among the officials to sign onto the brief, along with others in Boston, and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots through the mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they intend to provide a mail ballot. Local election officials will play a large role in helping states develop these lists, according to the court papers, and will have primary responsibility to help voters address any errors.

And Trump wants it all in place before November. The executive order’s proposed timelines “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” the officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you didn’t think about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions of at least 250,000 people.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions remain, said Lopez, who previously spent a decade administering elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The portal poses the potential for bottlenecks in the election system and it’s unclear what would happen if it was ever offline. The United States has a decentralized election system, with states each running their own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure, raising concerns about the security of information on tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for the formatting of that data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in a variety of formats — the proposed rule only says the Postal Service wouldn’t alter the data provided by states.

“It looks a little different across the country and therefore normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Struggle for small, rural counties

The Department of Justice initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service before backpedaling a few days later. Still, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary conversations” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system that can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, for the purpose of running the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards on ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots through the mail.

Envelopes must include an election mail logo, be automation compatible and have a bar code that allows for tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in small, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is in charge of elections and may not even be on the job full time, Patrick said. 

“There’s rural offices all across the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office — they are sharing it with the tax assessor or whatever — they don’t have the ability to generate those serialized tracking codes, intelligent mail bar codes,” Patrick said. “Because they’re physically hand-writing these envelopes out or they’re using a rubber stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order or the proposed Postal Service rule include any federal funding for implementation, something that would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have championed the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the order and arguing that it “will enhance the security of absentee voting.”

“It is vital to the strength of our republic that we ensure only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican who is the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and the proposed rule mark an overreach by the federal government into duties best left to states and local governments. 

The biggest reaction among Colorado clerks, he said, has been, “why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than I trust theirs.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees last Tuesday issued a report saying that both programs will be insolvent in less than a decade.

That doesn’t mean the programs will shut down altogether, but it does mean a big cut in benefits. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that more than 2 million Ohioans will lose an average of $487 a month, and cost the state $12.1 billion starting in 2032.

Medicare Part A, the program that covers hospital and nursing-home care, is projected to be insolvent by 2033. 

If that happens, it will cut the amount going for care by 11% as more Ohioans get older and sicker, the committee estimates. This in a time when already-stressed rural and inner-city hospitals are losing billions due to Medicaid cuts, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund

Ohio is among the states that are more vulnerable to a shortfall. It has the 20th-largest population over 65, and the 18th-largest between 55 and 64, according to KFF. 

And AARP Ohio reports that the program keeps more than 700,000 Ohio seniors out of poverty.

The time to act is now, said AARP Ohio Director Jenny Carlson.

“The trustee report puts Congress on the clock,” Carlson said in an interview.

“We’ve got 2.5 million Ohioans receiving Social Security. We will continue to be fierce defenders of Social Security. We worked. We paid in. We earned these benefits. So Congress needs to act now to protect the full benefit and strengthen Social Security.”

Carlson said she’s particularly concerned about low-income seniors. The average Social Security recipient in Ohio gets about $1,900 a month — or $23,000 a year — in benefits. 

“For many Ohioans, that covers basic necessities,” she said. “Think about groceries, housing, utilities, prescriptions and healthcare costs.”

If their Social Security is slashed, state and local governments will be left to deal with the consequences, Carlson said.

“The risk is if you kick the can down the road — if benefits are reduced — that impacts basic necessities and it’s going to put more pressures on state budgets because people can become (Medicaid and Medicare) eligible. And eligible for food stamps,” she said.

“It also puts pressure on social services provided at the county level.”

Experts blamed the shortfall on several factors, including an aging population and decades of tax cuts and other policies that have accelerated income inequality. But they were most critical of congressional inaction.

The Social Security “Trust Fund is under strain because Congress has failed to update the program for the economy we actually have,”  Elizabeth Wilkins, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, said in a written statement.

“Too much income now flows to the top, where it escapes Social Security taxation. Too many workers have faced weak wage growth. And the government’s poor response to the Great Recession damaged workforce participation and wages, and, in turn, weakened the reserve.”

Wilkins was referring in part to the fact that wage earners pay a 6.2% Social Security tax only on their first $184,000 of income. That tax is matched by employers.

For its part, Medicare is taxed at an employer-matched 1.45% that has no income cutoff.

There is already less in dedicated revenue for Social Security retirement than there are scheduled benefits.

By 2032, “the fund’s reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 78 percent of total scheduled benefits,” the Social Security trustees said last Tuesday in a written statement.

The Medicare Hospitalization Insurance fund is also falling short. If it isn’t shored up, it will require an 11% cut in 2033, and that will grow to a 16% cut by 2040, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said.

When Social Security and Medicare faced insolvency in 1981, Congress passed bridge funding and created a commission to come up with a longer-term solution.

In 1983, Congress made amendments to the Social Security Act that were supposed to shore up the system for 75 years.

However, they didn’t perfectly predict the future — including how quickly inequality would grow.

In the years since, experts say, Congress has failed to address the problem.

“Instead of talking about solutions to these real funding problems, leaders in Washington instead demagogue each other over the issue, with both sides promising not to touch the programs,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in a written statement.

“Unfortunately, that promise is a tacit endorsement of the across-the-board cuts that will happen at exhaustion — an unacceptable outcome. No state would be spared from the consequences of failure to save these programs from insolvency — each and every member of the House and Senate has constituents that rely on the programs.”

The committee added that the Republican spending bill passed last summer only added to the problem.

It cut taxes for the richest 1% of Americans by about $1 trillion over 10 years while cutting a similar amount from health and nutrition programs for the poor — making inequality even worse.

“… thanks mainly to the tax cuts in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and worsening demographics, Social Security’s projected shortfall is a full 16% worse than last year’s,” the budget watchdog said. “Medicare’s shortfall is 33% worse.”

The staff of Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, who voted for the bill, didn’t respond to questions for this story.

Husted’s Democratic challenger accused Husted of trying to make the Social Security shortfall even worse by proposing a balanced-budget amendment.

In announcing the amendment, Husted chided Congress for a “lack of discipline,” but he didn’t say Social Security and Medicaid would have to be cut to balance the budget.

A spokeswoman for former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown blasted the proposal and other of Husted’s votes.

“Rather than focus on lowering costs for Ohio families, Jon Husted ended his first year in the Senate by proposing a plan that would cut back Social Security and Medicare,” the spokeswoman, Lauren Chou, said in an email.

“Husted has already voted nine times to raise health care costs and kick nearly half a million Ohioans off their coverage — all to give billionaires the largest tax cut in American history. Sherrod Brown fought to restore Social Security benefits to a quarter million Ohio workers and will continue to stand with hardworking Ohioans.”

Congress will likely face intense pressure to find a fix. 

One idea is to remove the income cap beyond which wealthy Americans stop paying into the system. But experts say that’s too little, too late.

“Congress waited too long for any one policy to solve this problem neatly,” Stephen Nuñez, the Roosevelt Institute’s director for stratification economics, said in an email. “If policymakers had acted 10 or 20 years ago, lifting the cap would have gone much further.”

Nuñez added, “Instead, runaway income inequality and economic mismanagement further eroded the program’s foundation. That’s why we need a multifaceted approach going forward. One that demands more from the wealthiest, closes loopholes that allow income to escape tax, and protects and expands benefits.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget lists several possible approaches:

• Six-figure limit — Capping annual benefits for the wealthiest retirees at the normal retirement age (67 for people born in 1960) at $100,000 for couples and $50,000 for individuals. It’s estimated to close 20% of the solvency gap if the cap is indexed to inflation.

• COLA cap — Capping cost-of-living adjustments and indexing them to a measure of inflation known as “chained CPI.” This is estimated to close 10% of the solvency gap if applied to the top quarter of recipients.

• Employer compensation tax — Replacing employer Social Security and Medicare contributions with a flat tax on all compensation — including massive CEO pay and their gold-plated benefits. That measure is estimated to close a whopping 66% of the Social Security shortfall and half of the Medicare gap.

With 38 million members nationally who are known for their tendency to vote, AARP is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the United States.

Carlson, the organization’s Ohio director, said it will press lawmakers to make sure Social Security and Medicare keep faith with the people paying into them.

“Advocacy is our backbone,” she said. “Consumers across the state and the nation need to know they have a strong voice in Congress and the states saying we will defend the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. We have been for 60 years.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement announced grants for abandoned mine land cleanup, brought about under a federal infrastructure law.

According to the Ohio River Valley Institute, the grants are meant to be used to repair waterways and land damage resulting from historic coal mining.

The abandoned mine land grants for 2026 amount to $679 million, but that amount is $45 million less than before congressional cuts were made to the program.

Eric Dixon, a senior researcher for the Ohio River Valley Institute, said the funding maintains “historic investment in cleaning up hazardous coal mine damage,” while also boosting job opportunities, as well as the safety and health of Appalachian communities.

“Unfortunately, the tens of millions in cleanup funding slashed by Congress means more families will have to wait for help with orange-tinted streams or crumbling home foundations,” Dixon said in announcing the funding.

An infrastructure law passed in 2021 started the process of reclaiming abandoned mine land with about $10.9 billion in grant funding nationwide over the next 15 years.

The funding cuts occurred in a January spending bill, in which the institute said funds originally meant for coal mining cleanup were redirected to other federal programs.

In grant funding distribution documents released after the $500 million cut was announced, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement said the loss would be “applied equally to the remaining 11 grant distribution years,” at about $45.5 million per year.

The institute said the congressional funding cuts are “equivalent to the cost of stabilizing around 10,000 acres of subsidence, which occurs when land above underground mines caves in.”

Ohio stands to lose nearly $3 million per year, starting this year, according to the federal agency.

So, while Ohio was set to receive $696 million between 2022 and 2036 to address abandoned coal mines, the reduction means the state will receive $664 million over the grant period, according to an analysis by the Ohio River Valley Institute.

Ohio has a state abandoned mine land program, as well as administration authority for the federal program “to address the highest priority problems resulting from coal mining that occurred prior to enactment of today’s stricter reclamation requirements,” according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Regulations began in earnest in the 1970s, but mining activity before then led to impacts including 1,300 miles of streams polluted by acid mine draining, nearly 119,000 acres of land in need of “major reclamation efforts,” polluted water supplies across the state, and acres of landslides, according to the ODNR.

In 1972, the state started its own reclamation program, with a state severance tax imposed on active surface mine operators.

A separate program called the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization program gives state funding to projects around that use the land for other things.

Some of the approved projects include building construction, mine stabilization, and park improvements.

In Lawrence County, for example, $3 million was approved for a sports and recreation complex. Another $2.8 million was approved for a four-phase project in Athens County’s village of Glouster to reclaim downtown buildings, improve a village park, build a daycare facility and operate a workforce development program, according to the state.

The village of Leetonia in Columbiana County was approved for $3.5 million to construct a learning and history center, along with a conservatory and roadway improvement project in the area.

The area still has more than 200 ovens used during 19th-century coal mining.

“The overall goals of this project include interpreting the industrial and cultural history of the Cherry Valley, developing a trail system that integrates remaining industrial structures, developing the educational potential of the site, promoting local and regional access to the site, and fostering a connection to the regional trail system,” a profile of the project stated.

Surrounding states also saw federal funding losses, with Kentucky seeing a $4.7 million reduction in annual grant funds, West Virginia losing $8.9 million year over year, and Pennsylvania netting a $15.4 million annual loss. Indiana will see an annual loss of $1.5 million per year.

Pennsylvania and West Virginia saw the highest cuts grant cuts in the nation. Alaska and Texas were the only states to see no reductions in funds as a result of the cuts.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Supreme Court recently blocked a permit for what would be the state’s largest solar installation. The 800-megawatt Oak Run Solar Project still has a pathway to completion — the court reversed only one part of the state siting board’s prior approval — but it remains unclear how things will play out.

This is just the latest example of how state lawmakers and other officials have obstructed renewable energy development in Ohio. In total, they have thwarted more than 5.3 gigawatts of solar and wind projects over the last dozen years.

So says a recent analysis released by Save Ohio Parks, which opposes fracking and oil and gas extraction from public lands.

“It’s a lot of inexpensive power that we don’t have available to us. And it means fewer choices for consumers,” said Tom Bullock, executive director for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. ​“Boy, would that come in handy right now when electricity prices keep going up, up, up.”

Ohio, like many other states, is facing rising utility bills as well as massive new energy demand due to a wave of proposed data centers. The Save Ohio Parks report contends that clean energy could have helped rein in those energy costs while meeting a huge chunk of data centers’ demand if Ohio had allowed more development. The 5.3 GW of blocked clean energy would have also avoided large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution.

The state stepped up its pushback on wind and solar as each of those clean energy sources became more cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear power.

A 2014 law that more than doubled property-line setbacks for wind turbines effectively blocked over 3.3 GW of utility-scale projects in the state, the report notes. Efforts in 2017 to roll back those restrictions failed, leaving Ohio among the nation’s most restrictive states for wind power.

“The economics of a wind farm don’t work when you need that amount of setback from a property line,” said Rachel Kutzley, a Save Ohio Parks board member who worked on the report.

Seven years later, Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 52, which lets counties ban new solar projects above 50 MW of capacity and ​“economically significant” wind farms able to produce more than 5 MW of electricity. SB 52 doesn’t let counties ban power plants that use fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Neither the Save Ohio Parks report nor a February 2026 paper in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy quantified how much clean energy generation the bans by Ohio counties have prevented.

Projects that were already in grid operator PJM Interconnection’s queue are not subject to outright bans under SB 52. The Ohio Power Siting Board, however, can deny permits for individual projects — and since 2021 it has rejected eight installations, making Ohio one of the toughest states for developing clean energy. The board has routinely referenced local government opposition when rejecting projects.

Those eight rulings alone have killed more than 1.1 GW of solar generation.

Developers withdrew five other applications for projects that would have added roughly another 1 GW, after adverse recommendations from the Power Siting Board’s staff or significant local pushback made it likely the full board would deny permits. The Kingwood Solar case, which challenges the board’s deference to local government opposition, is due to be decided soon.

Matt Schilling, a spokesperson for the Ohio Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, said he did not have a comment on the report from Save Ohio Parks. ​“However, I will observe OPSB has approved 49 solar projects across Ohio with nameplate capacity totaling 9,250 MW,” he added.

Only about one-third of those approvals were for permit applications filed after SB 52’s effective date.

It’s not just solar and wind — Ohio has also stymied energy-efficiency efforts over the years, which would have additionally cut down on pollution and saved money for residents. The Save Ohio Parks’ report doesn’t consider the effects of the state’s infamous House Bill 6, which eliminated utilities’ energy-efficiency requirements after 2020.

Those impacts would have been quite sizable, said Mike Specian, a utilities manager with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, who shared his separate analysis with Canary Media.

If utilities had continued to achieve energy savings for customers after 2020, the cumulative savings could have been as much as 70 terawatt-hours, or 70 million megawatt-hours, Specian said. That high number is partially because energy-efficiency investments provide benefits, on average, for nearly a decade. ​“Those savings deliver year over year over year,” he said.

The mix of thwarted solar and wind projects alone likely would have displaced 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel plants, said Ben King, a director with research firm Rhodium Group’s energy and climate practice. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas that drives human-caused climate change.

King based that estimate on results from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Avoided Emissions and Generation Tool. Ohio’s lost clean energy generation could have cut millions of metric tons of pollution from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants with harmful health effects as well, the EPA tool shows.

The lost clean energy opportunities are also impacting consumers’ finances, although it’s hard to tell exactly how much because electricity prices reflect multiple components.

Ohio gets about 7.5% of its electricity from wind and solar, compared with 80.6% from coal and gas, according to federal data for 2025.

When it comes to the electricity dispatch market, ​“the generation we have less of is the least expensive in Ohio,” said Ashley Brown, a former member of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Solar and wind have no fuel costs, so their marginal costs for producing energy are very low. That competition also reins in bidding by producers of other forms of electricity, particularly fossil fuels, whose prices have soared even higher because of the Trump administration’s war on Iran.

“It really does force enormous price pressure on other forms of generation,” Brown said.

Less solar and wind generation has some effect on the capacity market, the mechanism PJM uses to ensure it will have enough energy producers available to meet future demand spikes. Last year, capacity made up about 16% of the wholesale cost of electricity, noted Jeff Shields, PJM’s senior manager for external communications. Even though renewables count less toward capacity than other types of energy, ​“we can use all the capacity we can get,” he said.

Renewables’ ability to come online more quickly than other sources could do a lot to curb inflation, said Bullock at the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. ​“Unless Ohio takes action, consumers are locked on this escalator. We’re strapped to the escalator that keeps going up.”

Nevertheless, some Ohio lawmakers seem intent on making it harder — not easier — to build new clean energy projects in the state.

SB 294, reported out of the Senate Energy Committee on June 2, would further cement the state’s preferences for natural gas and nuclear power — and potentially make it even harder to get approval from regulators for solar and wind.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

I am a pre-service teacher who graduated from an Ohio university in May 2026. Beyond preparing to be a full-time teacher in the fall, I am also a public school advocate.

Public schools serve and protect the rights of all children in our country. In these times, it is critical for all school teachers to advocate for the public schools which are the roots of not only their careers, but the families and communities they serve.

As an educator, I believe that the policy affecting our schools, students, and jobs is something often overlooked by fellow teachers.

Through our teacher preparation courses, we learn to write lesson plans, to implement strategies for classroom management, and how to teach the state standards in interactive ways. However, a topic often omitted from the education and professional development of teachers is educational policy, or the process by which laws and policies for schools are created, deliberated and passed.

The local, state, and federal policy-making processes affect all educators. Teachers should care about educational policy because it affects their ability to make decisions and policy for their own jobs, as well as the funding their schools receive.

To put it simply, public schools across America are being threatened. Bills are being passed challenging the abilities of local educators to make their own educational decisions, as well as the funding that K-12 schools and teachers receive.

Teachers are being forced to exclude media from their classroom libraries, to expose the sexuality of innocent children, and to indoctrinate children with knowledge that those in power get to decide is “true.” Additionally, vouchers are taking away funds from public schools that need them.

In my home state of Ohio, for example, we are seeing bills proposed and enacted weekly that are affecting teachers in classrooms.

In 2025, one specific bill proposed that strongly affects teachers is Ohio Senate Bill 113. This would completely and entirely ban diversity, equity, and inclusion in K-12 public schools. If any K-12 public school chose not to comply, they would lose funding.

How might your classroom look different if any topic surrounding “identity” was completely banned? This bill eliminates the ability of school districts to make their own well-informed policies regarding inclusivity and DEI in their school buildings.

Iowa, South Carolina, and Oklahoma are considering similar legislation.

Diving deeper into the Buckeye State, public school funding is an imminent issue in educational policy.

In 2023, Ohio passed Ohio House Bill 33, the state budget, which enacted universal vouchers. Ohio now has one of the largest voucher programs of any state in America; as a result, the funding of public schools faces intense negative effects.

Additionally, throughout the next two years, Ohio schools expected $3 million dollars toward public education. However, the Fair School Funding Pan, which was to be passed as part of the budget, was underfunded. Districts are now relying on local levies more than ever.

This hurts how our classrooms are supported by our districts, fiscally. This example highlights how the lack of funding toward public schools across the country places an attack on educational policy.

These harmful legislative attacks on public education are seen country-wide. In 2023 in Texas, S.B. 10 was passed, requiring all K-12 classrooms to display a copy of the 10 commandments.

As a public school teacher, I am curious as to how this honors the separation of church and state. Teachers and local educators should possess the right to make educational decisions, not follow generalized ones mandated by state and federal law makers.

Moving into Florida, the parental rights bill H.B. 1557 was enacted in 2022. This bill, masked as a way to get parents more involved in their children’s schooling, requires school personnel to inform parents of each child’s physical and mental well being.

Some districts see this as a threat, and are requiring all educators to report if a child confides their sexual identity with them. This puts all teachers in a very bad position, and could cause us to face consequences if we do decide to be a safe and trusted adult for a student.

The safety of our students should be a priority for districts, who should have the ability to make policy regarding parental rights.

These threats are seen at the federal level, too, with orders such as Executive Order 14190.

This executive order, coming from the 2nd Trump administration, would end “indoctrination” in public schools by forcing teachers to promote a “patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”

As teachers, I think we all can agree that our daily jobs don’t include indoctrinating students. We have too many curriculum requirements, state standards, and district requisites to focus on accomplishing during our short school days.

Sadly, these bills aren’t even a fraction of the total number of legislative attacks coming from the local, state, and federal level weekly, all across the country.

As teachers, we are in the front line of the aggression against public schooling. We need to involve ourselves in the world of education advocacy to save our students, jobs, and communities as a whole.

To read more about ways teachers can get involved click here.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that a company has expressed interest in potentially building one north of the city of Upper Sandusky.

Since news first broke about the potential data center, people have been quick to share their opinions on the internet. A post showing the initial headline and first few paragraphs of my first story about a data center being discussed at an Upper Sandusky planning commission meeting had nearly 500 comments and 266 shares just in the past 10 days.

People are riled up, but why? I thought it would be a good idea to share a bit about data centers in my column today.

Data centers are the fundamental physical infrastructure of the modern digital economy. They house the servers, networking equipment and storage systems that power the internet, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Without them, everyday online services — from streaming media and e-commerce to banking and social media — would cease to function.

So yes, they’re important, and as things like generative AI become more and more prevalent in our society, data centers are increasingly necessary — but they come at a cost.

The first is the drain on resources.

Data centers require continuous, high-volume electricity. The surge in AI processing has caused some modern hyperscale facilities to consume as much power as a small city. Early data centers that tapped into the local electric grid consumed a massive amount of electricity and caused electric rates to spike drastically.

The initial proposal for a data center in Upper Sandusky would not connect to the electric grid, so it wouldn’t have that problem. Instead, a 150-megawatt natural gas power plant is being proposed to be built on 50 acres of land. The energy produced by the power plant would feed a data center on the remaining 100 acres of the property, with neighboring properties also being allowed to tap into the produced electricity.

Some data centers also utilize a significant amount of water to help cool their servers. A representative from Smartland Energy said the proposed data center in Upper Sandusky would use a maximum of 100,000 gallons of water per day, which would not require any additional expansion of the city’s current water treatment plant. Drought prone areas like the western united states would have bigger water issues.

Pollution is another concern. Natural gas power plants are over twice as efficient for the environment compared coal plants, but they still produce 800 to 900 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of energy created. They also are not zero-emission, as a significant amount of nitrous oxide and unburned methane can be released into the environment.

The water used to cool data centers also can get polluted. As cooling systems for data centers operate, trace amounts of metals like zinc, lead and copper can leach from system components into the water. Data centers also use chemicals like biocides to prevent mold and algae and corrosion inhibitors to maintain their cooling systems, which can end up in wastewater.

Noise and light pollution also can be a problem. The constant hum of cooling systems, industrial HVAC units, and backup generators can generate disruptive noise levels, sometimes reaching up to 100 decibels. Furthermore, some large facilities require continuous 24/7 exterior lighting which creates localized light pollution that can disrupt the body’s circadian rhythms and disturb migration patters of wildlife.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to keep an eye on with data centers is the tax deals they have with the state of Ohio. To offset some of the above negative effects, data centers should provide a significant amount of tax resources to the communities they are built in as well as increased jobs and local infrastructure.

The proposed data center and power plant would bring approximately 100 permanent jobs and improved natural gas and internet infrastructure, but what about taxes?

Massive tax abatements for data centers are becoming a serious problem for the state of Ohio.

Republican lawmakers established a tax exemption in the early 2010s to lure technology companies to Ohio. At the time, they didn’t foresee the modern hyperscale and electric-intensive data centers that would be required to facilitate the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency boom.

For facilities that cost $100 million or more to build, the exemption allows developers to waive up to 100% of Ohio’s 5.75% sales tax for up to 15 years. The proposed data center in Upper Sandusky was estimated to be a $600 million investment (with an additional $300 million for the power plant).

Last year alone, tax breaks for data centers cost the state of Ohio nearly $1.6 billion in potential tax revenue. Local tax revenue is affected as well. Approximately $166.8 million was lost from local sales tax revenue in 2024 in Ohio.

Some data centers come with benefits. A school district in Louisiana was able to give its teachers $50,000 bonuses with the windfall of sales tax that came with a massive data center in the school’s district.

So the question residents of Wyandot County need to ask themselves is simple. Does this proposed data center come with huge tax abatements? If so, how does the local community actually benefit in any way from its existence?

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.