Officers with the Fostoria Police Department responded at approximately 10:26 p.m. July 20 to a report of a person struck by a train in the 400 block of South Town Street, in the Seneca County portion of the city, according to a written release from Police Chief Gabe Wedge.

Officers found the juvenile conscious and alert, Wedge said. He was taken to Fostoria Community Hospital for further treatment.

Witnesses told police the boy and another person, also a juvenile, ran around the lowered crossing gates on foot in an attempt to beat the train, according to the release. The second juvenile was not injured.

Wedge said no further information was available. Neither juvenile was identified.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Usually there was a balance to it, but lately, especially with one side of the aisle deciding it no longer was going to listen to science or experts in their fields, we’ve been seeing a lot more mindless cutting of programs.

Elon Musk famously brought a chain saw on stage to a CPAC event in early 2025 to showcase how haphazardly he was planning to make cuts to government spending while he was in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, a program that made so many unnecessary cuts to programs and government jobs that a significant amount of people needed to be rehired when they were done.

When people make cuts to programs without asking why those programs exist, there are consequences. We’re experiencing one of those consequences right now with the cyclospora outbreak.

Cyclospora is a microscopic, single-celled parasite that infects the small intestine, causing an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis. It is primarily transmitted by consuming food or drinking water contaminated with infected feces. It frequently causes watery, explosive diarrhea, bloating and fatigue.

The parasite often contaminates fresh fruits and vegetables — such as salad greens, cilantro and berries — through tainted irrigation water or inadequate hygiene during handling.

On Friday, investigators announced that epidemiological and traceback data linked a substantial outbreak cluster to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, and it then suspiciously retracted the claim. The alleged contaminated product was served at Taco Bell locations across five states, with Ohio being one of them along with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

At the time I’m writing this, federal health officials have identified 1,644 cases of cyclosporiasis and nearly 100 people have been hospitalized. It’s also likely much worse than that because CDC reporting is delayed badly (Michigan alone has announced over 5,000 cases).

So how did things get so bad?

Usually, when there is an issue with a food-borne illness, the government is on top of it. Top scientists and other experts in their fields are able to investigate the issue quickly, find what the infected people had in common, then trace everything back to a likely source. That didn’t happen for weeks with this cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Why?

It all boils down to unnecessary cuts.

The Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria at the CDC, which does most of the tracing of cyclospora outbreaks, was funded largely by USAID. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy and provided humanitarian relief and civilian foreign aid globally, but it was one of the first things Musk chopped when he was in charge of DOGE. One team of scientists at the CDC that was funded by USAID originally had 11 members and its program head quit after staffing was cut to just three.

Additionally, the CDC scaled back funding for a federal-state surveillance program for foodborne pathogens called FoodNet a year ago on July 1, 2025. It made the reporting of illnesses like listeria and cyclospora optional. At the time, a representative from Trump’s administration said the Department of Health and Human Services was focusing on more dangerous diseases like salmonella.

This is what happens when unnecessary cuts are made. To make the government “more efficient,” it stopped taking less-deadly diseases as seriously and now there is a massive outbreak of foodborne illness that is hitting us at home.

You’d think they would have learned their lesson because this isn’t the first time slashing funding for science has backfired on this administration.

DOGE also cut about $15 million of federal funding for the government’s screwworm monitoring program in central America as part of its slashing of USAID. The government had a program in Panama that released sterile screwworm larvae into the wild to attempt to halt the northern spread of screwworm, which causes devastation to cattle herds.

Earlier this summer, screwworm was discovered in the United States for the first time since it had been declared eradicated in the 1960s. If you thought beef was expensive before, just wait. The Trump administration now is preparing to spend $1.3 billion to combat the screw worm outbreak.

Save $15 million to spend $1.3 billion. How efficient.

This isn’t even the first disease outbreak directly traced to a poor Trump administration policy.

This past April, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, playing to a growing anti-vaccine base of voters, issued a memo making the annual influenza vaccine voluntary for military personnel.

Less than two months later, a major flu outbreak occurred at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, racing through the basic military training wing where new recruits sleep in bunk beds and share meals at large communal tables.

Nearly 300 troops got sick and at least one died.

At the time of the outbreak, only 40% of the recruits had opted to take the vaccine due to the change in policy. The Air Force has since rescinded the policy, requiring all recruits get their flu shots.

Yet again, political decisions were made that ignored science and they backfired.

How much more can we take? At some point, people need to remember that some policies and programs exist for a reason.

The unintended consequences of these decisions have been explosive in 2026 — and not just in the bathroom.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Homan, who President Donald Trump has tasked with leading his mass deportation campaign, said in a Sunday interview on Fox News that ICE’s acting director has instructed officers to wear a body camera “whenever possible” during vehicle stops. 

This month, two immigrants — 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — were shot and killed by ICE agents who stopped their vehicles. Neither man was an initial enforcement target, the Department of Homeland Security said.

During Sunday’s Fox and Friends Weekend program, Homan said he supported body cameras because “they exonerate more law enforcement than they convict.” 

“I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the officers saw when they took that action,” Homan said. 

Federal immigration officers have shot 22 people and killed six, including three U.S. citizens, during the second Trump administration. Most shootings have stemmed from traffic stops, which Homan said officers were continuing. 

After the back-to-back shootings of Salgado Araujo in Texas and Guerrero in Maine, DHS instructed agents to pause vehicle stops, but Trump quickly reversed those plans. 

Congressional standstill

Homan blamed Democrats for the reason immigration agents don’t have body cameras, pointing to the weeks-long shutdown of DHS. He also accused traffic stops of becoming more dangerous because of Democrats criticizing ICE.

“They’re more dangerous now than ever because Democratic members of Congress, Democratic mayors and governors have preached for the past year ‘ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency. ICE has no authority. Resist,’” he said. 

Democrats refused to approve funding for DHS unless restraints were placed on ICE and Border Patrol officers, such as the requirement for body cameras, after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal immigration officers in Minnesota in January. 

Congressional Republicans last year used a special legislative maneuver to allocate roughly $175 billion to DHS for immigration enforcement, detainment and deportations, without needing Democratic support. 

GOP lawmakers used the same move following the shutdown this year to fund $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol until September of 2029.

In a separate interview, on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Homan again gave his support for body cameras on ICE officers and blamed Democrats for a lack of body cameras. 

“I think body cameras are the way to go,” he said. 

After the two killings in Minnesota in January, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS would be issuing body cameras to immigration officers. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Over the past few weeks, several groups of lawmakers have written public comment letters to Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought expressing strong opposition to the new draft rule, which would give political appointees the power to decide what institutions receive grant funding, among other revisions. 

A summary of the rule cites the Biden administration as to why it is needed. “Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public,” it says, pointing to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies.

Democrats said the proposal exceeds the office’s authority, will make it harder for grant recipients to carry out funding priorities established by Congress and would turn federal grants into a tool for President Donald Trump to “unilaterally advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals.” 

The draft rule would allow Trump to “terminate or suspend any grant at any time for any reason and without any notice,” they said.

“Ultimately, these changes will make it harder for grant recipients to apply for and manage federal funds – undermining public safety, public health, economic competitiveness, and the government’s ability to address rising costs,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the entire Senate Democratic Caucus in their July 1 letter to Vought. 

Maryland Democrats in Congress and members of the Congressional Community Safety Caucus, led by Reps. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, LaMonica McIver of New Jersey and Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, also wrote letters urging OMB to rescind its proposed new rule. 

Hundreds of billions in funds affected

The more than 100-page draft rule, published in collaboration with 41 other federal grant-making agencies on May 29 and titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” would change the framework used to evaluate grant applications as well as guidelines for cost sharing.

It would potentially affect hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding at universities, nonprofit organizations and other U.S. institutions, according to SciLine, an independent nonprofit service for journalists and scientists run out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Under the proposed rule, federal grants could not be used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” DEI initiatives. 

Awards would also in many cases have to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” and agencies would be allowed to cancel funding that is “not effective at achieving program goals or Federal agency priorities” or “no longer in the Federal Government’s interest.” 

“The overarching goal of OMB’s proposed revisions is to improve transparency, accountability, and oversight for how Federal taxpayer dollars are used in the context of Federal grantmaking,” according to the executive summary of the rule.

OMB officials say they could implement the new draft rule as early as Oct. 1. 

Community violence intervention programs 

During the public comment period for the draft rule, which ran from May 29 to July 13, congressional Democrats slammed its vague language and the implications it holds for many institutions that rely on federal funds. 

Maryland’s senators and Democratic representatives in their July 10 letter to Vought denounced the rule for changing a process traditionally based on merit. “The federal grantmaking process includes essential, non-political guardrails that this rule seeks to eviscerate,” they wrote.

They also said the proposed rule contains a slew of new undefined standards for grants, including that they must adhere to “gold standard science” and cannot reflect “anti-American values,” that recipients may not be able to understand or comply with. 

Maryland institutions, often known as hubs for scientific research and innovation, have been hit hard by National Institutes of Health funding cuts and mass federal layoffs since Trump began his second term in 2025. Local governments and schools that receive federal funds have also taken blows, as has the state’s overall economy. 

In their July 13 letter, members of the Congressional Community Safety Caucus voiced concerns over how the draft rule could specifically affect community violence intervention programs. 

Community violence intervention programs, local efforts that have been linked to drops in violent crime rates in cities across the country, rely on federal grants for “state and local government investments, hospital partnerships, philanthropy, and research support,” according to the lawmakers’ letter.

The new draft rule, they wrote, would jeopardize the operation of these programs by allowing Trump administration officials to “withhold, suspend, or terminate grants, or change terms and conditions mid-implementation, forcing grantees to operate in a tumultuous environment.” 

The administration has already made cuts to parts of the Office of Justice Programs, further limiting the funds available to community violence intervention programs.

Other responses 

Though opposition to the proposed rule is mainly coming from Democratic lawmakers, some bipartisan criticism regarding the rule’s broad scope and fast timeline exists. 

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, on July 6 asked Vought to extend the proposal’s public comment period at least 90 days and “withdraw portions of the rule that would potentially harm small and rural communities and scientific and biomedical research.”

“While I agree these principles should guide the administration and oversight of Federal funds, the rule would impose new, burdensome requirements on award recipients … and conflict with Congress’ control over the federal funding process,” she wrote.  

OMB did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment on lawmaker pushback to the proposed rule. But Vought took to social media last month to express his view of the opposition. 

“The freakout by those on the Left subsidized by taxpayer funds over OMB’s update of the regulation governing federal grant making tells you how important it is to keep the bureaucracies from leaking out spending that is woke, wasteful, and contra to the policies of the Trump Administration thru the NGOs,” he wrote. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state convened the former officials, along with advocates and educators, at a virtual press conference to blast those sweeping moves, which are part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department. 

Murray rebuked the transfers as “outrageous” and “completely unacceptable,” noting that while she is fighting “tooth and nail” against any effort to dismantle the agency, she is “especially concerned about what this could mean for all students, especially students with disabilities.” 

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

The Education Department had announced 10 earlier interagency agreements, or IAAs, with HHS, Labor, Interior, State and Treasury, which transfer several of Education’s responsibilities to those agencies.

The department has said it “will continue to perform all statutorily required duties and responsibilities” involving special education programs and civil rights enforcement.

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 civil rights office is tasked with investigating complaints from students and families. 

‘Learners, not patients’

Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that the transfers “would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency.” 

Neas was the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary at OSERS during the Biden administration. 

“The stakes have never been higher,” she said. “If we allow the Department of Education to be dismantled, we not only undo decades of progress, we also risk abandoning the promise that every child deserves a chance to try and to succeed.” 

Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law said the “new interagency agreement between the Department of Education and the Department of Justice is what someone would create if the person were designing a system to fail.” 

Lhamon served as assistant secretary for civil rights during the Obama and Biden administrations. 

“The principal harm of this new agreement is that it guarantees lengthier continued silence from the federal government on the classic kinds of discrimination cases families experience,” Lhamon said. Examples include restraining or secluding students, she said.

It raises “the core question (of) whether students with disabilities have the free appropriate public education to which the law entitles them,” Lhamon added.

Stephanie Smith Lee, co-director of policy and advocacy at National Down Syndrome Congress, pointed out that “IDEA is an education and civil rights law, not a healthcare program.” 

“Students with disabilities are learners, not patients,” added Lee, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs under the George W. Bush administration. 

“Moving special education and vocational rehabilitation to the Department of Health and Human Services would separate them from the rest of federal education policy and weaken the expertise and coordinated oversight that students, families and states depend on,” she said. 

Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the Education Department, dismissed the criticism, saying in a statement to States Newsroom that Murray and the former officials were part of a failing status quo. 

“As Senator Murray is well aware, the Department of Education’s interagency partnerships do not alter the Trump Administration’s dedication to students with disabilities and federal civil rights laws,” she wrote. “These agreements simply ensure that well-positioned agencies can support the workload, pool their expertise, and ultimately strengthen protections for students.” 

US House bills ‘dead’ in Senate  

Meanwhile, earlier in July the House Committee on Education and Workforce advanced a package of 10 bills permanently transferring several of Education’s functions to other departments and largely reflecting many of the earlier IAAs. 

Notably, that package does not include any efforts to transfer Education’s responsibilities regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies. 

“As long as this former preschool teacher is a United States senator, every one of those bills is dead on arrival,” Murray said. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Associate Judge Todd E. Edelman warned during a status hearing in the case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn that the government may be “operating at its own peril” if it does not preserve the pool for the defense attorneys and their expert to examine and test. 

Edelman questioned why the Trump administration couldn’t “maintain the status quo” for the rest of the week to ensure access to the evidence doesn’t become an “issue in this trial.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Reddington said the Interior Department was in the middle of remedial work on the Reflecting Pool after draining it. 

Reddington said prosecutors “certainly asked them to hold the site as a whole,” but added he doesn’t have control over whether they do. 

Edelman then encouraged the “government to not do anything further” on the Reflecting Pool before denying without prejudice Hearn’s defense team’s motion to dismiss the case. He said the effort was “entirely premature” but didn’t prevent the lawyers’ from filing a different motion to dismiss in the future. 

Mary Dohrmann, a principal at Washington Litigation Group and one of Hearn’s lawyers, wrote in the motion to dismiss the “Constitution simply does not permit the government to charge a man with destroying an object, retain exclusive custody of that object, and then drain, disturb, and alter the object before the defense may examine it, despite a written demand for its preservation.”

“And yet that is what has happened here,” Dohrmann added. “The government’s failure to preserve this evidence, in the face of an express demand no less, has destroyed Mr. Hearn’s ability to collect evidence material to his defense on multiple elements of the charged offense. Dismissal is the only appropriate remedy in view of the government’s actions.”

Edelman scheduled a readiness hearing for Sept. 11 and set the trial to begin on Sept. 28. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump’s three separate proclamations to impose steep tariffs on items like hockey sticks, wine and cement, came just days after he threatened to slap more tariffs on Canada as smoke from raging wildfires in Ontario blanketed much of the northeastern U.S. through the weekend. But a senior administration official denied the new tariffs were in response to the smoke.

“These are not the so-called wildfire tariffs. The president has asked for options on that, and options are being shared with him. These tariffs are in response to discriminatory treatment by Canada against U.S. products,” the senior administration official said on a call with reporters Monday afternoon.

The tariffs will go into effect Aug. 19.

Trump appeared alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney Sunday at the FIFA World Cup trophy ceremony in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but the two leaders did not discuss White House plans for the new tariffs, according to the senior administration official.

Trump triggered the new tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a Depression-era provision that authorizes the president to impose duties up to 50% of a product’s value in response to discrimination against U.S. commerce. The provision has been long forgotten since the 1940s and has never been enforced, experts say. 

“To our knowledge, Section 338 has not been used for this purpose before,” the senior administration official told reporters. “It’s been on the books for a long time. In our view, the terms are clear: It gives the president this authority in situations where a country discriminates against the United States relative to the treatment given (to) a third country.”

Trump’s unprecedented sweeping tariffs on global goods, including from Canada, imposed in April 2025 under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, were found illegal and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in February.

The administration was ordered by the U.S. Court of International Trade to refund roughly $166 billion in duties paid by importers under the IEEPA tariffs.

Since the Supreme Court’s major blow to Trump’s trade agenda, the White House has sought other routes to impose tariffs. Almost immediately after the court’s decision, Trump announced a temporary base 10% tariff on all imports under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Those tariffs are now being litigated in trade court.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That’s the conclusion of a study of Cincinnati that was made public last week.

The study by the University of Notre Dame’s Student Policy Network in conjunction with the Center for Land Economics used data from the Hamilton County Auditor’s office to simulate the effects of a specific kind of “land-value tax.” 

It would tax land at four times the rate of the buildings and other improvements on it. Currently, valuations of land and improvements are added together and taxed.

The goal of a land-value tax is to create a financial incentive to develop unused or underused land in otherwise developed neighborhoods. The tax mix would be different, but it would provide the city with the same revenue it’s getting currently.

Most Ohio economists appear to think it’s a good idea.

Ohio state Sen. Louis Blessing III, R-Colerain Township, is proposing a constitutional amendment that would allow Ohio communities to opt into a version of a land-value tax.

The researchers found that Cincinnati has more than $1.87 billion in vacant or underdeveloped land, and they found some striking incongruities.

For example, a low-income apartment building in the hip Over the Rhine neighborhood is taxed at 22 times the rate of the parking lot next door.

“When we went parcel by parcel through Cincinnati’s assessor data, the pattern was impossible to miss,” Curtis Brashaw, co-leader of the student team, said in a written statement accompanying the report. “A downtown lot worth millions can pay less tax per square foot than the apartment building next to it.”

The principle behind a land-value tax is straightforward. Taxing land at a greater rate than improvements makes development more financially attractive. And particularly in urban areas, that discourages a gap-toothed landscape in which prime land is underused. 

“When a property owner chooses to improve their land, whether by constructing a new apartment building or renovating a deteriorating structure, the tax bill rises as a direct result,” the report said. “In this way, the tax code treats investment as a liability rather than an asset, discouraging development. Over time, this creates a financial disincentive for development that contributes directly to vacant lots, surface parking, and urban blight. We tax the wrong thing.”

Changing the tax mix would create winners and losers.

Under the student group’s simulation, median taxes on vacant land would increase 126%. And median retail and commercial property taxes would increase 39% — largely because land with that zoning and in those locations is valuable.

On the other side of the coin, homeowners and apartment dwellers would benefit. The median single-family home would see a 10% drop in property taxes, while taxes on multi-family units would decrease more than 16%.

The study also found that the biggest benefits flow to those who need them most.

“The burden shifts progressively,” it said. “The lowest-income neighborhoods see median cuts near 17% and middle-income neighborhoods 10% to 11%, while only the highest-income quintile sees a median increase of about 11%.”

In places where a land-value tax has been implemented, there’s some evidence that it helped the overall economy. For example, Allentown, Pa., implemented such a scheme in 1996. 

Tax cuts flowed to nearly 75% of properties and building permits increased by 32%, the Strong Towns Archive quoted former U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., as saying. The Notre Dame students’ report said that new development in Allentown far outstripped that in nearby communities such as Bethlehem. 

Blessing, the Ohio state senator promoting a land-value tax option, said the new report helps prove his case that it’s a smart idea.

“This is exactly the kind of evidence Ohioans deserve as we look for real answers on property taxes,” the report quoted Blessing as saying. “This amendment doesn’t impose anything on anyone. It simply gives communities the option to stop penalizing the families and businesses who improve their property. This report shows Cincinnati what that choice could look like, and I believe Ohio’s voters should be the ones to make it.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The children range in age from 18 months to 18 years and were allegedly found in a roughly 12-foot by 12-foot room inside a Hamden house when law enforcement conducted a search warrant for a parallel investigation on June 30. 

The $1 million is going into a special fund that is being set up for Vinton County for the 16 children, said Joel Potts, the chief government and external affairs officer at the Ohio Department of Children and Youth. 

“These resources are specifically for this emergent need,” he said during a recent Controlling Board meeting. 

“We know that many of them will be needing therapeutic foster care for quite some time to come. That is $150 a day to $250 a day on average per child. So those costs alone would bankrupt the county when you see them doubling the number of cases.” 

Potts said he has never seen anything like this before in his 40 year career. 

“A child off the radar is terrible enough,” he said. 

“Sixteen kids in one family in one household to be off the radar is something that I’ve just not seen.” 

Livestock was kept in better conditions than the children, Vinton County Sheriff Ryan Cain said during a press conference earlier this month. 

“Extremely high presence, I’m sure, of bacterial and human feces,” he said. “It was just a disgusting scene.” 

Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson said it’s something we’re not used to seeing in America. 

“It really looked third-world,” he said. “I think if they would have waited another 24 hours, there was a very high probability that we’d be dealing with a death or multiple deaths of these children.” 

The children were not enrolled in school, authorities said, adding that some of the children can’t speak and that the 18-year-old can’t spell their name. 

“It was terrible,” Wilson said. “They really looked almost like feral animals … so when we’re talking reading and writing and education, we’re talking a whole ‘nother level of expectations here.”

Ohio state Sen. Kyle Koehler, R-Springfield, asked if $1 million is enough money to help the 16 children. 

“What happens when the youngest of the children are in their teens and things start coming forth that we didn’t expect?” 

Potts stressed the $1 million is for the children’s immediate needs.  

“Over the next several months we are going to have a much better sense of what these particular children are dealing with, and what their long-term needs are going to be,” he said. 

Ongoing costs will be necessary, Potts said. 

“This is unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve seen a county agency literally double the number of kids in temporary custody overnight.”

Vinton County is Ohio’s least populated county with about 12,600 people.

All of the children are currently in foster care and the hope is the children will get adopted, Potts said. 

“As horrendous as these types of cases are, it does give us that opportunity to ask those hard questions, and it’s time for us to ask those hard questions,” he said. 

“You can’t look at something like this and not think that we need to do more.”

During the state budget process last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine originally proposed an additional $83 million to Ohio counties for child protective services, but lawmakers did not fully fund the request in the last year’s budget, said Ohio state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake.

“I do know that this was a very large discussion in our state budget that we heard from county officials across the state about the dire needs of protective services and not having enough money,” Sweeney said.  

Ohio state Sen. George Lang, R-Butler County, said he spent his early years in foster care. 

“I do believe this is one of those rare exceptions where we need to err on the side of helping rather than err on the side of fiscal prudence,” he said. 

Ohio state Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Chillicothe, was in Hamden over the weekend and saw the house is on a dead-end road with only one other house at the end of the road. 

“No neighbor, the hardware store guy, the fire department had never visibly seen a child here,” he said. “It’s rather bizarre, to say the least.”

Making sure the children are taken care of is the top priority, Wilson said. 

“We’ve got to ensure the kids are safe,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure they’re placed in good, solid therapeutic placements. And we have to hold accountable the people who are looking to do this to their own family.”

Gary Siders Sr., 73, Catherine Siders, 67, Gary Siders Jr., 36, and Elizabeth Siders, 33, are each facing 16 counts of felony endangering children in Vinton County Common Pleas Court. They have all pleaded not guilty.

A Vinton County judge signed a gag order on July 14 after Gary Siders Jr.’s attorney filed a motion for the order. 

855-BCI-OHIO (855-224-6446) is the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation tip line. 

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.

Ohio Senate Bill 386 and its House companion, the bipartisan Medicaid Savings Act, would move Ohio away from the managed care system that currently serves roughly three million Medicaid enrollees and toward an administrative services model, similar to one Connecticut adopted years ago.

The sponsors argue it could save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year by cutting out what they call the “middleman.”

They’re not wrong that Ohio’s managed care program has room for improvement and there may well be room for direct state/provider partnerships, but scrapping it altogether, in this particular moment, would be a mistake. 

This debate isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening just as Ohio finalized a new two-year state budget ahead of the July 1 constitutional deadline, and just as federal Medicaid cuts signed into law last year begin working their way through state budgets, with Ohio expected to lose tens of billions of dollars in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade and hundreds of thousands of Ohioans expected to lose coverage.

At its core, managed care works like a fixed payment plan for a state’s health care spending.

Instead of absorbing the seasonal swings and unpredictable spikes of a fee-for-service system, Ohio pays managed care plans a set amount per member, per month, and the plans largely absorb the risk of what happens after that.

In a time when the state’s fiscal footing feels shakier than usual, that kind of predictability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a hedge against the very volatility Ohio is trying to manage.

And even more importantly, Ohio’s managed care contracts create real incentives to measurably improve the population’s health while decreasing costly inefficient care — a real boon to the people covered by Medicaid and to Ohio’s taxpayers.

Ohio requires its Medicaid health plans to share financial rewards with providers that deliver high quality care while lowering costs, and health plans tout specific innovative provider partnerships as selling points when bidding on state contracts. 

Those commitments should be treated as exactly that — commitments, not marketing copy.

Ensuring that plans follow through on the value-based partnerships and other population health solutions in their winning bids isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s central to whether managed care delivers on its promise.

When done right, managed care is one of the few tools Ohio has that actually aligns incentives, improves outcomes, and creates budget stability for the people who need it most.

The transparency critique is fair — but there is a fix

One of the strongest arguments for the Medicaid Savings Act is that the state has too little visibility into how managed care dollars are actually spent.

That’s a legitimate frustration, and I saw it firsthand when managed care plans’ pharmacy benefit managers failed to serve the public interest and hid highly questionable business practices behind “proprietary” labels. 

But Ohio’s General Assembly and the Department of Medicaid have spent the last seven years building tools to fix exactly that problem, including ensuring state legislature’s access to plan-level eligibility, billing, and spending data.

ODM also holds the health plans accountable to the highly detailed terms of their contracts and the promises they made when bidding to secure the work.

Better transparency is achievable through better oversight. It doesn’t require walking away from a model that, when done right, does something a Connecticut-style administrative services organization wouldn’t: put plans’ own money on the line for outcomes.

What Ohio would actually lose

Ohio’s Next Generation Medicaid and MyCare managed care programs tie substantial financial incentives to outcomes: increasing preventive screenings that save lives, delivering blood pressure and diabetes management that help people feel better while lowering costs, and providing care coordination for people with serious mental illness and complex chronic conditions.

Ohio’s MyCare program, for example, fully integrates Medicare and Medicaid benefit access and financing for dually eligible members, closing a gap where a bifurcated system creates fragmentation across Medicare and Medicaid and removing incentives to shift costs between programs rather than actually reduce them.

MyCare’s coordination greatly improves member experience and streamlines access to needed care while reducing administrative burden for the state, for members, and for the care teams advocating on their behalf.

As federal rules tighten Medicaid eligibility and coverage, that kind of integration becomes more valuable, not less.

In Connecticut, while the administrative costs have been reduced relative to managed care, the state is still facing high costs with individuals using home and community-based services — a similar population to the Ohioans served through MyCare.

Ohio has already addressed this gap with this mature integrated program to serve these exact members — why cut off our nose to spite our face? 

Reform the model. Don’t demolish it.

None of this means the status quo is good enough.

Legitimate questions remain about whether managed care plans are saving money on the right things and the state should keep pushing for more transparency and for plans to create more downside risk among the value-based providers, so everyone in the chain has real skin in the game. 

With over half of the state’s budget dedicated to Medicaid, member advocates and policy experts alike should continually push for systems that deliver better results at a lower cost, and alternative delivery systems, including the ASO model, may emerge as a viable solution for certain populations in certain circumstances.

But lawmakers should be honest that the Medicaid Savings Act is a big bet — one being made at the exact moment Ohio can least afford budget uncertainty.

Before trading a system built around aligned incentives and shared risk for one built around administrative efficiency alone, the state should make sure it isn’t solving a transparency problem by giving up the very structure that gets results for the Ohioans who need them most.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The restaurant, bar and event space at the same location will stay open.

“After much thought and consideration, we have made the difficult decision that the 2026 season will be the final season for the golf course at The Front 9,” the family said in a written statement. “The golf course is currently open, and we plan to finish the 2026 season as scheduled. Current leagues, members and scheduled golf activities will continue throughout the remainder of the season.”

The statement was direct about the scope of the decision: “We want it to be very clear: The Front 9 restaurant, bar and event space are staying open. This decision affects the golf course only.”

The owners attributed the closure to the economics of running a nine-hole course.

“While the golf course has a special history, continuing to operate and maintain it is no longer financially sustainable,” the statement said. “We have worked hard to keep the course going, but operating as a 9-hole-only course has made it difficult to generate the level of revenue needed to keep up with the rising costs, staffing, equipment, maintenance and course conditions our golfers deserve.”

The family said it has hired a real estate agent to begin marketing the golf acreage, and that no sale is pending.

“At this time, there is no pending sale, no selected buyer and no finalized plan for how the land will be used,” the statement said.

The property sits at 6730 N. Township Road 69 in Liberty Township, in the Old Fort Local School District, with a Kansas mailing address. Seneca County Auditor records list the parcel at 76.864 acres, owned by The Front Nine LLC and appraised at $367,010 for 2025. The parcel is classified commercial and coded as a golf course. It is not enrolled in the state’s Current Agricultural Use Value program, which reduces taxes on qualifying farmland and can trigger repayment when land converts to another use.

Most of the acreage is already carried on the county’s books as open ground. Auditor records break the parcel into about 55 acres of undeveloped or residual land, roughly 17 acres of woodland and 2 acres of primary site, along with smaller wetland and right-of-way areas.

The course has changed hands twice in the past decade. Auditor transfer records show First Federal Bank took the property from Nature Trails Inc. by sheriff’s deed in July 2018, in a transaction covering four properties. The Front Nine LLC bought this parcel from the bank that December for $225,500. The company was registered with the Ohio Secretary of State in November 2018, weeks before the purchase closed.

On its website, the business says the owners bought the clubhouse and front nine at auction in 2018, after the former Nature Trails course had sat vacant for nearly two years, and opened in July 2019. The site is signed by Brian and Tracie Eakin. A 2019 report in The Advertiser-Tribune identified Tracie Eakin and Christine Spencer, sisters, as co-owners.

The owners had previously described losing greens to severe weather. “As a nine-hole course, the loss of multiple greens has an outsized impact,” the business wrote on its website. “Unlike an eighteen-hole facility, where play can sometimes be redirected, every green here matters.”

The family asked in its announcement that questions be directed away from employees.

“At this time, our staff and family do not have additional details beyond what is shared here, and we ask that they not be put in the position of answering questions they may not have answers to,” the statement said. “Confirmed updates will be shared when they become available.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Three months later, that investor wrote his first checks to Husted’s federal campaign — $507,000 of them, all on the same day.

Federal Election Commission records show Larry Connor, founder of the Miamisburg-based Connor Group, gave $250,000 to Team Husted, the senator’s joint fundraising committee, and $250,000 to Ohio Flyer PAC, an independent-expenditure super PAC that has spent more than $1.6 million against Democrat Sherrod Brown, on Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025. He gave another $7,000 directly to Husted for Senate the same day.

Those were the largest political contributions of Connor’s life, and the first federal money he had ever given Husted — a politician whose calendars show him meeting with Connor about school plans six years earlier.

Congress did not fund the school. The Cincinnati project appears nowhere in the earmark table attached to the fiscal 2026 spending package that became law on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. Eight other projects Husted requested did make it in, worth $27.4 million to Ohio — an airport in Youngstown, a road in Wooster, a community college in Columbus, parks in Chillicothe and Vinton County.

This spring, Husted asked for the $5 million again.

What the record does and does not show

Nothing in the public record establishes an agreement, an understanding, or any connection between Husted’s funding request and Connor’s contributions. Earmark requests are public by design, and Husted submitted dozens of them. The stated recipient is Kids and Community Partners, the Connor Group’s charitable arm, not the for-profit real estate firm — a distinction Husted’s own paperwork turns on.

In the certification letter accompanying the request, Husted wrote that “none of the entities for which I have requested congressionally directed spending are for-profit entities,” and certified that “neither I nor my immediate family has a pecuniary interest” in any of the projects. Both statements are required under Senate Rule XLIV.

Connor also spread money widely that August day, giving $228,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and $10,000 to the Ohio Republican Party. In November 2025 he gave $206,768 to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC backing Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor, joining a roster of billionaire donors that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Yass.

What the record does show is a sequence, and a relationship that runs back two decades.

“School Planning,” 2019

Husted’s official calendars from his time as lieutenant governor record at least five contacts with Connor in 2019 and 2020.

A call was scheduled for Thursday, July 25, 2019. On Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, Husted met Connor at the Connor Group’s Miamisburg headquarters. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, he met Connor at Connor’s own office for 30 minutes under the subject line “School Planning.” On Monday, Nov. 4, 2019, a call was scheduled under the subject “Dayton School,” with a note that Connor would reach Husted on his personal cell. Another call was set for Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020.

The Greater Dayton School, the Connor Group’s first school, opened four and a half years after that “School Planning” meeting.

The request

On Thursday, May 15, 2025, Husted submitted his fiscal 2026 spending requests to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. Among them, listed on his own Senate website, was $5 million for the “Connor Group Kids and Community Partners Fund” for “Construction of Greater Cincinnati School and School Based Health Center on Site.”

The project would replicate the Greater Dayton School, which the Connor Group calls Ohio’s first private secular school built to serve under-resourced students. The Connor Group’s published materials say the Cincinnati school is expected to open “in 2028 or 2029” with a one-time capital investment of $5 million — roughly the amount Husted asked the federal government to supply.

Seven weeks after the spending package became law without it, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins named Husted to the Appropriations Committee, filling the vacancy left when Sen. Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as Homeland Security secretary. Husted is the first Ohioan on the panel since George Voinovich left the Senate in 2011. He was assigned to six subcommittees; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — the panel that would decide the Cincinnati request — is not among them.

In his fiscal 2027 requests, published this spring, the Connor project appears again at $5 million. On that same list, Husted requested $1.326 million to expand a Sandusky County Park District facility in Fremont and $2 million for infrastructure at a Sandusky County community park in Jackson Township. Combined, the two northwest Ohio park requests total less than the single Cincinnati school request.

A program Husted created, and a school that depends on it

At the Greater Dayton School’s March 2024 grand opening, then-Lt. Gov. Husted spoke alongside Connor. “I remember thinking that starting a school is hard, and that starting a school like this seems impossible,” Husted said, in remarks the Connor Group published on its website. “… I knew Larry well enough that he had a plan and he would work to overcome every barrier that got in the way and make it a reality and never give up.”

The school’s model leans on EdChoice, Ohio’s private school voucher program — and Husted takes credit for creating it. Writing to the Upper Arlington school board in 2024 to discourage it from joining a lawsuit against the program, he said: “I know because I created it in 2005 when I served as Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.” The Greater Dayton School’s founding principal, identified by the Dayton Daily News as Stich, credited the program at the opening: “It takes Larry Connor, it takes the state of Ohio being dedicated to scholarships for student choice to fund an operation like this.”

EdChoice began as a program for low-income students in low-performing districts. That changed under the administration in which Husted served as lieutenant governor: the state budget signed Tuesday, July 4, 2023, extended eligibility to families at up to 450% of the poverty line. Ohio spent more than $1 billion on private school vouchers in fiscal 2025. Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page has since found the program unconstitutional while allowing it to continue during appeals; the Tenth District Court of Appeals heard argument Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in the suit brought by the Vouchers Hurt Ohio coalition, and a ruling is expected within months.

Connor’s support for Husted in Ohio tracks that history. He has given $51,885.41 to Husted’s state campaign committee since 2003, and his wife, Christine, another $17,552.35 — $69,437.76 between them, according to Ohio Secretary of State records reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. His largest state contribution came 22 days after the voucher expansion was signed: $15,499.69 on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, the maximum an individual could give under Ohio law at the time. Thirty-nine contributions at exactly that figure went to Husted’s committee that year.

The stakes are not abstract in Seneca County, where Tiffin City Schools is absorbing a $1.2 million annual funding loss from property tax legislation that took effect in March.

A recurring question in Husted’s race

Campaign finance questions have followed Husted through the campaign. TiffinOhio.net previously reported that he accepted $116,892 from billionaire Les Wexner between 2001 and 2025, including a contribution two months before he voted in September 2025 to block a Senate amendment directing release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents; his campaign later said it would give the money to charity. He also testified as a defense witness this spring in the trial of two former FirstEnergy executives accused of bribing state regulators to pass House Bill 6, the utility bailout he championed as lieutenant governor. Husted has not been charged in either matter and has denied wrongdoing.

He faces Brown in the November general election for the remaining two years of the Senate term he was appointed to in January 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I welcome Mr. Ramaswamy to the race for however long he sticks around,” then-Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement issued during the event. “We’ll see if he actually stays in — Mr. Ramaswamy quit on President Trump and DOGE on day one, he quit on Ohio and moved his company to Texas, and he quit his presidential campaign after a devastating fourth-place finish in Iowa.”

Yost lost the primary and is gone from the race. Ramaswamy won on May 5 and faces Democrat Amy Acton on Nov. 3. But the line has outlasted the man who delivered it, and the record behind it has since grown more complicated in two directions. One of the three departures Yost cited is disputed — Ramaswamy says he was not pushed out of DOGE, and Politico reported that he was. And in December, for the first time, the pattern ran the other way.

Sixty-nine days

Trump announced on Nov. 12, 2024, that Ramaswamy and Elon Musk would jointly lead the Department of Government Efficiency. Sixty-nine days later, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 — Inauguration Day — Ramaswamy was out, before the effort had done substantive work.

He has consistently said the decision was his. Asked on Fox News the following Monday whether Musk had fired him, Ramaswamy rejected it twice. “I think that’s incorrect,” he told host Jesse Watters, adding that the two men “had different and complementary approaches” — his own centered on constitutional law and legislation, Musk’s on technology. Pressed a second time, he answered: “No, we had a mutual discussion.”

The administration’s account matched his. Trump transition spokesperson Anna Kelly said on the record that Ramaswamy “played a critical role in helping us create DOGE,” and that his plan to run for governor “requires him to remain outside of DOGE based on the structure that we announced today.” On the morning of the inauguration, Ramaswamy posted a photograph of himself shaking hands with Musk. “A new dawn,” he wrote.

Politico published a different version hours later. Citing three people familiar with Musk’s preferences who were granted anonymity, the outlet reported that Musk had spent the preceding days making clear he wanted Ramaswamy gone, and that Ramaswamy had already been cut out of the effort’s decisions.

The proximate cause, according to that reporting, was a post Ramaswamy made on X in late December 2024, during the Republican fight over H-1B visas, arguing that American tech companies hire foreign-born workers in part because the country’s culture had “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” The comment drew heavy criticism from parts of Trump’s base. “They wanted him out before the tweet — but kicked him to the curb when that came out,” one of the three people told Politico.

A Republican strategist Politico described as close to Trump advisers was blunter. Ramaswamy “just burned through the bridges and he finally burned Elon,” the strategist said. “Everyone wants him out of Mar-a-Lago, out of D.C.”

Not all of Politico’s sourcing cut against him. The outlet reported that a person close to DOGE said Musk did not think it feasible to campaign for office while working on the effort, and that a person familiar with Ramaswamy’s thinking said the two were on good terms and that “the reality is that it wasn’t possible” to do both at once. CBS News reported the previous day that the leadership change followed friction with incoming staff.

Every element of Politico’s account rests on people who were not named. Ramaswamy’s denial is on the record and under his own name, and no one has produced documentation resolving the two. What is not in dispute is the clock. He was appointed in November, gone in January, and campaigning for governor 35 days after that.

One week in February 2023

The exits Yost referred to had a common motive, and two of them happened within days of each other.

Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 around a specific model: acquire drug candidates that larger pharmaceutical companies had shelved, then develop them through subsidiaries. He stepped out of the chief executive role in January 2021, telling shareholders the move reflected in part his “increasing public engagement” — the year he published “Woke, Inc.” and began building the political profile that would carry him into the presidential race. He stayed on as chairman for two more years. On Feb. 21, 2023, Roivant announced he had left its board the previous day to run for president, crediting him as founder and noting that six medicines developed at its subsidiaries had won FDA approval over the prior decade.

That same week he resigned as executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, the anti-ESG investment firm he had co-founded in Columbus a year earlier and which by that point managed more than $500 million. Co-founder Anson Frericks confirmed the resignation at the time, and Ramaswamy told CNBC that May that he had stepped away and was off the firm’s board for the duration of the campaign.

The campaign those resignations were made for lasted eleven months. Ramaswamy announced on Feb. 21, 2023, and ended it on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses. He endorsed Trump that night.

TiffinOhio.net has examined Ramaswamy’s biotech record in detail, including the 2015 Axovant IPO and the 2017 failure of the Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine. No regulator has charged him with wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crime.

The company that left Ohio

The second item on Yost’s list is the one Ramaswamy most directly contests, because it describes something a company did rather than something he did.

In November 2024, Strive announced it was relocating its headquarters from Columbus to Dallas, taking most of its Columbus staff. Ramaswamy has said the decision was made without him. Asked about it by News 5 Cleveland, he noted he was neither chief executive nor a board member by then, and cast the move as the thing that pushed him toward the governor’s race.

“The new CEO was pursuing a merger and acquisition with a company in Texas, and they had a decision to make about where was the more business-friendly environment to set up that business, and they made the decision to put that in Texas,” he said. “To me, that was actually a moment that motivated me, that said I have a mission, a cause to make sure that we make Ohio more competitive than Texas or any other state in the country.”

The explanation has not retired the issue. Union leaders in northwest Ohio and Democratic lieutenant governor nominee David Pepper have continued to raise the relocation on the campaign trail, and it has surfaced repeatedly in coverage of the race.

December: not an exit

On Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, Ambros Therapeutics launched with a $125 million Series A round co-led by RA Capital Management and Enavate Sciences. The company, based in Irvine, California, named Ramaswamy a co-founder alongside board chairman Keith Katkin, with Jay Hagan as chief executive. Trade coverage identified Ramaswamy as a co-founder, an investor and a sitting board member.

Ambros licensed its lead candidate, neridronate, from the Italian firm Abiogen Pharma. The drug has been approved in Italy for more than a decade to treat Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type 1, a rare and severe chronic pain condition with no FDA-approved treatment in the United States; a German drugmaker discontinued two Phase 3 studies of it in 2019. Ambros said its own pivotal trial was on track to begin enrolling in the first quarter of 2026, and Hagan told the Orange County Business Journal he expected top-line results in early 2028.

The strategy — take an older drug another company set down, and run new trials on it — is the one Ramaswamy built Roivant around a decade ago.

What distinguishes the December launch is its timing and its direction. Every previous departure moved him out of business and toward a campaign. This one did neither. He was already ten months into the race for governor, and he did not leave a company. He started one. He has also kept up out-of-state appearances during the campaign, including a keynote at a Utah energy and data center summit.

Stepping back from a company to seek office is routine, often legally necessary, and Ohio has elected candidates who did exactly that. Yost’s charge was never really about the mechanics of resignation. It was about whether Ramaswamy finishes what he starts — a question Ohio voters answer on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

TiffinOhio.net has covered Ramaswamy’s business record, pandemic-era positions and campaign travel throughout the 2026 cycle.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Miami Beach police arrested Kalmbach, 31, at 10:33 p.m. Tuesday, July 14, at the W South Beach hotel on Collins Avenue. He faces two first-degree misdemeanors: battery involving domestic violence and violation of a domestic violence injunction.

The arrest came five days after a judge, on a motion granted by agreement of both sides, postponed his kidnapping trial. That trial had been scheduled to begin Monday, July 20. It is now set for Monday, Sept. 14.

Kalmbach was booked into the Miami-Dade County jail at 3:35 a.m. Wednesday, July 15, and released after posting bond the following day, according to Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation records. Bond was set at $7,500 on each of the two counts, for a total of $15,000, and he was placed on GPS Level 1 electronic monitoring under a pretrial release order. A judge issued a stay-away order barring contact with the alleged victim. Attorney Howard Srebnick, who also represents Kalmbach in the felony case, filed a notice of appearance and a written plea of not guilty on Friday, July 17. Arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16, before County Judge Alicia Garcia Priovolos.

The following section describes allegations of domestic violence.

What the arrest affidavit alleges

Kalmbach denied that anything happened. According to the sworn complaint/arrest affidavit, he told the responding officer that he and his girlfriend had been sleeping and that no argument or physical contact had occurred. The officer wrote that he observed no visible injuries on Kalmbach.

The alleged victim, contacted separately inside the hotel room, also told officers that no threats or harm had been made, according to the affidavit. She declined treatment from fire rescue and declined to have crime scene photographs taken.

The officer nonetheless identified Kalmbach as the primary aggressor. The affidavit states that officers were dispatched to the hotel after the alleged victim’s sister called the front desk to report that her sister was involved in a domestic dispute. Inside the room, the officer wrote, he observed redness on the left side of the alleged victim’s face and on her left forearm that appeared recent, a broken cup on top of a dresser, and items scattered across the floor and into the bathroom. Two hotel employees reported hearing the alleged victim screaming and crying, according to the affidavit.

A records check revealed that Kalmbach was subject to a non-expiring protective order obtained by the alleged victim, the affidavit states, and the officer noted the injunction case number. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement lethality assessment was completed. Seven officers were equipped with body-worn cameras at the scene.

Kalmbach was transported to the Miami Beach Police Department holding facility. The affidavit describes the two as having been in a ten-month live-in relationship.

The affidavit was sworn by Officer M. Gutierrez on Wednesday, July 15. TiffinOhio.net is not naming the alleged victim.

The felony case remains pending

Kalmbach was first arrested in Miami on Feb. 23 on two third-degree felonies. In April, Miami-Dade prosecutors replaced those counts with far more serious charges: kidnapping with a weapon, a life felony, and aggravated battery with great bodily harm and a deadly weapon, a first-degree felony. The Information alleges he confined the alleged victim between Feb. 21 and Feb. 23 using “a pair of scissors and/or a knife,” and cut her hair and cut her with a knife, causing “great bodily harm and/or permanent disfigurement, to wit: a scar(s).”

He has pleaded not guilty and demanded a jury trial. He has remained free on bond in that case since Feb. 26.

The state filed an amended discovery exhibit on Wednesday, July 8, listing six essential witnesses and disclosing that police reports, body-worn camera footage, crime scene photographs, a domestic violence assessment and 911 dispatch records had been turned over to the defense. A new trial prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Janeen Zamora, was assigned that same day. A report hearing is set for Thursday, Sept. 3.

As of the online docket, the felony case reflects no entry addressing Kalmbach’s bond following the July 14 arrest. He is now free on bond in both cases at once, with the felony trial set for Sept. 14 and the misdemeanor arraignment two days later.

Ohio political connections

Kalmbach lost the 2024 Republican primary in Ohio House District 69 to incumbent state Rep. Kevin Miller. His campaign was endorsed by U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan and U.S. Rep. Bob Latta and backed by Americans for Prosperity and the Center for Christian Virtue.

State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) donated $1,000 to Kalmbach’s campaign on Feb. 20, 2024, according to pre-primary campaign finance reports filed with the Ohio Secretary of State. Campaign finance records show the financial relationship ran in both directions: Kalmbach Feeds donated $250 to Click’s committee in 2021, Paul Kalmbach Sr. donated $250 in September 2024, and Daniel Kalmbach donated $350 to Click in May 2025.

Kalmbach is the son of Paul Kalmbach Sr., chief executive of Kalmbach Feeds in Upper Sandusky and a longtime Republican donor. Independent journalist DJ Byrnes at The Rooster reported during the 2024 campaign on questions about Kalmbach’s residency and professional background.

Kalmbach has not been convicted of any offense in either case. He is presumed innocent.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

FDA had announced Sunday the false positive on a Taylor Farms lettuce sample, amid an outbreak of cyclosporiasis that has sickened more than 1,600 people.

But in a call with reporters Monday afternoon, acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said the false positive report doesn’t change the basis for the probe or the epidemiological data supporting Taylor Farms’ voluntary recall of some of its iceberg lettuce products.

“I want to stress that our investigation continues, including into other potential sources and commodities for other clusters of illnesses,” he said on the call. 

The announcement comes after the FDA previously reported on Saturday that a sample of iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico had tested positive for the parasite. As of Sunday, the FDA said there are no confirmed samples of Taylor Farms lettuce testing positive for cyclospora.

The FDA did not cite any other positive tests for the source of the outbreak, which has been linked to severe gastrointestinal illness.

As of Monday morning, a banner on an FDA webpage tracking the outbreak still reads: “Do not eat recalled iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. FDA’s investigation is ongoing.”

The FDA also said: “Due to the complexity in detection of Cyclospora, FDA laboratory experts re-reviewed the sample results and have concluded that the finding does not represent true amplification and should be considered a false positive.”

5 states affected

After an FDA investigation into the source of the outbreak affecting at least five states identified shredded lettuce provided by Taylor Farms and sold in many Taco Bell restaurants in the United States as a potential reason, the California-based produce firm announced a voluntary recall of many of its lettuce products. 

The sample that generated the false positive was not part of the current recall, according to FDA acting Deputy Commissioner for Food Donald Prater. 

Prater said that it was important to communicate the finding given the ongoing outbreak and public health risk. The FDA detected the false positive during a subsequent quality check in the lab and immediately issued the correction, he said. 

“The reevaluation of the sample does not alter the data supporting the outbreak advisory that prompted the current voluntary recall,” Prater said on the call with reporters Monday. “FDA’s traceback investigation and the outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms’ location in central Mexico.” 

The FDA and Taylor Farms continue to work together to ensure that “product implicated in this outbreak” has been removed from store shelves and not sold on the market, the Sunday statement continued. 

Taylor Farms statement

In its own statement Sunday, Taylor Farms said the FDA had “apologized” to the company after informing it of the mistaken result. 

“Based on initial information provided by health officials, in an abundance of caution, we completed a voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico,” the company’s statement read. “Recalled product was limited to iceberg lettuce grown and processed in central Mexico. All other Taylor Farms products, including all Taylor Farms brand products available for purchase, are not involved in the recall.” 

In the call with reporters on Monday, however, an FDA official said that the agency informed the company of the false positive report and explained how it happened, but did not offer an official apology. 

“We did not offer an official apology, but did explain factually the issues,” the official said. 

The multistate outbreak of the parasite has mostly been concentrated in the Great Lakes and Appalachian regions, with cases identified in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, according to the FDA. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there have been more than 1,644 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, the food-borne illness caused by ingestion of the parasite, with 94 of those cases leading to hospitalization. There have been no reported deaths. 

The CDC’s webpage on the cyclosporiasis outbreak was last updated on Saturday, before the false positive was announced. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Election officials who do not comply with administration directives to enhance security of voting machines and to share voter data with the federal government through the powerful Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements computer program would be subject to fines and even prison time, he said.

“If the states that choose not to participate with the SAVE program and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states, and hold the election officials accountable,” Mullin said during a press conference. 

The Trump administration will make it mandatory for states to undergo security enhancements of their voter machines and withhold grants or reimbursements to any states that do not, he said.

The mandate was necessary, he said, because foreign adversaries produce parts that are vital pieces in U.S. voting machines, and can “change voter registration and your vote.”

“The machines have to be secured and your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed,” he said, summarizing the department’s message to state officials. “Our machines are vulnerable. There are steps that can be made right now that can secure those.”

Earlier Friday, Mullin sent a letter to the secretaries of state of four states the department reviewed — Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — to warn them of the “tens of thousands of non-citizens who are illegally on the states’ voter rolls.”

Leaders from those states immediately pushed back against Mullin and President Donald Trump’s claims. 

It is unclear what authority Mullin would use to investigate state election administration. The U.S. Constitution empowers states to run elections.

But it is clear the Trump administration considers election security a top priority in the leadup to the midterms.

Mullin’s remarks followed President Donald Trump’s address to the nation Thursday evening in which he declared that the U.S. election systems are vulnerable to foreign cyberattacks and nations such as China and Iran have sought to influence the outcome of past elections, including in 2018 and 2020. 

Noncitizen voting

Trump has long focused on voting by noncitizens, which is rare. 

Mullin on Friday said the Homeland Security Department reviewed voter rolls in a handful of states and discovered more than 250,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote. 

The federal government will make it a priority to “look at who voted in their states” and hold their election officials accountable, Mullin said. 

The federal government will go through the records “one by one,” he said at the press conference, and pursue maximum charges for anyone found to have voted illegally, which includes up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. 

SAVE in court

The SAVE program allows local jurisdictions to determine someone’s immigration status for purposes such as applying for government jobs, benefits and driver’s licenses. 

The administration wants states to use the powerful computer system to check the citizenship of people on voter rolls and is battling in court to restore that use of the program after a federal court ruled in June the expansion was unlawful.

Mullin blamed the program’s pause on “activist judges” who don’t want secure elections. 

The SAVE program is distinct from, but shares its acronym with, the SAVE America Act, a bill that proposes to restrict voter access by adding requirements to register and cast ballots, including photo IDs. The bill is stalled in the U.S. Senate and does not include funding for election security infrastructure. 

Democratic officials cry foul

In Mullin’s letter to Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, which was shared with States Newsroom, Mullin shared “concerning results” of a preliminary review of Nevada’s voter registration data showing there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens registered to vote. 

“I hope that you share in the commitment to ensure that only U.S. citizens participate in our federal elections,” Mullin wrote. “Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen.” 

Mullin said his team would help support the state to “take steps to protect Nevada voters and ensure that ineligible voters will not impact upcoming federal elections.”

Aguilar, a Democrat, told States Newsroom in a statement Friday that the department’s estimate is “wildly speculative at best.” The department “hasn’t shared anything that backs it up,” he added.

Aguilar said there are multiple safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens or any other ineligible voters from casting a ballot, and that Nevada runs “some of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country.”

“The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar wrote. “They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.” 

In a statement Friday afternoon, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said all evidence shows that noncitizen voting is “extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.” 

Every resident must take multiple steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot or register to vote, he said. 

“While the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians’ private, personal information, we will review any information provided by DHS so that we can evaluate the validity of these claims,” Schmidt said. 

California under fire

California has repeatedly come under fire from Trump regarding its elections. In his speech Thursday evening, he cast doubt on the integrity of the state’s recent Los Angeles mayoral and gubernatorial races. 

Secretary of State Shirley Weber described the claims as fallacious and unsubstantiated. 

“Non-citizen voting remains exceedingly rare,” she said. “In California, election officials work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered.”

She said her team will carefully review Mullin’s letter to assess the methodology for its claims, and “welcome legitimate best practices that comply with state and federal law while protecting Californians’ personal information.” 

“However, the information provided during the President’s remarks and on the White House website, do not inspire any level of confidence in the methodology used or the conclusions reached,” she added. “If the President is truly committed to election integrity, he must stop undermining confidence in our democracy, making it harder for eligible Americans to vote, and attempting to seize authority that the Constitution clearly reserves for the states.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nearly all of those 22 incidents – 19 – involved Department of Homeland Security officers shooting upon people in their vehicles during traffic stops, a crucial nexus, according to a States Newsroom review of news reports and documents. The encounters spanned the nation, from Colorado to Texas to Oregon to New Jersey.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, where he promised to carry out an aggressive immigration crackdown, federal immigration officers have killed six people, three of them U.S. citizens. Four deaths came during traffic stops.

Following Guerrero’s death, the second immigrant to be killed by ICE officers during a traffic stop in a week, DHS put a pause on traffic stop enforcement. But Trump quickly ordered the department to abandon those plans.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that officers will conduct vehicle-related enforcement stops “in order to continue their deportation campaign.”

The agency has plenty of funding at hand. Congressional Republicans last year used a legislative maneuver to allocate roughly $175 billion to DHS for immigration enforcement, detainment and deportations, without needing Democratic support. GOP lawmakers did the same move this year to fund $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol until September of 2029.

After the ICE shooting in Biddeford, the entire Maine congressional delegation called for an independent investigation, with Republican Sen. Susan Collins urging an end to vehicle enforcement.

A Thursday report from the American Civil Liberties Union found patterns of misconduct by immigration agents during Trump’s second term, identifying 432 incidents where agents either used or threatened to use force against immigrants and bystanders.

The report reviewed more than 1,200 incidents across eight states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and New Mexico. 

Of the traffic-related enforcement, the ACLU found in 76 instances, people and passengers were pulled from their cars; windows were smashed 47 times; officers 14 times rammed vehicles into people’s cars; and they hit people with cars six times. 

What happened afterward

In the moments after those 22 shootings, DHS has quickly accused those who were fired upon of using their vehicles as weapons against immigration officers. 

But independent video has often contradicted that narrative. 

In at least five cases DHS brought, charges were dismissed after the department accused U.S. citizens and immigrants shot by federal agents as being the aggressors. 

In August 2025, Francisco Longoria, a Mexican national, was driving his vehicle in San Bernardino, California, when federal immigration agents in unmarked cars tried to pull him over. He fled and the agents fired upon him.

The Department of Justice charged him with attempting to harm agents, but prosecutors couldn’t defend the DHS actions and charges were dismissed. Longoria was not injured.

Marimar Martinez was labeled a domestic terrorist by DHS and indicted after she was shot in her car five times by Border Patrol agents in October 2025, during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Chicago. DOJ dropped its charges against Martinez, a U.S. citizen, after the Trump administration accused her of using her car as a weapon.

When the president initially directed immigration agents to the nation’s capitol, Phillip M. Brown, a U.S. citizen, was pulled over by law enforcement, including an immigration officer who shot into his vehicle. During the October 2025 shooting, Brown was not injured, but charged with fleeing from law enforcement. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case.

During the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation drive in Minneapolis in January, that left two U.S. citizens dead, a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was shot by a federal agent while in his home. DHS accused Cesar Sosa-Celis of striking an immigration officer with a broom handle, but Cesar Sosa-Celis denied it and surveillance video contracted the federal government’s claim.

The immigration agent who shot Cesar Sosa-Celis was prosecuted by local Minnesota officials and arrested in May for falsely reporting a crime and for assault.

In Houston, on July 7, ICE officers killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, saying he tried to run over agents as has been the case in other incidents.

Salgado Araujo was driving several other people to work that morning when immigration officers approached his van. He was not considered a person of interest, DHS has stated.

The FBI has sought a search warrant to seize plastic bags with “crystal-like substances,” to test for methamphetamine, according to the Texas Tribune. One of the lawyers representing Salgado Araujo’s brother, who was in the van during the shooting, said it was granulated salt.

A grim beginning to the year

The most people shot by federal immigration agents was in January.  Three of the five people shot by ICE and Border Patrol officers were in Minnesota, with two of them fatalities. 

The two deaths were in Minneapolis, where the Trump administration conducted an aggressive deportation campaign that targeted the city, which has a high Somali refugee population. 

That month, federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, and shot and wounded Cesar Sosa-Celis. 

Good was killed while in her vehicle, which then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled her as a domestic terrorist. DHS accused Good of using her SUV as a weapon, but independent video did not uphold that allegation.

A week later, federal immigration officers shot and killed intensive care unit nurse Pretti, who was recording agents on his phone and helping a woman who was pushed down by them. Noem again labeled him a domestic terrorist and said he was attacking agents, but multiple videos taken from different angles do not show that.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But with prices of fuel and other petroleum products remaining high, costs are continuing to rise and consumers find themselves with less money to spend, it reported. 

The Cleveland Fed on Wednesday published one of its eight annual installments of the Beige Book. It seeks to assess economic conditions through online surveys and interviews with businesses, community leaders, economists and others.

The bank’s region includes all of Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. There was a consensus throughout that costs were rising.

“Nonlabor input cost growth remained robust in recent weeks,” the report said. “Contacts across industries continued to cite higher fuel costs as the primary driver of input cost pressures. Firms reported direct impacts as costs rose for transportation and petroleum-based products and indirect impacts as higher fuel costs filtered through to items sensitive to shipping costs, including metals and construction materials.”

It added that the expense of things such as  electricity, insurance, software, and food is also continuing to rise, but at a slower pace than it had.

Some of the Cleveland Fed’s contacts said that with fuel prices falling in recent weeks, they’d see other prices fall. But several developments put that in doubt.

The United States and Iran are again attacking each other, and energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz are again being throttled. Meanwhile, global oil reserves are at their lowest point in decades.

Some of those surveyed by the Cleveland Fed said they were passing only part of their increased cost to customers, while others said they were passing all of it along. And the increased cost is having an accelerating effect on consumer demand — especially among those who are already strapped.

“Consumer spending declined modestly after a slight decrease in the prior reporting period,” the report said. “Retailers across industry segments attributed the declines to the ongoing impact of high fuel prices.” 

It added, “One non-auto retailer said spending by low-income households fell while that of high-income households was unchanged, and another noted that price increases pushed revenue higher even as unit sales fell. Auto dealers generally reported flat or softer sales due to high vehicle prices and interest rates, and one dealer added that demand for service and parts rose as consumers held onto vehicles longer.”

Economists watch consumer spending closely because it makes up nearly 70% of gross domestic product.

Meanwhile, demand in the real-estate and construction sectors grew robustly since early June, with demand for luxury homes staying strong and that for affordable housing growing, the report said.

It added that demand for manufactured goods grew moderately, powered in part by data center construction and in part by the Trump administration’s tariffs.

“Data center development continued to drive demand for metal products and electrical components,” it said. “In addition, several metal producers reported stronger orders as customers depleted their imported inventories and shifted to domestic sources to avoid tariffs.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Helmick granted a preliminary injunction on July 13, allowing these ten businesses to continue selling their intoxicating hemp products. 

Helmick wrote in his opinion the ten businesses “have adequately alleged they will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary injunctive relief.” 

Titan Logistics Group LLC, Hopportunity Holding Company LLC, Saucy Seltzer LLC, App Girls LLC, Modern Distribution LLC, Grayscale Brewing LLC, IHC Investments Inc, Know Naturals LLC, Precision Fill and Pack LLC, and JSZN LLC filed a lawsuit against nearly 100 county and municipal prosecutors offices across Ohio to stop any legal action against them under a new Ohio law that bans low-level THC hemp products and THC and CBD beverages. 

The case is in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. 

Helmick initially put a temporary restraining order in place, but it expired July 13 — the same day he issued the preliminary injunction.  

The ten businesses are in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Nelsonville as well as North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, and Florida.  

Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson filed a motion to stay on Tuesday, but the court has not responded. 

“This Court’s decision has also invited confusion and chaos into Ohio’s marijuana markets,” Wilson wrote. 

He went on to write the preliminary injunction creates “a patchwork intoxicating-hemp market … that will harm consumers, businesses, and law enforcement.” 

“Untested, untracked, and unlabeled intoxicating cannabis products are available once more for purchase by children,” Wilson wrote. 

He questions how Ohioans, law enforcement, and stores are supposed to know which THC beverages are covered by the preliminary injunction. 

Ohio Senate Bill 56 took effect March 20. The law also changes the state’s marijuana law. 

The 2018 Farm Bill said hemp can be grown legally if it contains less than 0.3% THC, but new federal restrictions on hemp products are set to take effect Nov. 12 that will ban products that contain 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. 

“What Senate Bill 56 has done is to exclude federally legal intoxicating hemp products from Ohio’s statutory definition of hemp, redefine them as illegal marijuana, and then to prohibit any company from cultivating or selling those products unless the company has a physical presence in the State of Ohio,” Helmick wrote in his opinion. 

The Ohio Healthy Alternatives Association was happy with the preliminary injunction. 

“While this preliminary injunction is an important step forward, the OHHAA recognizes that the fight is far from over, and will continue to staunchly support its members throughout this litigation while advocating for their right to provide Ohioans with access to federally legal hemp products of their choice,” they said in a statement.

In a separate case related to Ohio S.B. 56, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Magistrate Jhay Spottswood-Harrison denied granting a preliminary injunction to Happy Harvest and Get Wright Lounge on June 24. 

A Franklin County Court of Common Pleas judge initially issued a TRO on April 22 to allow Happy Harvest locations and Get Wright Lounge to sell their existing products, but the 10th District Court of Appeals stayed the TRO. 

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.

Brazenness is a key tool of tyrants, both personal and political: Just as you’re shocked into inaction when someone cuts the line at airport security, so too Trump relies on baffling our expectations, which is what should concern us about the upcoming election and his efforts to interfere with people’s right to vote and to have their votes counted.

Trump used a nationally televised address Thursday to spew more outlandish misinformation about our election system as a pretext for aggressive federal intervention. He endorsed Mike Lindell – the pillow mogul who has done more than anyone, save Trump, to cast bad-faith doubt on Minnesota election integrity – for governor Wednesday.

In response, Minnesota faith, labor and civil society leaders have declared: Not this time. 

They’re also trying to alert and assist some 80 civil society groups in 19 states, many of them already facing Department of Justice harassment and other forms of heavy-handed federal intervention into election administration, in what looks like an effort to keep Republicans in power no matter the will of the voters.

Because our election system is so decentralized — tens of thousands of polling places across the country, thousands of counties counting and certifying votes — the resistance needs local and state leadership and organization. 

The blueprint for pushing back is a memo, first reported here, that’s circulating among pro-democracy leaders, titled, “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework.”

The idea of the title is that if we are to be a free people in the face of despotism, we must exercise our constitutional rights to preserve them. 

The instrument for organizing resistance is civil society, which “Act Free” describes as “the broad, distributed, multi-sector mobilization of everyday people behaving, with agency, as if the Constitution applies to them. And in doing so, making it apply.”

Although “Act Free” has been a group project, a key author is Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH and one of the most influential people you’ve probably never heard of.

It begins with a bracing warning: “Anyone paying attention knows that Donald Trump is not preparing to lose the 2026 midterms. He is preparing to disrupt and sabotage them, and his administration has been laying the groundwork for months.”

The evidence is all around us, but you have to connect dots and see the full picture: 

In Georgia, the former director of National Intelligence was present at an FBI raid of Fulton County, where agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots and other documents. Recall: Georgia is where Trump demanded the Republican secretary of state “find” the 11,780 votes needed to give him victory in 2020. 

In June, FBI agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which Ohio Capital Journal describes as advocates for voting and labor rights and against outsized corporate power.

The Justice Department has sued 29 states — Minnesota among them — and the District of Columbia over their refusal to provide unredacted voter rolls that include the driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers of voters. 

Several current and former election officials in Wisconsin confirmed they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI, which is apparently investigating the 2020 election. 

The Justice Department is sending election monitors here and other (suspiciously blue and purplish blue) states and cities. 

A dangerous MAGA tool beat a principled Republican in 2024 for Maricopa County recorder and is now in charge of vote counting in Arizona’s most populous county. 

Trump has issued an executive order that seeks to dictate election administration — in an unconstitutional power grab — via the U.S. Postal Service.

The Trump administration is threatening to withhold terrorism-prevention funding unless states comply with election demands, according to reporting from a progressive outlet that covers voting rights and litigation.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter recently to election officials in all 50 states threatening them with prosecution if noncitizens vote in the upcoming August and November elections. (Voting by noncitizens is prohibited in federal elections, and extremely rare.)

Trump recently fired the two Democrats and forced a Republican to resign from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, thus paralyzing it.

You can read these as discrete events, but Trump’s history tells us that this is all deliberate. As the “Act Free” memo argues, “The point is to generate enough chaos, legal uncertainty, and manufactured doubt to suspend certification (of votes), and in that void, consolidate power around the people already holding it.”

Schrantz told me that Operation Metro Surge “baptized me in the breadth of possibilities of what we might have to deal with.” 

Unfortunately, however, the denial continues, especially among the swells on the Acela Corridor. 

“When I’m around D.C. and New York elites, they wanna tell themselves a story that there’s some normal way we can get through to the other side of this. I just don’t think so. It’s as bad as it looks, and we need wider bandwidth to imagine what’s possible,” she said in an interview. 

Once we get people to understand what’s happening, then what? 

The “Act Free” memo sketches out a civil defense of democracy that draws on recent history: 

“When ICE and CBP occupied our communities for two and a half months … tens of thousands of trained constitutional legal observers documented every encounter. Mutual aid networks sustained people through the crisis. Small businesses invoked their Fourth Amendment rights and refused warrantless entry. Local law enforcement mostly stood aside rather than collaborate. And when called, 50 to 70% percent of the general population showed up, not because they were activists, but because they understood what was being taken from them and chose to act.”   

The political cost of Operation Metro Surge became too great for the Trump administration, and they were forced to retreat.  

So, how do democracy defenders replicate what was achieved resisting Operation Metro Surge when it comes to ensuring a free and fair election? 

“Act Free” advises that state leaders need “a rigorous, ground-level understanding of the macro threat landscape, the specific vulnerabilities of their state’s election administration system, and a genuine power analysis of the people and institutions inside it.”

Schrantz offers a refreshingly hard-headed primer on power analysis, and it’s worth quoting in full: 

“Knowing who sits in which seat is not enough. A genuine power analysis asks: who has leverage over that person? What does it take to move or block a specific decision? Who are the allies already inside the system? What is the procedural timeline for each key decision? Who could be positioned for sabotage? What conservative or election denier lawyers are positioned to act, and when? What have you already seen play out, and what does it reveal about the network of power being utilized? This is the organizing discipline most pro-democracy coalitions skip. It is the most important thing to do first.”

Then you’ve got to recruit community leaders: “Someone with a real network of relationships, in their neighborhood, school, congregation, childcare center, apartment building. These leaders are essential to organizing scaled and aligned public action with agency, and to maintaining a distributed strategy that cannot be decapitated.”

Because Trump’s strategy is racial division — the suspect votes are always in counties with significant populations of Black and Latino voters — the coalition must be multi-racial, as both a core value but also a “strategic necessity,” the memo reads.  

Next: Assign roles: legal, political, press and public, tactical/operational, grassroots deployment.

“Act Free” advises employing “deterrence” well before Election Day: Making sure elected officials and other people of influence know they are being scrutinized and will pay a cost if they cede to Trump’s demands — but will be strongly supported if they do their jobs honorably. Clergy and other local leaders can meet with secretaries of state, county boards and county election officials about the importance of free and fair elections and get them on the record about their commitment. 

Finally, it’s rehearsal time. Every potential scenario must be gamed out so everyone knows what to do: “Each role has a specific set of actions. Each scenario has a specific protocol. This is what you see. This is what you do. This is who you call.”

Americans assuming the courts will work it all out don’t realize how slowly the judiciary operates. (Which is precisely why Trump never faced justice for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.) MAGA will seek to fill the vacuum as the courts dither, “manufacturing a pretext through smears and propaganda, using legal maneuvers to suspend seating an unwanted elected official, grabbing and holding power in the vacuum created by the suspension of certainty.”

But if the organizers do their jobs, hundreds of thousands of trained volunteers will be ready to exact severe political costs, and quickly, if the authoritarian tries to intervene in local election administration. If there’s another “Brooks Brother riot” or another instance of MAGA foot soldiers attempting to stop ballot counting, a counterprotest will demand the count continue, and information will be quickly disseminated about the usurpers. If they seek to block polling stations or intimidate voters, precinct captains will film and disseminate. 

Those hundreds of thousands of volunteers will need courage undergirded by solidarity and the comfort that comes from knowing they have secured the blessings of liberty for their descendants.

As “Act Free” says, “The woman in the pink coat who stepped forward with her iPhone when Border Patrol (killed) Alex Pretti made a courageous choice that worked to expose the lies of the Department of Homeland Security. That kind of leadership does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from … people who have already processed the stakes and know what they are willing to risk when the moment comes.”

You can feel despair about what’s happening, but that’s a dead-end choice. 

Reading “Act Free” reveals what we should feel: concern, yes, but also vigilance — and hope. 

This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, 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 administration has filed a total of 27 lawsuits against more than 20 cities, counties and states with such policies since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, according to the Justice Department. In just the past three months, the administration has sued at least a half dozen jurisdictions, including Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, a county in Michigan, and the city of Philadelphia, for seeking to place limits on the activities of  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

These policies tend to focus on restricting immigration enforcement in public spaces, limiting how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and barring both local and federal immigration agents from wearing masks or otherwise concealing their identity while on duty.

“These sanctuary policies are most times created to help make communities safer. They promote a greater level of trust and cooperation between communities and public institutions of all kinds,” said Cassandra Charles, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group.

Some cities have had sanctuary policies since the 1980s, but Charles said many states and cities are creating new protections as the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation campaign. She described the current swell of litigation as “unprecedented.”

Charles said the administration is misinterpreting the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states that federal law trumps state law. That clause, she argued, does not allow the federal government to dictate what laws states can pass, nor does it “create a duty for the states to help the federal government enforce federal law.”

But the Justice Department argues that sanctuary laws violate longstanding constitutional precedent and prevent the federal government from conducting lawful enforcement activities.

“As explained in DOJ’s briefs in these cases, states and localities do not have a right to obstruct federal law enforcement, to regulate the federal government, or to discriminate against the federal government,” Kiersten Pels, an agency spokesperson wrote in an email. “These and other cases simply seek to vindicate that fundamental aspect of our constitutional structure.”

Our state taxpayer dollars should not go towards having local law enforcement enforce federal immigration law.

– Maryland Democratic state Sen. Clarence Lam

The lawsuits have yielded mixed results.

In May 2025, the Justice Department sued four New Jersey cities (Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark and Paterson) to challenge their policies curtailing local cooperation with federal immigration agents. The next month, a U.S. district judge in New Jersey, appointed by President Joe Biden, tossed out the suit, arguing the cities’ policies didn’t impede ICE activities because of the state’s existing sanctuary laws.

But earlier this month, a U.S. district judge in Pennsylvania sided with the administration in a lawsuit challenging a new Philadelphia policy.

Last month, the administration sued to stop the city of Philadelphia from implementing a new policy barring immigration agents from wearing masks, concealing their badges, or using unmarked vehicles while on the job. Last week, the judge—a Trump appointee—cited the Supremacy Clause in siding with the administration, issuing a preliminary injunction blocking the city from moving forward.

When the Philadelphia City Council approved the policy, the judge ruled, “it attempted to sidestep the Constitution’s clear mandate and disregarded this fundamental principle of law that has informed American jurisprudence for over 200 years.”

The new policy barring officers from concealing their identities was part of a package of seven ICE-related bills the council approved in April. Rue Landau, the city council member who sponsored the package, noted that the other measures have taken effect.

“If the federal government won’t protect their residents, local leaders have the obligation to step up to the plate, and that’s exactly what we did here in Philadelphia,” Landau said. “Great news for Philadelphia: We’ve got six laws on the books, and right now we are working on ensuring that the city of Philadelphia clearly spells out how we’re implementing these laws.”

In late April, the administration filed a similar lawsuit against the state of New Jersey to challenge a law, enacted in March, that prohibits immigration agents from shielding their identity while on duty.

Maryland is the latest state to face a DOJ lawsuit.

Its new law, in effect since May 31, prohibits state and local correctional officers and law enforcement agents from inquiring about or investigating a person’s immigration status. It also bars them from detaining or transferring a person to federal authorities for a suspected immigration violation without a warrant or court order.

Last week, the Justice Department sued Maryland to stop the law, arguing that its “purpose and effect is to obstruct federal law enforcement.”

“Such blatant disregard for federal laws that have been on the books for decades is not merely a political disagreement or passive abstention; it is deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety for all Americans,” the lawsuit states.

In May, local sheriffs from 17 counties in Maryland also sued the state to halt the new law. Their complaint argues that the law puts them in “an impossible and unconstitutional position.”

“If Plaintiffs follow the Act, they are effectively forced to shield removable aliens from federal custody,” the lawsuit states, while “if they continue cooperating with ICE as they have for years, they risk state penalties and lawsuits.”

In some sections, the sheriffs’ lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit against Maryland employ identical language.

Chris Hajec, head of litigation at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors stricter immigration enforcement and filed the lawsuit on behalf of the sheriffs, said the Maryland law “puts (the sheriffs) in a dilemma.”

“Either they’re violating the state law and they’re going to get sued by their attorney general, or they’re violating the federal criminal law and they could be prosecuted,” Hajec said.

But Maryland Democratic state Sen. Clarence Lam, the Senate sponsor of the new law, dismissed that argument. Lam said the law only limits what state officers can do, without obstructing ICE from carrying out its duties.

“We think that these efforts to block the implementation are bogus,” Lam told Stateline. “We as a state are wholly within our right and jurisdiction to be able to place limitations on what state and local law enforcement agencies can do. There’s nothing that prevents us from doing so, and that’s all this does.”

“Our state taxpayer dollars should not go towards having local law enforcement enforce federal immigration law.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@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.

It just wants a ride and a meal.

As ticks spread into new parts of the country and emergency room visits for tick bites climb higher than usual, states are scrambling to monitor where the pests are showing up, what diseases they may be carrying and how to warn residents before a bite turns into something far more serious.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that emergency department visits for tick bites were higher than expected across much of the United States and at their highest levels for that point in the year since 2017. 

In June, there were 112 tick-related ER visits per 100,000 people, compared with 110 per 100,000 during the same period last year, according to the CDC’s online tick bite tracker. That suggests this year’s summer trend may be in line with 2025.

Nationwide, the latest available data show an estimated 65 tick bite-related emergency department visits per 100,000 people, up from 47 per 100,000 last year. This year’s current figures are preliminary and subject to change, but if they hold, this year’s rate may be the highest since 2017.

Health officials say the trend reflects a combination of expanding tick populations, changing environmental conditions and increased human exposure during warmer months.

The concern extends well beyond Lyme disease.

The lone star tick, once found primarily in the Southeast, has steadily expanded its range and is known for its aggressive host-seeking behavior, often actively crawling toward people and animals. An adult female is distinguished by a white dot or “lone star” on her back.

The species has been linked to alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy that can cause people to develop severe reactions after eating beef, pork and other mammalian products. Researchers also continue to monitor ticks that carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, anaplasmosis and other illnesses.

Tick surveillance by state health officials varies widely across the country. Some states maintain active surveillance programs that collect and test ticks to identify where disease-carrying species are becoming established. Other states rely more heavily on human disease reports or passive tick submissions, making it harder to detect changes before infections begin to rise.

Those differences can leave public health officials with an incomplete picture of how quickly tick populations are changing — and where people may face the greatest risk.

Several states, including Massachusetts, Missouri and Oklahoma, have expanded surveillance efforts in recent years or launched public education campaigns as tick habitats shift. All three joined the list of states that now or will soon mandate reporting of alpha-gal syndrome. Other states are studying the spread of lone star ticks and the increasing recognition of the syndrome, which experts believe remains underdiagnosed. 

Some experts say warmer winters in many parts of the country have allowed ticks to remain active for longer periods each year while expanding into regions where they were once uncommon. At the same time, growing white-tailed deer populations and changing land use have created more opportunities for people and ticks to cross paths.

Public health officials say the best defense remains preventing bites altogether. They recommend using insect repellents registered by the Environmental Protection Agency, wearing permethrin-treated clothing, including long sleeves and pants in wooded or grassy areas, checking people and pets for ticks after spending time outdoors and removing attached ticks as soon as they’re found.

For states, the challenge is becoming less about responding to tick season and more about adapting to a future in which, in many places, the season is lasting longer — and the tiny hitchhikers are turning up in places they never did before.

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 exchange, first reported by Fox News, turns on a single word — “mortality” — and on which patients it counts.

What Acton said

On a podcast appearance in September 2025, Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, cited the numbers as evidence that Ohio’s early response saved lives.

“In those early days, the mortality rate was 50%. I started with that in March. By June, when we reopened, it was because we took swift, decisive action. The mortality rate had gone down to 5%. We learned how to save lives,” Acton said.

Asked about the figure, Acton’s office told Fox News she had been referring to death rates in hospitals — not the share of everyone who caught the virus.

Why the charge depends on the denominator

A spokesperson for Ramaswamy, who was living in New York City during the pandemic, said the claim rewrote the pandemic’s history.

“Liberal Amy Acton is desperately trying to rewrite history, spewing lies in a futile attempt to justify her disastrous decision-making during COVID,” Connie Luck said. “But her outrageous claims only confirm what we already know: she’s an incompetent, failed government bureaucrat who ran our state into the ground and is wholly unqualified to lead Ohio.”

That criticism measures Acton’s numbers against overall COVID-19 mortality — the share of all infected people who died. By that yardstick, the rate was never close to 50%; the virus killed roughly 275,000 Americans in 2020, according to CDC figures cited by Fox, and the overall death rate ran in the single digits. That much is not in dispute. But it is not the population Acton, a physician and the state’s former health director, said she was describing. She was talking about people sick enough to be in a hospital or an intensive-care unit — and for those patients, the record tells a different story.

The 50%: intensive-care patients

When Acton was signing Ohio’s first emergency orders in March 2020, the only U.S. outcome data available came from small hospital case series, and those early reports found ICU death rates at or above 50%.

A case series of 21 critically ill patients at a Washington State hospital, published in JAMA on March 19, 2020, found that 11 of them — 52.4% — had died. Eleven days later, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study of 24 ICU patients across nine Seattle-area hospitals; as of March 23, half had died.

Those figures held up in later, larger analyses. A CDC study published in June 2024, drawing on more than 4.7 million U.S. cases from before vaccines were available, found that 44.2% of patients admitted to an intensive-care unit died. The CDC authors described that result as similar to earlier studies conducted in Seattle, which found 50%, and Washington, which found 52% — the same two March 2020 reports.

The 5%: hospitalized patients by June

Acton’s second number tracks a different but equally documented trend: the sharp drop in deaths among hospitalized COVID-19 patients as clinicians learned to treat the disease.

An analysis prepared for STAT by the nonprofit FAIR Health, based on hospital records for roughly 100 million insured Americans, found that the mortality rate of hospitalized COVID-19 patients fell from 11.4% in March 2020 to below 5% in June — and stayed there, reaching 3.7% by September. Other studies that adjusted for age and underlying health found the same collapse: mortality in one New York hospital system fell from 25.6% in March to 7.6% in August, and survival among ICU patients in an English cohort rose from 58% in late March to 80.4% by the end of June. Researchers have credited wider use of steroids such as dexamethasone, less reliance on early ventilation, and hospitals that were no longer overwhelmed.

One point of precision: Acton’s two numbers do not describe exactly the same group. The 50% reflects intensive-care patients at the pandemic’s outset; the roughly 5% reflects all hospitalized patients by June. Read as a single, unbroken statistic, the “50% down to 5%” compresses two different populations. But each figure is grounded in real data, and the trajectory she described — catastrophic early mortality among the most seriously ill, followed by a steep drop by summer — is exactly what the record shows. Nothing in it is invented.

Acton’s counter

Acton’s campaign used the exchange to point back at Ramaswamy’s own pandemic record. Ramaswamy is the founder of Roivant Sciences, a biotech company whose subsidiary was involved in COVID-19 treatments.

“While Dr. Acton was working hand in hand with Governor DeWine to keep Ohioans safe, Vivek Ramaswamy was calling for mandatory COVID-19 testing, making more than $2 billion off of the COVID vaccine, and recommending segregating Ohioans based on biomarker status,” said Addie Bullock, a spokesperson for Acton’s campaign.

Those points track the public record. Ramaswamy advised Ohio’s 2020 pandemic response under then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and backed measures that people close to the DeWine administration considered overreach, including mandatory testing and isolation for select groups, as TiffinOhio.net has reported. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed Acton and later endorsed Ramaswamy, has repeatedly said the pandemic closure decisions were his own, not Acton’s — a point he made again when he called an earlier Ramaswamy attack ad inaccurate.

The dispute is the latest turn in a race in which Ramaswamy has made Acton’s pandemic record a centerpiece, a strategy detailed in TiffinOhio.net’s review of Ramaswamy’s record. Acton and Ramaswamy meet in the general election on Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The contribution appears in federal campaign finance filings for V-PAC: Victors Not Victims, the independent super PAC formed by Ramaswamy’s allies to support his campaign. Records show Scotts made the $250,000 payment on Jan. 30 and designated it as a corporate contribution. Because V-PAC is an independent-expenditure committee rather than a candidate’s campaign, federal law lets it accept unlimited sums directly from corporate treasuries — something candidates themselves cannot do.

In a statement, Scotts Chief Communications Officer Tom Matthews did not dispute the contribution and said the company gives across the political spectrum. “When it comes to political contributions, we have a history of donating to Democratic and Republican organizations and committees,” he said, adding that the company’s corporate spending is guided by “a commitment to supporting a stable, predictable and science-based regulatory environment.” Matthews cited the company’s Marysville headquarters and Ohio workforce, saying its “commitment to Ohio runs deep.”

Scotts is not an ordinary corporate donor. In 2012, the company was sentenced in federal court in Columbus to a $4 million fine for eleven criminal violations of federal pesticide law — then the largest criminal penalty ever imposed under that law. A separate civil settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought the total to $12.5 million.

The company had pleaded guilty to treating its wild bird food with two insecticides that regulators had prohibited for that use, including one whose label warned it was “extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife.” According to the Justice Department, Scotts kept selling the treated bird food for two years after the product line launched — and for six months after its own employees warned management of the danger. More than 70 million units had been sold by the time the company recalled the products in 2008. Scotts also admitted falsifying documents to convince the EPA and state regulators that unregistered pesticides had been approved.

The case is more than a decade old, and Scotts resolved it in full. The company attributed the falsified paperwork to a product manager, who pleaded guilty separately, and part of the sentence steered $500,000 to Ohio bird-conservation efforts, including the state Audubon society’s important bird area program and a Columbus Metro Parks habitat project. Matthews said the decades-old case had no bearing on the donation. “In no way did a compliance issue that occurred nearly 15 years ago and has long been resolved influence our decision making here,” he said.

Matthews’s statement described the company’s practice of making corporate contributions to “state-level political organizations and committees that represent the broader business community and the consumer lawn and garden sector.” V-PAC is a federal committee organized to elect a single candidate, and the statement did not separately explain the company’s decision to support it.

The donation gives a company with a federal environmental conviction a financial stake in Ohio’s next governor. Whoever wins in November will appoint the director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency — a cabinet post that oversees the state’s air, water and waste enforcement — and will set the administration’s environmental priorities. Scotts is one of Ohio’s larger manufacturers, with its headquarters and research operations in Union County.

V-PAC has become the financial engine behind Ramaswamy’s bid, raising tens of millions of dollars, most of it from a small group of wealthy contributors led by Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who has given $20 million. The committee reported roughly $23 million in cash on hand this spring. Ramaswamy, a Republican, faces Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director, in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Moreno, a Westlake Republican, said Thursday he plans to introduce legislation targeting the Canadian government and the officials he blames for smoke that has repeatedly fouled the air across Ohio and the Great Lakes. “I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” he wrote on X, quote-posting a Cleveland journalist’s image of a haze-shrouded downtown.

His office released the bill text Friday. Formally titled the “Countering Atmospheric Nuisances Arising from Drifting Airborne Foreign Incendiary Residual Emissions Act” — the CANADA FIRE Act — the measure is set for introduction July 20. It would require the president to determine whether Canadian wildfires harmed U.S. air quality and, if so, sanction Canadian officials deemed responsible, block their assets and revoke their visas. It also declares Canada’s ambassador “persona non grata” until the smoke clears and directs a study of a victims compensation fund financed by new tariffs.

“Thanks to Canada’s failed leadership, Ohio’s skies are seeing the worst pollution on record and Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence,” Moreno said in a statement. His office faulted Canada for failing to invest in “forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns, and stronger enforcement against arson.”

The air was, by any measure, dangerous. The Ohio EPA issued a statewide air-quality advisory Wednesday, effective early Thursday, warning that pollution could reach the “very unhealthy” to “hazardous” range. In Cleveland, federal monitors rated the air “hazardous,” with the Air Quality Index climbing past 500 Thursday afternoon — a scale that tops out at 500. David Margolius, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health, said conditions were worse than the 2023 smoke events that first turned Ohio’s skies orange.

What Moreno’s bill does not address is what scientists say is driving these increasingly frequent smoke events: a warming climate.

Peer-reviewed attribution research has found that human-caused climate change significantly increased the likelihood of the record wildfire seasons now sending smoke south. One study of Canada’s catastrophic 2023 season concluded warming more than doubled the odds of that scale of burning in eastern and southwestern Canada and made the extended fire season more than five times as likely. The Canadian Climate Institute notes that while the number of fires isn’t rising, the large, fast-moving blazes are — and it cautions that the “arson” framing Moreno’s office invoked distorts the science. In wildfire terminology, “human-caused” describes any ignition not sparked by lightning; it is not a synonym for arson, and it is not what is making the fires bigger.

Fire scientists have been blunt. Jen Beverly, a wildland fire professor at the University of Alberta, told the BBC that Canada’s boreal forests produce fires that are especially hard to control and that “we’re seeing more of those because of climate change.” Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University has warned that until governments address the root cause, the smoke will keep coming.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney answered the wave of Republican criticism by turning it back on Washington. “Climate change is everyone’s responsibility — truly everyone’s — including the United States,” he said, contrasting Canada’s investments in clean energy with U.S. moves to obstruct it, including the Trump administration’s campaign against offshore wind.

That contrast lands close to Moreno’s own record. During his 2024 campaign, Moreno made expanded oil and gas production a centerpiece and, as Inside Climate News reported, argued that America needs more fossil fuels. The League of Conservation Voters named him to its “Dirty Dozen” list of candidates it considers the worst on the environment. The emissions from burning those fuels are the same greenhouse gases that scientists say are heating the atmosphere, drying out forests and lengthening the fire seasons whose smoke now settles over Ohio — a warming climate that researchers have also tied to more frequent extreme weather and rising costs for basic services.

Ohio, meanwhile, has moved in the opposite direction from Carney’s clean-energy pitch, expanding fracking onto public lands while renewable projects face steep permitting hurdles that fossil fuel operations largely avoid.

Moreno is not alone in aiming at Ottawa. Four Michigan House Republicans sent a letter this week urging Canada to do more on wildfire management, and Moreno’s office echoed its language. Their case is that Canada’s forest management has fallen short and that the consequences are real: the smoke has closed schools, canceled outdoor events and battered Michigan’s summer tourism economy during its peak. As of Friday, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre counted roughly 895 active wildfires nationwide.

Whether a sanctions bill aimed at a close U.S. ally advances is another question. It would need to clear a Senate where such a measure faces long odds, and it does nothing to change the atmospheric conditions carrying the smoke across the border. For Ohioans watching the haze return summer after summer, the more consequential debate may be the one Moreno’s bill sidesteps: what, if anything, Washington intends to do about the warming that keeps the fires burning.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The shelter announced the intake on its Facebook page, describing it as an emergency intake tied to a humane case. The group said the 26 dogs included 20 young puppies, one older puppy and five adult dogs. It did not release details about the case.

“This single intake has nearly doubled the number of dogs currently in our shelter,” the shelter wrote, adding that the sudden increase had “put a tremendous strain on our resources.”

To manage the influx, the shelter said it would close Thursday, July 16, so staff could concentrate on the health and welfare of the newly arrived animals. In a later post, the shelter said it would reopen at 2 p.m. Friday, July 17.

The shelter said it urgently needed wet and dry puppy food and welcomed monetary donations, which it said help cover veterinary care, vaccinations, deworming and medications for the incoming dogs.

The community response was quick. In a post thanking supporters, the shelter said residents had “responded quickly to ensure we are getting the supplies we need to take care of the animals,” and thanked the community “for stepping up in our time of need.” Photos posted by the shelter showed bags of donated dog and puppy food stacked inside the building.

Among the donors was American Plastics–Tiffin Division, a plastic injection-molding plant on South County Road 1 that manufactures storage shelving and totes. The shelter said the company donated puppy food and shelving, delivered the items, assembled the shelves and helped stock them. The shelter said it was grateful for the company’s help and for the community’s continued support.

The Humane Society of Seneca County is a nonprofit animal shelter at 2811 S. State Route 100 in Tiffin. Donations can be dropped off during regular business hours — 12:30 to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. The shelter also maintains online wish lists on Amazon and Chewy, and accepts contributions through its website, humanesocietysenecacounty.org. The shelter can be reached at (419) 447-5704.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The fast food chain wrote in a statement that it plans to remove the “potentially impacted lettuce” from its “supply chain nationwide and will be replaced within 24 hours in select states.”

“While no official advisory has been issued, we believe public health is a shared responsibility among restaurants, their suppliers, and authorities, and we are proud to have consistently acted quickly and proactively to protect our guests,” the statement said. “Taco Bell has taken precautionary action, and we encourage all relevant restaurants, retailers, and foodservice operators to do the same.”

The CDC statement said it had linked the ongoing outbreak to Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The statement didn’t say whether the lettuce was the cause of the severe gastrointestinal illness caused by a parasite in other states. 

Since the outbreak began, the CDC has confirmed more than 1,600 cases in 34 states. Nearly 150 of those people were hospitalized, though no deaths have been reported so far. 

The CDC writes on a webpage about the outbreak that it expects the number of confirmed cases will continue to increase given the six-week “reporting lag between illness onset and case reporting to CDC.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Summer Crisis Program began on July 1 and runs through Sept. 30. Last year it served more than 55,000 Ohio households. 

The program provides assistance with electric bills, buying an air conditioner or fan, or repairing a central air conditioning unit. It also helps households with disconnection notices, as well as those that have been shut off or are trying to establish new service.

To qualify for assistance, you must have a gross income below 175% of federal poverty guidelines.  For a family of four, that’s $57,750.  

To apply, call the Breathing Association at  380-213-1444 to schedule an appointment or go to https://ba.itfrontdesk.com. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

There have been 96 hospitalizations and Lucas County in Northwest Ohio has had the most cases with 278 as of Thursday, according to the state health department. 

“Michigan seems to be leading much of the outbreak that we’re seeing here in the Midwest, and that’s just across the border,” said Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff. 

Michigan has reported 4,312 cases and 102 hospitalizations as of Thursday, according to their state health department. 

Shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bells in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia have been linked to the current cyclosporiasis outbreak, according to the CDC. 

More than 1,644 people who have had cyclosporiasis reported eating at Taco Bell locations in the five states, and the CDC is recommending to not eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Balls in those states. 

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which is also known as Cyclospora.

People become infected by eating food or drinking water that contains the parasite, and folks can prevent cyclosporiasis by not eating food or drinking water contaminated with feces, according to the CDC. 

People who have been sick reported symptoms starting either on or after June 22, according to the CDC. 

“This organism is one that thrives in warm tropical or subtropical climates,” Vanderhoff said. 

“Anytime we see an outbreak in Ohio or the broader Midwest, that outbreak is generally going to be traceable back to imported fresh produce, especially things like leafy greens, berries, fresh herbs that were contaminated at their original source.”

Cyclosporiasis is not typically life-threatening, but can cause severe watery diarrhea, Vanderhoff said. 

Other symptoms include loss of appetite, bloating, weight loss, cramping, nausea, and fatigue, according to the CDC. 

It can take anywhere from two days to up to two weeks to become sick after getting infected, and people can get infected more than once. Cyclosporiasis is generally not spread person-to-person. 

“I would discourage people from avoiding the foods that are most likely to be at risk because they’re the kinds of foods that are really healthy and your body really needs fresh leafy greens, fruits, especially things like melons, raspberries, some herbs like cilantro and basil,” Vanderhoff said. 

He recommends people wash their hands with soap and water before and after preparing fruits and vegetables. 

“Thoroughly wash all of your fresh fruits and vegetables under running water,” Vanderhoff said. 

“We don’t want you soaking them. We want you to scrub them (and) clean them under running water. … Once you’ve gotten them thoroughly cleaned, dry them, and then put them into your refrigerator promptly.”

Cyclosporiasis can be treated with certain antibiotics. Symptoms can last from a few days to more than a month without treatment, according to the CDC. 

“We want people to seek medical attention because otherwise they can get very ill,” Vanderhoff said. 

“They can become severely dehydrated, and can have a whole variety of problems related to that.”

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.

Simply put, the ruling “gives the parties more money to spend,” said David Kolker, senior counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

In a 6-3 decision on June 30, the court struck down limits on how much political parties could spend in coordination with specific candidates.

But will it make a difference, particularly in mega-money Senate races in Ohio, Maine, Texas, Iowa and elsewhere? 

In sheer dollars from big donors, maybe not. In strengthening the role of political parties and how they use those dollars to help campaigns, yes.

“The idea there will be an explosion of money that’s not already going to be there, I don’t really see that. The super PAC money is already there,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insight at OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan group that tracks and analyzes money in politics. Super PACs can spend unlimited sums independent of campaigns.

Don Levy, Siena Research Institute director, saw evidence in July of how eagerly the parties could spend money — or yank it back. 

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner’s now-defunct campaign was rocked by new allegations of sexual abuse, which he has denied. Siena conducts polls in Maine.

When the scandal broke, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, both of New York, issued a terse three-sentence statement in response.

One of those sentences was: “The DSCC will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.” 

That indicated “money is top of mind” for the party, Levy said. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is seeking reelection in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won in 2024 by 7 points.

The court and big money  

The Supreme Court has been methodically tearing down barriers aimed at limiting big money in politics.

In 2010, the Citizens United decision overturned decades-old restrictions on corporate independent expenditures, allowing them to spend unlimited sums from their corporate profits to support the candidates of their choice.

The ruling led to the creation of super PACs, allowing special interests to raise and spend unlimited funds to boost political candidates.

An analysis by Daniel Weiner, director, elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, found that their funding “largely comes from a small group of the very wealthiest donors.”

From 2010 to 2022, super PACs spent about $6.4 billion on federal elections. They spent an estimated $2.7 billion in the 2024 election.

There were, and are, limits on contributions to specific candidates and political parties. Super PACs cannot coordinate with campaigns. 

Until the Supreme Court ruling, there were limits on how much the parties could coordinate. Not anymore.

Parties have “complained about being outspent by the outside super PACs. Whether that’s true or not you could debate,” said Kolker. 

The court decision, though, makes it easier for big donors to funnel money to the parties, knowing the parties can now seamlessly direct the funds to candidates they feel need it most.

Republicans pushed for the ruling, with many in the GOP believing that Democrats had the advantage of obtaining more, often smaller, contributions to their candidates, while Republicans relied on bigger donors who felt more bound by contribution limits and restrictions.

Republicans hailed the decision.

“By striking down these unconstitutional caps on coordinated spending, the Court has restored core political speech and ensured parties can compete on a level playing field,” said a joint statement from Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the GOP’s House campaign committee.

Democrats saw things much differently. The ruling “is a win for billionaire donors and special interests who want more influence over the GOP agenda and an invitation for corruption,” said a joint statement from Democratic Party Chairman Ken Martin, Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who heads the party’s House campaign committee, and Gillibrand.

Maine and other swing states for Senate control

Democrats need a net gain of four Senate and three House seats in November’s elections to win control of those chambers.

The biggest money is likely to pour into a handful of Senate races.

Maine has been a top Democratic target, though the turmoil over Platner’s candidacy makes it unpredictable.

It had been a competitive race. In the Siena/New York Times/Portland Press Herald poll June 19-26 poll, before the latest Platner controversy erupted, he led Collins by 2 points. Trump’s approval rating was 36%. 

Maine Democrats have until July 27 to choose a replacement for Platner, who left the race July 8.

The court ruling is “not going to be a huge game changer for the amount of money flowing into a competitive race. They already have super PAC money, and already have megadonors giving to parties,” said Glavin.

Money could matter more in Ohio, where big spending in 2024 – a non-presidential election record of $483.4 million, according to AdImpact – helped Republicans paint incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, as out of touch with the GOP-trending state. Brown lost to Republican businessman Bernie Moreno by 4 points.

“I think money made a difference last time as they drove up Brown’s negatives,” said Jessica Taylor, Senate and governors editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Brown now will be able to tap more party expertise and funding as he runs this year against Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican appointed to the seat in 2025 to replace Vice President JD Vance.

Iowa is a different sort of money battleground. “Money could make a big difference if Democrats spend there,” Taylor said. Democrats are trying to win the seat now held by Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican who is not seeking reelection. State Rep. Josh Turek, a Democrat, is running against U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican.

Levy offered this example of where shifting party money could matter. Suppose polls hold up and former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, remains favored to win a North Carolina Senate seat now held by Republican Thom Tillis, in his campaign against Republican Michael Whatley.

“The national party could say we’ll write off North Carolina because Cooper has a big lead and is extremely well known in the state. It would be difficult to beat him,” Levy said. Maybe they’d direct more money to Texas, where state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton were tied in last month’s Siena poll.

The court ruling gives “a lot more power to party leaders who control how these funds are spent,” said Kolker, and probably more clout to Congress itself, making it easier to impose party discipline.

Does big money matter? 

Experts are quick to warn that big money is no surefire guarantee of success.

There are just too many moving parts influencing voters – their economic situation, their views of President Donald Trump and their disillusionment with the political establishment, to name a few.

“You want to have a robust TV program but the political environment is still going to matter in a lot of these races,” said Taylor.

What often matters most for a candidate and a political party is building an image and reputation and sustaining it, which is why in election after election, incumbents usually win.

“There is still an incumbent advantage. There are cycles where voter discontent and frustration reaches a point where the only way to express your frustration is to vote against whoever is in power,” said Todd Eberly, professor of political science at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Maine provides a strong example of the advantages and disadvantages of money.

Collins has been a senator since 1997. “Collins will play to her strength. The people of Maine, regardless of what the left may say, they feel she has good moral character and is in touch with the values of Mainers,” Levy said.

Democrats will undoubtedly try to tie her to Trump and the Washington establishment. At the same time, he said, “Maine is an inexpensive state and money will fly in there to say Susan Collins is in tune with Maine.”

The race will be a test of all the factors that influence a race, financial and otherwise.

“Candidates who spend more, their probability of winning has increased significantly,” said Eberly. “With one exception. If you’re an incumbent, it (big spending) doesn’t make much of a difference.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The New York congressman addressed affordability, voting rights and what he called “the most corrupt administration in American history” while drawing personal connections to the conventiongoers. He said he was grateful for the work of public employees and the unions that represent them, having been raised by two union members in a modest-income household. 

“Organized labor has always been there for me, and organized labor is there for the American people,” Jeffries said as the crowd, gathered in a large room at the Walter. E. Washington Convention Center, erupted into applause. 

The AFT is a 1.8 million-member union representing educators, healthcare workers and public employees from across the country. The organization hosts a national convention every two years.

The union is a major benefactor to Democrats. Its political action committee contributed more than $1.9 million to Democratic candidates and $2.1 million to the House Majority PAC, which works with House Democratic leadership, in the 2024 election cycle, according to the campaign finance tracker Open Secrets. 

Jeffries urged the union’s members to help Democrats win enough House races in November to return the party to the majority next year. Jeffries would very likely become House speaker if that happens.

“Are we going to take our country back?” Jeffries asked the crowd to open his address. “Are you ready to help us take back control of the United States House of Representatives in November?”

Campaign promises

Jeffries said House Democrats would push back against “MAGA extremists” and block efforts to undermine popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. And they will continue working to drive down the cost of childcare, healthcare and other household expenses, he added. 

In addition to promising better living conditions for Americans, Jeffries said Democratic leaders would fight to “clean up corruption” within President Donald Trump’s administration. 

He also said they would work to end the war with Iran and rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement initiatives, because the agency “is completely and totally out of control.” 

ICE officers have fatally shot immigrants this month in two separate incidents in Maine and Texas.

Spotlight on education

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, also spoke at the convention about the significant effect that public education had on him growing up.  

It was thanks to the support of his parents and public school teachers, as well as the help of Pell grants and student loans, that he was able to become a U.S. senator, he said. 

Now, what “keeps (him) up at night” is the fact that many children today don’t have access to the same opportunities, which he said would shrink the pool of future leaders in science, law and education.

“We have to invest in our children because we don’t know where the cure for cancer’s going to come from,” he said. 

He called for an increase in teachers’ pay, among other policies.

State of the union

AFT President Randi Weingarten also delivered her keynote address Thursday, touching on themes ranging from income inequality to the increasing power of big tech. 

“Our union stands at the intersection of the ways that regular people gain and exercise power in our democracy—through public education, unions and voting,” she said. “This election will decide whether we are a country governed by the people or ruled by the powerful, a country of opportunity or oligarchy, a country whose people live in freedom or in fear.” 

On Wednesday, Republicans from the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce took a first step toward dismantling the Department of Education, approving a package of 10 bills that would permanently reallocate some of the department’s duties to other federal bodies. 

“The House and Senate have less responsibility for public schooling than statehouses across the country,” Weingarten told reporters after her speech. “Yet the people who run the House (Education and) Workforce Committee spend more time fighting teachers and fighting unions and fighting against a better life for all of us … than actually helping kids have opportunity in a capitalist system.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Grilled by U.S. Senate Democrats, acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling stood behind the multiple interagency agreements, or IAAs, Education has so far signed with Labor, likening his agency’s functions in the transfer to a “firm that’s just consulting and helping them move these programs’ money, but not the actual programs themselves.” 

The agreements — also made with the departments of Health and Human Services, State, Treasury, Interior and Justice — are a main part of the plan by the Trump administration to axe the 46-year-old Education Department. 

Sonderling appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in his bid to serve as the next Labor secretary, where he touted his extensive DOL experience.   

“Few people have had the opportunity to experience the department from so many different perspectives, from the outside in private practice, as a policy adviser, as an agency head, as an adjunct professor, as deputy secretary, as acting secretary, and now as the nominee for Labor secretary,” he said. “These experiences have prepared me to lead this department with a deep understanding of its mission, its people, and most importantly, the Americans we serve.” 

The Floridian took on the role as acting secretary in April, after Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned amid misconduct allegations. 

Sonderling was also named by the president in June to serve as acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and confirmed by the Senate in March 2025 as deputy Labor secretary. 

The committee will vote July 23 on whether to advance Sonderling’s nomination to the full Senate. 

‘It makes zero sense’

At the hearing, a handful of Democrats dug into the Trump administration’s continued dismantling of the Education Department and Labor’s role regarding several of Education’s programs. 

“Right now, you are working with (Education) Secretary (Linda) McMahon to take over the Department of Education programs to help Trump abolish that department,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who noted that Sonderling has built his “own anti-worker record at DOL.” 

Murray pointed out that “it makes zero sense that DOL, an agency whose expertise is in supporting wage earners and job seekers, is being tasked now with taking over complex education programs from the Department of Education to help kindergartners and elementary school students.” 

Through multiple IAAs, the Department of Labor is taking on expanded roles in administering Education’s programs surrounding elementary and secondary education; postsecondary education; and career, technical and adult education. 

The Education Department has stressed in fact sheets that it would maintain its statutory responsibilities and oversight of the programs regarding the IAAs.

In the lower chamber, a package of 10 bills permanently transferring several of Education’s functions to other departments and largely reflecting many of the earlier IAAs advanced out of the House Committee on Education and Workforce on Wednesday.

Programs still run by ‘career experts’

Sonderling stood behind the administration’s efforts, saying “it makes a lot of sense” for DOL to handle more grant responsibilities and work with Education.

The nominee also emphasized that the interagency agreements are “not dealing with policy,” but instead with providing the Department of Education “a service.” 

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, said the Trump administration’s scattering of education programs across the federal government, including at DOL, creates a system that’s “much more complicated and much less efficient, particularly for states and public school districts.” 

But Sonderling argued that those programs “still all remain” at the Education Department and are “being run by career experts” at Education.

He added that “for efficiency purposes, we’ve moved a few tranches of employees to the Frances Perkins Building (DOL’s headquarters), where they all have their own offices, they all have their own computers, they have parking, and they are working out of that building.”  

Pressed by Baldwin on any evidence the nominee will present that “transferring these programs to the Department of Labor has made anything better for students, teachers, parents,” Sonderling expressed his commitment to providing the senator with that data. 

“There’s a right way to do reform — come to the committee and say, ‘Hey, look, this is in statute but there’s a better way to do it, so let’s work on a better way to do it,’” said Sen. Tim Kaine.

“The wrong way to do it is to treat the (Education Department) like it’s a furniture store and having a discount going out of business sale and hand off pieces willy-nilly to agencies that don’t have the expertise to deal with them,” the Virginia Democrat said. 

“That’s my concern about what’s happening right now.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 20-14 vote followed hours of debate over amendments from Democrats that sought to roll back pieces of the earlier Republican packages and change how the upcoming process would work. None of the Democratic changes were approved. 

Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar and Virgin Islands Democratic Delegate Stacey Plaskett didn’t vote. 

House Republican leaders are likely to bring the budget resolution to the floor next week before that chamber leaves for its five-week August recess, now expected July 23. 

The Senate will be in session for an additional two weeks after that before beginning its summer break, though it isn’t clear if GOP leadership in that chamber will bring the budget measure up for a vote. 

Process to provide funds for defense, farms

Both chambers of Congress must adopt a budget resolution in order to unlock the budget reconciliation process that will allow them to move another bill without Democratic support. 

House Republicans said during committee debate they hope another package would provide up to $95 billion. That currently unreleased measure would bolster aid to farmers, provide more funding to the Defense Department and implement pieces of a voter identification bill they’ve dubbed the SAVE America Act. 

“We are going to use reconciliation to make a run at doing what we think will save this country for our children’s future and for the remainder of this century,” Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said. “I can’t think of a more important thing to work on.”

Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, ranking member on the committee, criticized Republicans for not focusing on how to make life more affordable for everyday Americans. 

“Over the last 18 months, we have seen where Republicans’ priorities are: trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires, tens of billions of dollars for war and absolutely nothing for the American people,” Boyle said. 

Democratic changes rebuffed

Democrats offered more than a dozen amendments during debate, including one from Vermont Rep. Becca Balint that would have removed the instructions for the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Republicans’ budget resolution, once approved by both chambers, would allow the Armed Services Committee to spend up to $60 billion and the Intelligence panel to spend up to $13 billion. 

“My colleagues use the deficit as a pretext to excuse increasing hunger and deepening poverty in this country,” Balint said. “They preach fiscal responsibility, and yet, when it comes to approving tens of billions of dollars in additional Pentagon spending, they are a rubber stamp.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Jack Bergman spoke against the proposal, saying the additional defense funding “is necessary to support our troops and supply them with the munitions and anything else they need to fight, win and return home safely.”

In addition to providing instructions for more defense spending, the budget resolution would allow the Agriculture Committee to write a bill that would provide up to $12 billion in additional aid to farmers. 

The Administration Committee would be able to spend up to $10 billion, likely to create a grant program for states that institute voter identification requirements. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Steubenville City Council voted to lease 19 parcels to Oklahoma-based Ascent Resources – Utica, said Steubenville resident Greg Burrier, who was at the city council meeting. One council member voted against it. 

“I’m extremely disappointed,” he said. “I feel like I got the rug pulled out from underneath my feet.”

The money will be put in the city’s general fund, but the city has yet to decide what it will be spent on, Burrier said. 

The Ohio Capital Journal sent questions to Steubenville Mayor Ralph Petrella but he did not respond. 

This is the first time Save Ohio Parks has heard of an Ohio city seeking bids to frack its own public land. Fracking is the process of injecting liquid into the ground at a high pressure to extract oil or gas.

“Given that the state is doing this, it’s probably not surprising that a city would think that’s the way to make money too,” said Save Ohio Parks Board President Cathy Cowan Becker. 

“The state is very, I guess, determined to lease out its state public lands for fracking, it’s probably not a surprise that some cities are looking at that as well.” 

Nearly 100 of those acres is under Beatty Park, which is next to Union Cemetery-Beatty Park — a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“It’s got a nice tree canopy,” said Burrier, who has fond memories growing up of going to Beatty Park. 

“It’s in a hollow, and it’s got shale formations, limestone formations, and sandstone formations on each side.”

Burrier lives close to Jim Woods Park, which will also be fracked. The roughly 20-acre park is next to an elementary school.

“They’re not going to frack underneath the elementary school, but where they’re fracking borders the elementary school, which I think is ridiculous,” he said. 

Steubenville passed an ordinance in October authorizing leasing public lands for fracking. The city originally tried to bid out four parcels in December, but received no bids. 

The city tried again earlier this year with the 19 parcels and received two bids from Texas-based Pike Petroleum for $249,000 and the winning bid from Ascent Resources – Utica. 

Becker hopes other Ohio cities do not try to lease their own land for mineral rights. 

“If they see dollar signs, cities are always strapped for money and since the state is doing it, this is where their minds go for how to raise some money,” she said. 

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

There were 19 incidents in Jefferson County, where Steubenville is located. 

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

Fracking will cause air pollution, noise pollution, and light pollution, Becker said. 

“It will affect the park, just like it will affect and is affecting the state parks,” she said. 

The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission recently approved bids to frack more than 15,000 acres of Ohio’s public land — including nearly 13,000 acres in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area, which is about an hour from Steubenville. 

Becker is concerned about the massive amount of water use that comes with fracking as well as the frack waste. 

“The toxic chemicals that go in, the radioactive stuff that comes out, and that’s going to have to be injected somewhere,” she said. 

“The truck traffic, each well is literally thousands of truck trips because every bit of that water and chemicals and sand has to be trucked in, and then all of that waste, truck load by truck load, has to be taken out.”

Becker and Burrier both question if the roads in Steubenville are ready to handle the increased truck traffic. 

“The street (near my house) is just crumbling,” Burrier said. “They got to fix it every six, seven months and then it crumbles back again.” 

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.

Though federal law already prohibits Medicaid dollars from being used for abortion services, clinics who also happen to provide those services were cut off from reimbursements for federal funds.

That means funding for sexually transmitted infection testing, cancer screenings, birth control consultations, and primary care visits saw the most impact, according to Planned Parenthoods in the state.

“When patients don’t have access to free or covered STI testing and treatment, then they don’t include it in their appointment, so a lot of infections aren’t caught, which means they are able to more easily spread through a community,” said Lauren Blauvelt, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

Blauvelt said it’s still hard to know yet what the full extent of a year of cuts will be, especially compounded by other drops in funding and support over the years.

“We can’t make staffing changes until we start seeing the uptick in patients coming back for care,” she said. “But we’re committed to expanding our services, and that includes preventive care.”

Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio decided to close two locations in Ohio when the cuts came down, shuttering clinics in Hamilton and Springfield. Danielle Craig Hemphill, chief external affairs officer for the region’s clinics, said those closures are “permanent,” but the Dayton and Mt. Auburn locations are still open, and telehealth is still an option for those patients.

When the federal spending bill that slashed that funding was signed, 40% of Southwest Ohio’s family planning patients were using Medicaid, according to Hemphill.

Since the funding drops, family planning and gender affirming care visits are down 55% in the region, and proportionally, communities of color have been the most impacted.

“It’s likely that many of these patients have not received care at all and this can have profound effects on their longterm health,” Hemphill told the Capital Journal.

Telehealth services are available from Planned Parenthoods across the state, and both Hemphill and Blauvelt said they are encouraging patients to utilize the services if it’s possible for them.

While not appropriate in every case, telehealth has been touted as a useful access point for those without reliable transportation, low income populations, and those in parts of the state where clinics are not located or in close proximity.

The Ohio Department of Health’s annual abortion report showed a 15% increase in 2025, attributing that increase primarily to telehealth prescriptions.

Mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-drug regimen most commonly known for use in medication abortions, has been FDA approved since 2000 for the practice, and despite congressional hearings and anti-abortion rights movements that claim the contrary, scientific studies over decades have backed up the safety of the drug.

Reproductive health clinics including Planned Parenthood are used to looking down the barrel of cuts and even funding elimination as a nationwide debate over reproductive rights continues.

Republican majorities in both Congress and the Ohio General Assembly have leaned on the side of attempting to further regulate abortion and/or remove funding completely to those who provide the service.

Attempts have come before and after a 2023 constitutional amendment to establish abortion and other reproductive rights in the state passed with 57% of the vote in Ohio.

“We know Ohioans want the decision about their personal health to be personal, not made by politicians,” Blauvelt said. “The right to reproductive healthcare is only as good as the access to that healthcare.”

Ohio has seen legislation introduced that would have created “personhood” bills, meaning in-utero fetuses would have constitutional rights at conception.

There has also been legislation introduced to keep clinics who provide abortion from receiving any Medicaid funding, even after the expiration of the previous cuts.

Neither of the those bills have come to pass, but anti-abortion legislation has become a mainstay of Ohio’s legislature over the last few years.

A 24-hour waiting period law that did pass has since been struck down temporarily by a Franklin County Court, but another waiting-period bill has been introduced and is still making its way through lawmaker scrutiny.

Laws to force abortion providers to pay for burial or cremation of fetal remains and bar things like the use of telehealth for abortion treatment were also blocked by Ohio state courts, even before the U.S. Supreme Court said telehealth abortion services could continue amid a case out of Louisiana.

The legislature is on an extended summer break that is scheduled to last until after the November general election, something that should bring into focus the impacts those elections could have on reproductive health in the next General Assembly, and next year in Congress, according to reproductive rights advocates.

During the election season, Blauvelt said it’s important that voters make their demands clear to incumbent elected officials and potential elected officials when it comes to things like affordability and healthcare access.

“Blocking patients from accessing affordable healthcare is the exact opposite of what voters deserve and what they’re looking for,” Blauvelt said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

For more than a year, the Ohio Supreme Court has been set to make a landmark ruling in a case with high stakes for renewable energy development. But now, the Ohio Power Siting Board has asked the court to skip that and dismiss the case altogether.

In December 2022, the OPSB denied developer Vesper Energy’s permit application for a 175-megawatt photovoltaic installation called Kingwood Solar. The OPSB held that Kingwood Solar failed to meet its public interest requirement because local government boards opposed the project. All other criteria for issuance of a permit were met.

The developer appealed the decision in 2023. On July 1, more than three and a half years after it first denied the permit, the OPSB has filed a motion to dismiss the case because Kingwood Solar’s grid interconnection agreement has expired.

Since the project no longer has a valid interconnection agreement, it can’t immediately be built, and the board argues that this makes the whole case moot.

Even if the court rules that the OPSB must issue the state permit, the developer would need to go through grid operator PJM Interconnection’s infamously long queue all over again for the project. Progress would likely be further delayed by the need to comply with 2021’s Senate Bill 52, which took effect six months after Kingwood Solar applied for its siting permit and adds extra hurdles for siting renewables in Ohio. The law includes an option for counties to block projects before they ever get to state regulators.

Solar advocates say the board’s argument is unfair: The reason Kingwood Solar’s interconnection agreement expired is because the OPSB missed deadlines for letting the company move ahead with its appeal. And then the court took a long time to consider the case.

Beyond that, advocates note, the court’s possible failure to address the merits of Kingwood Solar’s appeal would be a major missed opportunity to clear up uncertainty around renewable energy development in Ohio.

In December 2022, the OPSB held that unanimous local government opposition was the ​“controlling” factor on whether the project failed to serve the public interest. In other words, the OPSB let the fact that the local boards didn’t want the project determine the outcome — despite the OPSB being the state regulatory agency charged with balancing the economic, environmental, and other benefits of the project.

Vesper Energy, other developers, and clean energy advocates argue that the court should not let the board deny renewable energy permits just because local governments might not like the projects.

After Kingwood Solar filed its appeal, the Ohio Supreme Court twice refused to deal with the case until the OPSB finally ruled on various motions for reconsideration — months after its legal deadlines.

Yet more delays followed after Kingwood Solar filed its third notice of appeal in October 2023. Briefing wrapped up by March 2024, but the court didn’t hear lawyers’ oral arguments until March of last year.

Eleven months later, in February 2026, Kingwood Solar urged the court to expedite its decision, noting that time was running out on its interconnection agreement. The court refused. The court still hasn’t ruled.

In response to a question about whether it would be unjust for the OPSB to seek dismissal after its own delays contributed to the missed interconnection deadline, spokesperson Matt Butler wrote via email, ​“We cannot speculate on hypotheticals regarding this matter and will let the motion speak for itself.”

Missed opportunities

Doug Herling, a vice president at energy developer Open Road Renewables, has a question for the court: ​“Why did you run out the clock?”

Herling’s company isn’t a party in Kingwood Solar, but it had cases of its own last year and this year in which the OPSB or its staff likewise deferred to local government opposition and denied permits.

Vesper Energy declined to comment at this time. Under the Ohio Supreme Court’s rules, its response to the OPSB’s dismissal motion is due by July 13, but the court could rule before then.

“The court’s delay and rejection of Kingwood’s motion for expedited ruling has complicated this case in a way that wasn’t necessary,” said Karin Nordstrom, an attorney with the Ohio Environmental Council, which has been a party in several related cases. Regardless of PJM’s deadline, though, ​“getting a resolution and clarity from the court on this issue remains a matter of great public interest,” Nordstrom said.

The potential ruling on Kingwood Solar comes at a critical time for Ohio, which is seeing growing energy demand due to data centers and other factors, coupled with rising energy costs. Despite the state’s appetite for energy, it continues to stymie renewable energy developments.

“A substantive review of the public interest, including a substantive review of the reasoning for public support and opposition, remains incredibly important, because Ohio does need more energy,” Nordstrom said. Both developers and environmental advocates ​“need Kingwood for clarity on this issue.”

Otherwise, building solar or wind projects in Ohio remains highly risky and stressful for developers.

“It just sends a message that right now it is not safe to invest in new development in this state, because what should be a three- to five-year development timeline could stretch past fairly reasonable interconnection deadlines,” Herling said. ​“No one can make an investment decision with this type of uncertainty facing you, along with the rest of the regulatory climate now facing renewables in the state.”

After SB 52 took effect, opponents of renewable energy began pushing counties not only to adopt bans against new solar and wind development, but also to oppose even ​“grandfathered” projects that were exempt from the law. Greene County and the three townships where Kingwood Solar would be built all passed resolutions against it.

Meanwhile, the OPSB diverged from its prior practices and began treating local government pushback as sufficient to deny permit applications, even though SB 52 did not alter the legal definition of ​“public interest.”

The OPSB’s decision on Kingwood Solar focused on whether government opposition was unanimous and noted when objections were vigorous, but largely ignored whether any arguments against the project were based in fact or on misinformation, resistance to change, or political pressure. The regulators failed to clarify the public interest standard when they updated their rules in 2024, despite requests from industry and environmental groups.

The Kingwood case offers an opportunity to make the law clear, if the court decides not to dismiss it.

Even if the court does dismiss the case, the issue isn’t going away: An appeal filed in March 2025 for NextEra Energy’s Circleville solar farm raised similar arguments to those in the Kingwood Solar case. There has still been no ruling in that case either, even though the Ohio Supreme Court heard oral argument more than six months ago.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

High prices and overall voter dissatisfaction with Washington have put control of the U.S. House and Senate in play this year — a dynamic that has trickled down, with heightened Democratic enthusiasm in many state contests.

“For the most part the Republicans are kind of playing defense more than offense,” said Katy Owens Hubler, director of elections and redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

Midterm elections generally favor the party that doesn’t control the White House. Still, it’s unlikely Democrats can capture the majority in states: GOP lawmakers currently hold nearly 55% of the nation’s 7,386 state legislative seats. 

That gives Republicans control in 28 state legislatures and Democrats control in 18, while three states have divided control of chambers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. NCSL is eyeing 10 Republican-held chambers, four Democratic-held chambers and the tied state House in Minnesota for potential flips in control in November.

“My feeling generally is that it is going to be a good year for Democrats,” Owens Hubler said, “but it’s not going to be a blowout year.”

Chambers to watch this November

These are the legislative chambers the National Conference of State Legislatures is watching for potential changes in partisan control: 

Democratic-held chambers

• Maine House

• Minnesota Senate

• Michigan Senate

• Pennsylvania House

No-party control

• Minnesota House (tied 67-67)

Republican-held chambers

• Alaska Senate 

• Alaska House

• Arizona Senate

• Arizona House

• Michigan House

• New Hampshire Senate

• New Hampshire House

• Pennsylvania Senate

• Wisconsin Senate

• Wisconsin House

Source: National Conference of State Legislatures

Wins in some states could deliver Democrats total control of state government — both legislative chambers and the governor, known as a trifecta — making it much easier to pass progressive legislation. In other states, weakening Republican majorities or breaking veto-proof supermajorities would make it easier for Democrats to object to GOP policies.

Since President Donald Trump’s second term began, Democrats have flipped a dozen seats in special elections in Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas, according to tracking by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats at the state level. They also flipped another 18 seats in last year’s general elections in New Jersey and Virginia. 

Republicans have not flipped a single Democratic legislative seat.

“2026 is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform state legislative power,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. 

The committee is touting record numbers of Democratic candidates running for office in some states and has announced plans to spend a record $50 million on state legislative races this year, with aims of flipping more than 650 legislative seats. And just as in 2024, the state of the economy — and ever-rising prices — are proving a central campaign message. 

In Michigan, defending their state Senate majority and winning control of the state House would give Democrats a trifecta. They would need to flip four Republican-held House seats to do so.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks said she’s confident her party will maintain or even grow its Senate majority. The House will be a “tougher lift,” she said, but the party’s chances look good now.

“I feel very confident that we will be working with a Democratic legislature in both chambers next term,” she said.

Following months of GOP obstruction in the House, Democratic control of both chambers would reverse the current gridlock in Lansing. Brinks, who is term-limited, said she expects a Democratic trifecta will focus on the issues that matter to Michiganders, including regulations on data centers, childcare accessibility and affordability. 

“There are things that we know we could do that make people’s lives easier and more affordable,” she said. “So I think that in general you’ll see us try to tackle those things.”

Nationwide, Republicans have acknowledged growing voter frustrations over affordability while also arguing voters should support them for their work to redraw congressional districts. 

Set off by a White House push to give Republicans more seats in the U.S. House, 10 states have completed middecade redistricting — a phenomenon unseen since the 1800s.

Earlier this month, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to elect GOP state legislators, highlighted the party’s redistricting successes and underscored that current races for statehouse control will determine which party draws future maps.

In a statement to Stateline, Committee President Edith Jorge-Tuñón said Democrats can brag all they want about fundraising success, “but no amount of cash changes the fact that their party is being pulled further left by the socialist wing calling the shots.”

“We know Democrats and their national allies will continue to pour millions into state legislative races because they understand what’s at stake: the legislators elected in 2026 will shape redistricting and the balance of power for years to come.”

‘Things are looking really good’

In Iowa, Democrats flipped two state Senate seats in special elections last year to break the GOP supermajority, leaving Republicans with a 33-17 majority in the upper chamber. 

Democrats hope to deprive Republicans of winning back that supermajority and to break the supermajority in the state House in November. It’s especially high stakes this cycle as polling has shown a very competitive race for governor, with Democratic State Auditor Rob Sand ahead of Republican Zach Lahn in some tracking.  

Iowa hasn’t had a Democratic governor since 2011.

“From my perspective right now, assuming we continue to do the work and we raise the money we need to, things are looking really good,” said Democratic state Sen. Janice Weiner, the minority leader. 

Depriving Republicans of a veto-proof supermajority would give a potential Democratic governor much more power, Weiner said. And the more Democrats gain, the more they can challenge  the policies of the GOP, which has enjoyed control of both chambers and the governor’s office for the past decade.

Senate Democrats have already used their newly won power by rejecting gubernatorial appointments, including a high-profile nomination for the leader of the state’s Health and Human Services Department.

Success in November could position Democrats to further contest the state Senate in 2028, when they could conceivably tie with a 25-25 split with Republicans, she said.

“It’s an accountability issue,” Weiner said. “You don’t have to be in the majority to start being a player.”

In a statement, Iowa Republican House Speaker Pat Grassley acknowledged the uphill battle that midterms can present for incumbents. But he said Republicans have faced similar pressures before, particularly in the 2020 election, and have only grown their House majority in Des Moines.

Republicans currently hold 67 of 100 Iowa House seats, all of which are up for election this year. Democrats only need to flip one seat to end the Republican House supermajority. 

“We have a lot of territory to defend, including several districts that historically voted for Democrats. Our success in these areas isn’t a fluke,” Grassley’s statement said. “With our battle-tested incumbents and a dynamic slate of hardworking candidates, we are in a strong position in every corner of the state.”

What’s at stake

In this year’s legislative special elections, Democrats have overperformed general election outcomes by a median of 10.4 points compared with how their districts voted in 2024 elections, according to government relations and lobbying firm MultiState. If Democrats maintain that kind of performance through November, the firm said, it could result in one of the largest wave elections in recent history. 

But special elections are not necessarily predictive of general elections, said Chris Cooper,  a professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. 

North Carolina Democrats are aiming to prevent a House Republican supermajority and break the Senate GOP supermajority — which would require flipping just one seat. 

“I think breaking the supermajority does seem very much in reach,” Cooper said. “Getting the majority in the Senate isn’t going to happen unless we have a political earthquake the likes of which we haven’t seen in many decades.”

Increasing their numbers in the legislature would greatly increase the power of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, who has seen a dozen of his vetoes overridden by the GOP-controlled legislature. Among other issues, those overrides have allowed laws to be enacted punishing so-called sanctuary cities and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion policies from public education. 

“It’s extremely consequential,” Cooper said. “It doesn’t mean that Democrats are going to be able to do what they want, but it does mean they’re going to be able to stop the Republicans from doing what they want.”

For Democrats, statehouse races provide a critical opportunity to oppose policies enacted by the federal government’s Republican trifecta. 

“I think part of it is that people are waking up to the power that states have always had,” said Andrew Grunwald, vice president of political strategy at The States Project, an organization working to help Democrats gain power in states. 

State lawmakers who win election this year will have a huge impact on future congressional races as states continue to redraw U.S. House maps. But Grunwald said states also have the ability to immediately legislate on affordability issues that are top of mind for voters.

“When you look at who is passing laws that impact your everyday life, it’s your state lawmakers,” he said.

That’s particularly true in states with split partisan governance, including Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

He also pointed to Pennsylvania, where Democrats control the state House but Republicans control the Senate. That divide has left hundreds of Democratic bills to die in the upper chamber. Winning a Senate majority there would require flipping three seats but could have a major impact on what legislation ultimately becomes signed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. 

While the national environment looks favorable now, Grunwald acknowledged things can change quickly.

“We need to be doing the work now,” he said. “…If we’re not doing the work, voters will recognize that and if we’re meeting voters where they are and responding to their concerns they will recognize that as well.”

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The report took a close look at the Milwaukee area, where 14.6 inches of rain set Wisconsin’s all-time record for the largest rainfall in a 24-hour period. “As a result, the Menomonee, Milwaukee, and Kinnickinnic rivers all overflowed, and rainwater flooded homes, streets, businesses, and schools in low-lying areas. Recovery efforts continue today and have been expanded to address the impacts of another massive storm that hit the area in April 2026.”  Those storms earlier this year also dropped record-breaking amounts of rain in Green Bay and Wausau, and caused historic flooding along the Wolf River basin in Shiocton, New London, and Porterfield. Researchers have long warned that increased risks of flooding and more severe storms would increase in Wisconsin due to climate change, which the administration of President Donald Trump has downplayed and dismissed as a hoax. 

Not only did the August storms fill up basements and damage homes, but there was also extensive damage to roads, parks, bridges and other public infrastructure. In and around Milwaukee, damage to public property owned by the county property, public schools, the city of Milwaukee and 18 other localities came to at least $34.7 million. That included $10 million each for Milwaukee’s public school and sewage district, as well as $1.4 million in damage calculated by county officials, half of which was road-related damage. City officials estimated $1.7 million in damage, plus $5 million in additional costs related to cleaning up debris. Wauwatosa, one of Milwaukee County’s surrounding suburban communities, estimated $6.8 million in damage to city parks, roads and buildings. 

All in all, about $240 million in damage to private and public property was left behind by the August storms in the Milwaukee-area. After deploying the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Trump administration approved $210 million in aid to help individuals rebuild, but would not provide funding to support local governments, despite multiple requests from state and local leaders. 

Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers immediately declared a state of emergency after the August storms, requesting a federal major disaster declaration for Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington, Door, Grant, and Ozaukee counties. Evers made the request both for individual and public assistance, the Wisconsin Policy Forum report notes. Over 26,000 individual damage reports were received throughout the state as the damage was being assessed. FEMA concluded that the 2025 flooding was “sufficient in severity to warrant a disaster declaration in Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Ozaukee counties but only authorized assistance to individuals and said that aid to public entities was not warranted based on the severity of the disaster,” the report states. “This meant that only individuals in these counties would be eligible for assistance and that governments have not received aid.”

It is rare for the federal government to approve one form of disaster aid while denying another, according to the report, with only 2.7% of named disasters since the year 2000 resulting in individual assistance being approved but public assistance being denied. In 2008, when severe storms and flooding hit the Milwaukee area, the federal government approved $4.5 million in assistance to local governments, as well as another $10.3 million when severe storms hit in 2010. “Milwaukee County has also received $6.1 million to help with costs associated with snowstorm cleanup since 2000,” the Wisconsin Policy Forum noted.

Earlier this month, $22.6 million in assistance was provided to several counties. President Trump used the allocation to promote Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany as a candidate for governor of Wisconsin. 

Local governments have tried to pick up the slack, but at a high cost. Normally the state distributes $1 million to $3 million to local governments to cover disaster costs, but in 2025 the damage was so extensive that $16.9 million was needed to cover damage claims, the highest annual amount in records going back to the year 2000. “This was due both to the extent of the flooding in August 2025 and the denial of federal funding that potentially could have covered at least some of these costs,” the report states. Nearly 46,000 residents in Waukesha, Washington and Milwaukee counties applied for the individual assistance following the August storms, and as of June aid has been distributed to 36,800 of eligible applicants. 

Protecting against the effects of climate change 

Some local governments including  Milwaukee County have undertaken policies to help adapt to the effects of climate change. “The sewage district has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into flood control systems in the area, including concrete infrastructure like the Deep Tunnel system as well as green infrastructure efforts such as wetland preservation, the reduction of hard surfaces such as concrete that create runoff, and other methods to limit the speed and volume of flood waters,” the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports. Without those measures, the August floods could have been “much worse,” according to the Policy Forum. “However, it’s clear from the two storms in the last 10 months that there are still thousands of structures in the area that are vulnerable to flooding.”

Recovering from disasters causes hardship. And more frequent severe weather is likely to bring on more disasters, even as, the Policy Forum found, “the availability of federal disaster relief has become more difficult to predict.” When the federal government decides to reject local communities’ calls for help, “state residents have limited recourse beyond petitioning FEMA and Congress to provide assistance.”

The report recommends that state leaders authorize additional funding to pay for disaster relief using state tax revenue. Attempts to do this by Evers and other lawmakers have previously been  rejected by the Republican-controlled Legislature. State and local leaders could also make investments in flood control and mitigation efforts and expand green infrastructure. Developing community-based insurance policies to address “these unpredictable and increasingly likely disasters” is another solution the Policy Forum suggests. 

“State and local leaders have limited control over when and where floods strike, but they can be prepared to respond when they occur,” the report concludes. “They can also reduce flood risk by investing in infrastructure that slows, stores, and redirects water.” Even these efforts may still be overwhelmed by the scale of disasters. And with the federal government demonstrating that, for whatever reason, aid isn’t guaranteed to come, Wisconsin may need to become “more self-sufficient” in responding to future disasters. 

This story was originally produced by Wisconsin Examiner, 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.

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk gave $5 million on May 8 to the super PAC working to elect Vivek Ramaswamy governor of Ohio, according to a campaign finance report the committee filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday. Listed under Musk’s title as SpaceX’s chief executive, the contribution makes the world’s richest person the newest billionaire bankrolling Ramaswamy’s bid.

The money went to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, which its own website calls the #1 Super PAC supporting Ramaswamy’s campaign. Unlike a candidate’s committee, a super PAC can raise unlimited sums and spend them to support a candidate, but it cannot coordinate with the campaign or give money to it directly.

For Musk, it is a first. He and Ramaswamy were tapped together to lead the Department of Government Efficiency after President Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, but Ramaswamy left the cost-cutting effort before Trump took office and launched his campaign for governor. NOTUS, which first reported the donation, described the $5 million as Musk’s first contribution to his former DOGE partner.

A handful of billionaires supply most of the money

Musk is far from alone. FEC records show V-PAC has raised nearly $42 million this election cycle, and most of it has come from a small group of ultra-wealthy men. Pennsylvania investor Jeff Yass, a co-founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group, has given $20 million — including two $5 million checks in the first quarter of this year. Ratmir Timashev, the Russian-born co-founder of the software company Veeam whom Forbes describes as a billionaire, gave $5 million on May 12. Pershing Square hedge-fund manager William Ackman gave $1 million on June 8. Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy, another billionaire, added $100,000. Stone Ridge Asset Management founder Ross Stevens has given $6 million.

Those four billionaires — Yass, Musk, Timashev and Ackman — account for $31 million, or nearly three of every four dollars V-PAC has raised. Add Stevens’ contributions, and five men have supplied roughly $37 million, close to seven of every eight dollars the group has taken in.

Several of V-PAC’s largest donors have direct financial stakes in matters Ohio’s next governor would help decide. Timashev has said publicly that he wants to turn Ohio into a hub for artificial intelligence — an industry built on the data centers Ramaswamy has campaigned to expand, and in which Ramaswamy himself holds investments across the sector he would regulate. Corporate and industry money has flowed in as well: the Sports Betting Alliance, an industry group, has given $650,000; Marysville-based lawn-care company The Scotts Company gave $250,000 in January; and building-products distributor ABC Supply Co. gave $500,000.

A billionaire’s race

Ramaswamy is himself a billionaire, with a net worth estimated at roughly $1.8 billion, and he has loaned his own campaign $25 million this year — about 83% of what the campaign raised in 2026. Because the money is structured as a loan, he can repay himself from funds the campaign raises later.

His Democratic opponent, former state health director Dr. Amy Acton, is not a billionaire. Her campaign has built a record-setting Democratic fundraising total for an Ohio governor’s race on small-dollar donations, with an average gift of a few dozen dollars.

Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, is running to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine and faces Acton in the Nov. 3 general election. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently shifted its rating of the contest from “Lean Republican” to “Toss-Up.”

V-PAC has already spent on Ramaswamy’s behalf. It ran a $3 million ad campaign spotlighting Trump’s endorsement, and TiffinOhio.net reported last month that one of its ads made false claims about Acton’s role in Ohio’s COVID-19 shutdowns — decisions DeWine has repeatedly said were his alone. The group also paid for a Times Square billboard urging New Yorkers to move to Ohio.

Because super PACs must disclose their donors, the filings offer a public ledger of who is financing what is on pace to be the most expensive governor’s race in Ohio history — a contest in which a small circle of the country’s wealthiest people, together with the candidate’s own fortune, now accounts for most of the money on one side. Acton has led or run even with Ramaswamy in recent public polling despite the spending gap.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The teen faces two counts of attempted murder, both first-degree felonies, and two counts of felonious assault, both second-degree felonies, according to a press release issued Thursday, July 16, by the office of Prosecutor Beth A. Tischler. The charges were filed in Sandusky County Juvenile Court following an investigation by the Gibsonburg Police Department.

Gibsonburg officers were called to a home on East Yeasting Street on Monday, July 13, where they found an adult woman and an adult man with severe injuries, the release said. The prosecutor’s office said the injuries were consistent with being stabbed and that investigators believe the woman placed the original 911 call. Both adults remain in a hospital in the Toledo area.

A juvenile male was located at the residence with superficial injuries believed to have been caused by a knife, according to the release. He was treated at a hospital before being taken to the Sandusky County Juvenile Justice Center, where he remains.

The prosecutor’s office said the charges grew as the investigation developed. A single count of felonious assault, naming the woman as the victim, was filed the day of the incident, and the teen made an initial appearance in juvenile court the next day, Tuesday, July 14. After reviewing additional evidence, prosecutors said, they added an attempted-murder count naming the woman and attempted-murder and felonious-assault counts naming the man.

Tischler’s office said it will petition the juvenile court to transfer the case to the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas so the 16-year-old can stand trial as an adult.

The office said it is withholding the identities of both victims “out of respect for their privacy.” TiffinOhio.net does not name juveniles charged with crimes.

Neither the prosecutor’s office nor Gibsonburg police have said how the people at the home are related or what led to the injuries. In an earlier release, Police Chief Donald A. Karr said officers were called to the home about 4:43 a.m. and that a fourth person, also a juvenile, was not hurt. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a division of the state attorney general’s office, was called to process the scene, and several agencies assisted, including the Woodville Police Department, the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, Sandusky County EMS and the Gibsonburg Fire Department.

The charges are allegations. The case remains in juvenile court unless the transfer petition is granted.

TiffinOhio.net first reported on the incident July 13. This story will be updated as the case proceeds.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A TiffinOhio.net review of Federal Election Commission filings shows Havas gave Husted for Senate $4,066.12 between February and August 2025. Two contributions of $1,000 each, in February and April, were earmarked directly to the campaign. The remaining $2,066.12, recorded across July and August, was routed through Team Husted, the senator’s joint fundraising committee. Ohio Secretary of State records show Havas gave another $525 in January 2023 to the DeWine-Husted transition fund. No campaign-finance violation has been alleged in connection with the contributions.

A longer money trail

Havas’s support for Husted stretches back years. Campaign-finance filings show he gave $4,000 to Husted for Ohio, the senator’s campaign committee before his appointment to the Senate, across 2023 and 2024, and added another $1,291.32 to the Senate campaign in June. Counting his earlier contributions to Mike DeWine’s gubernatorial campaign committee — the ticket on which Husted ran as lieutenant governor and served in that office from 2019 until January 2025 — and to the DeWine-Husted transition fund, Havas has given more than $22,000 to committees tied to Husted and the DeWine ticket since 2018. About $9,400 of that went to committees Husted himself controlled.

The case that ended the chair role

Havas resigned after NBC News asked Husted’s campaign about his 2009 guilty plea. According to court records reviewed by NBC News, Havas was originally charged with sexual misconduct with a minor in a case involving a 15-year-old, when he was 22. That charge was later reduced to a single misdemeanor assault count, and he pleaded guilty in 2009 and served jail time. A criminal complaint accused him of being reckless as to the minor’s age.

Husted’s campaign said it had not known about the case. “Mr. Havas did not disclose his history to the campaign,” Amy Natoce, a spokesperson for the campaign, told NBC News. “Upon learning the facts, we immediately accepted his resignation as a campaign volunteer.”

Havas had been named a Franklin County campaign chair in December, one of 112 volunteers the campaign appointed to represent Husted across Ohio’s 88 counties. He also serves as vice chair of the Franklin County Republican Party executive committee and is registered with the state as a lobbying agent. TiffinOhio.net previously reported on Havas’s resignation and on the more than $10,000 his contributions represented to Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign, which faced similar criticism from Democratic nominee Amy Acton.

Democrats renew their attack

The Ohio Democratic Party seized on the donation history. In a statement, spokesperson Tony Wen said: “Andrew Havas’ record of sexual misconduct with a minor was public, but Jon Husted had no problem keeping him as a campaign chair until people started asking questions. Even now, Jon Husted continues to proudly tout two other endorsements from allies who have faced disturbing sexual allegations involving minors. Ohioans deserve to know why Husted keeps embracing predators.”

Wen’s reference to two other allies appears to point to state Reps. Rodney Creech and Gary Click, both of whom have appeared alongside Husted’s campaign. Husted’s campaign listed Creech among its endorsers on a March graphic; in 2023, a minor relative accused Creech of climbing into bed with her, according to Bureau of Criminal Investigation records reported by the Statehouse News Bureau. No charges were filed, a prosecutor who reviewed the case called Creech’s conduct “concerning,” and Creech has denied the allegations, calling them “demonstrably false” and politically motivated. Click, Husted’s Sandusky County campaign chair, drew scrutiny over 2023 committee testimony in which he described talking to young girls about their sex lives; he has not been accused of a crime.

A tight race

Husted was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2025 by DeWine to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. He faces former Sen. Sherrod Brown in the Nov. 3 special election, one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, which will appear on ballots statewide, including in Seneca and Sandusky counties. The Havas contributions add to a broader line of Democratic scrutiny over Husted’s campaign finances heading into the fall.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

AMERICAN TOWNSHIP, Ohio – Over 373 acres of pancake flat, former farmland, Google is building a $500 million data center here, about seven miles northwest of the county seat of Lima. 

The neighbors in American Township, population 14,538, are furious. 

They’ve stuffed public hearings and public comment boxes in a perhaps fruitless effort to block an ongoing construction project pushed by one of the most powerful companies in the world. 

Their problem isn’t any one thing as much as it’s everything: shell companies Google created and the non-disclosure agreements it signed with county commissioners to keep its identity hidden; constant, noisy construction at the site and nearby roadways; reports of private water wells going ominously dry from construction; the hundreds of tons of emissions from the facility when it’s operational; fears of rising electric costs; and the hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local tax incentives Google is getting to build something the locals don’t want.  

“This is all just Google’s land,” said Becky Streeter, a retired nurse practitioner who has lived here for decades, as she drove around the megaproject construction site last month before convening with a group of a dozen neighbors who want to stop it. 

American is but one of the dozens of localities caught in the middle of Ohio’s development boom of roughly 185 current and planned data centers – the technology sector’s thinly staffed digital warehouses, lured here by generous tax credits, plentiful land and cheap electric costs. The data centers, especially such “hyperscale” operations, facilitate the rise of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency systems. 

Residents are pushing back for a mix of provincial reasons and broader criticisms about AI and the extraordinary levels of electricity and, to a lesser extent, water needed to facilitate it. 

Google’s march toward operational status highlights a lopsided power imbalance, where residents who have lived in the area for decades are effectively powerless to stop a project that was lined up in secret for years by the company. Becky Streeter’s husband, Dave, put it another way as he helped her set up the meeting at a local community center last month. 

“It’s the golden rule,” he said. “The one with the gold makes the rules.”

The project site is larger than the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It sticks out not just for the local controversy it stirred, but for its politically powerful neighbor nearby. 

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who’s among the most politically powerful men in the state, lives just a few miles away from the construction site. At the Statehouse, Huffman has led a so-far unsuccessful charge to impose new rules on data centers and roll back their tax breaks. But he has quietly avoided the fray on Google’s specific project even as it has roiled the community. 

The Americans are mad

Interviews, public meetings and written comments from locals of American and nearby Sugar Creek townships all suggest deep opposition to Google’s data center. This pits them against township and county economic development officials who have welcomed the development.

At a standing-room-only public hearing in March, a long line of citizens urged the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to reject an air permit for the facility to build a fleet of 115 gas-fired generators as a backup mechanism, according to the Lima News. 

Of 325 written comments obtained by records request, only two expressed support. Almost all others (some were ambiguous) opposed development, raising concerns about secrecy around the project, air quality, electric costs and others.

“This was all done in a very secretive manner, with no public input,” said Randy Tooker, who lives a half mile away in Elida. “I moved here for the country setting and wildlife. The noise and pollution will undoubtedly affect all of this.”

In late May, the Ohio EPA granted Bistrozzi its air permit. That allows the data center’s generators to emit 236 tons of nitrogen oxides, 96 tons of carbon dioxide, and about 5 tons of fine particulate matter. The engines can run for a maximum of 500 hours per year.

The Ohio EPA wrote in permitting documents that it issues permits based on air quality standards established by the U.S. EPA. Some commenters’ broader “concerns about community health outcomes, including elevated rates of asthma and cancer” are important but under the purview of state and local health departments.

In interviews, more than 15 American Township residents expressed opposition to the data center and a sense of frustration with their inability to do anything about it. 

Charlene McCoy lives directly east of the project. She filmed over the course of weeks a thick haze of apparent construction dust drifting over the construction site, leaving the air cloudy and smogged. She began experiencing what she believed was an allergic reaction, with inflamed and red skin. Her eyes would swell up.

“My face got burnt, over and over and over again,” she said. 

She provided Signal Statewide with pictures of her face, red and inflamed, taken over time. She paid out of pocket for inconclusive medical tests. By April 17, she checked herself into the hospital, according to paperwork she provided. A test eventually pointed to a contact irritant, which led her to suspect lime kiln dust, which is used to dry soil during production. 

Google declined to comment on her claim. Ohio EPA spokesperson Bryant Somerville said the agency heard reports about the dust and asked the company to reduce and contain its spread. He said OEPA will be on site to monitor, and that lime kiln dust shouldn’t be leaving the property or impacting neighbors. 

“The construction company has since informed Ohio EPA of its plan to control the dust, which includes additional water trucks and monitoring wind conditions during lime kiln application,” he said. 

Lelanna Spencer, 56, who lives a two-minute drive from the development, said the data center was “rammed down our throats” without any real ability to participate. At first, she said, locals were only told the land would be an industrial park. 

The “dewatering” events didn’t help. 

Google distributed a flier, obtained by Signal Statewide, informing locals of reports of residents seeing “sudden changes in water pressure, flow or temporary loss of water.” This can occur from builders temporarily pumping groundwater out from the water table to dig and build in a dry environment, the flier states. 

“If you are currently experiencing any issues with your well water … we want to hear from you directly,” the company said in a flier. “We sincerely apologize for any disruption or concern this may be causing you and your family.”

No one interviewed by Signal Statewide thought they would succeed in stopping the project, though some thought they might be able to push for better terms for neighbors. Joyce Morris, of American, called the development “a ball that’s rolling that you ain’t gonna stop.”

The negative outlook on the facilities isn’t unique to Allen County. April polling from Bowling Green State University found that about 3 in 5 Ohioans have unfavorable views about a data center being built in their hometown, and a similar percentage associate them with higher electric costs and bad environmental outcomes. That number is 7 in 10 nationally, according to Gallup polling. 

“We oppose everything about the Data Center being built at the end of our road, but most of all the lack of transparency that there has been with this entire project,” said Shelly Reiff, of Elida, in a public comment. 

Discreet data center developers, major tax breaks

The earliest known indications of the development trace to 2022, when Bistrozzi LLC, later revealed as a front company for Google, was incorporated in Delaware. 

In 2025, Bistrozzi began acquiring hundreds of acres of land and striking tax deals and a non-disclosure agreement with the county commissioners for what was then only publicly  known as “Project BOSC.”

The three-year non-disclosure agreement, signed May 27, 2025, obligated commissioners to stay mum about private details of the data center while they consider a local tax abatement for it, according to a copy of the agreement obtained in a records request. 

On a state level, Google is already contractually exempt from Ohio’s 5.75% sales tax, plus any local sales taxes (i.e. a 1.1% sales tax in Allen County) on its builds. This exemption lasts until 2058 and is expected to save the company at least $600 million, in an estimate that state officials say is likely an underestimation because the total cost isn’t known until companies submit receipts to the state after the fact. 

In addition, the county in April 2025 established a “community reinvestment area,” abating 75% of the assessed value of the data center when calculating its property taxes. As part of the deal, Bistrozzi agreed to pay $250,000 annually over 15 years to Elida Local Schools.

In August that year, Bistrozzi (and later, “Bistrozzi Additional LLC”) began spending about $45 million on 373 acres of land split between five landowners, county records show. It also won a permit from the Ohio EPA to fill in about 0.7 acres of wetlands to build. The company agreed to offset the wildlife disruption via mitigation and conservation work at a metropark 90 minutes away. 

Then there was the water. In September 2025, the city of Lima agreed to sell between 5 and 10 million gallons of water per day to the facility over 20 years. Water officials say the plant can handle the new demand, but some residents expressed skepticism. Google says the $500 million it’s investing in the area includes $50 million flowing to public works projects, including road construction and updates to Lima’s water system. 

Only after all these pieces fell into place did Google in March of this year reveal itself as the project developer. 

The announcement included a reference to building roundabouts in town to facilitate added traffic. However, the Allen County Port Authority recently delayed construction on those roundabouts “to allow for adjustments in response to public input.”

Several residents said the port authority planned to use eminent domain to seize land without owners’ permission, for property that includes family land or the site of a popular farmstand, according to Streeter. 

An Allen County Port Authority spokesperson declined to respond to inquiries about alleged use of eminent domain, stating the project is still in the design phase, and “efforts are underway to minimize impacts to surrounding property owners.”

None of the three county commissioners responded to an interview request. 

A powerful neighbor

Matt Huffman lives not far from the project site. He’s currently the Ohio House Speaker after having finished a stint as the Senate President, and is considered among the most powerful figures in Ohio Republican politics after nearly 20 years in the Statehouse and 14 years on Lima’s city council. 

While he has positioned himself against data centers at the Statehouse, he has avoided the hyperscaler controversy in Allen County. 

As House Speaker, the de facto leader of the chamber, Huffman controls the agenda and can move or stall bills at his leisure. 

The Ohio House under his leadership has attempted, without success, to impose new regulations on data centers, ban their non-disclosure agreements with local public officials, and end the statewide sales tax exemption, which cost Ohio $2 billion last year in state and local sales tax revenue, with most benefits going to parent companies of Google, Facebook and Amazon. 

House Republicans nearly passed legislation last month that would roughly halve – but not end – data centers’ sales and property tax incentives. It would also require them to secure their own sources of electricity by either building their own power plants or entering long-term electric supply contracts, and adhere to “best industry practices for water conservation and water-use efficiency.”

Huffman and others in his leadership team in June nixed a final vote on sending the bill to Gov. Mike DeWine, late at night on the final lawmaking day until mid-November. He said at the time that members were frustrated that the bill doesn’t zero out data centers’ sales tax credit – several lawmakers have said the rapidly inflating size of the credit was kept secret from them, adding to the frustration. 

But Huffman’s pugilism hasn’t extended to American Township. 

He declined an interview request about the project. When asked after a statehouse press conference in June what he thinks about it, Huffman avoided specifics, noting he only heard about the data center a few months ago and he hopes Google is following the “spirit” of the House legislation in terms of water and electricity. 

“As projects like these move forward, our priorities remain clear: protecting local control over siting, ensuring data centers provide the energy they require, and safeguarding local water resources,” he said in a statement later.

The hands-off approach is a far cry from when he personally intervened at the Ohio Power Siting Board in 2022, asking its commissioners to kill Birch Solar, a massive solar farm planned in Allen County. At the time, he excoriated the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for siding with “out-of-country rent seekers over the Ohioans who would be impacted” by the solar farm. 

“I believe that local officials elected by their neighbors, rather than Columbus-based interest groups, are in the best position to determine what is best for their communities. After all, they are the ones who are actually living in the impacted community,” he wrote.

‘Long-term investments in the people’

Along with the American Township facility, Google has data center campuses in Lancaster and New Albany, collectively totaling $20 billion in investments in Ohio, per the company.

Molly Kocour Boyle, Google’s regional head of data center public affairs, described its data centers as “long-term investments in the people and local economy of the communities we call home.”

She didn’t respond to some specific questions, but described the company as one of the region’s “top taxpayers” and the confidentiality agreements as a common practice in industrial real estate development. 

“We recognize a project of this scale brings changes; as with any construction process, there is some disruption, but we are committed to working closely with local officials, state agencies, and nearby residents to address questions as they arise,” she said. 

“The collaboration we’ve experienced with local leaders has been vital to our progress. We look forward to being a supportive neighbor and ensuring our presence creates lasting, positive opportunities for residents and small businesses alike.”

Cindy Leis, a project supporter who leads both the county’s economic development arm and its port authority, declined an interview request and instead requested written questions, which she didn’t respond to. 

A familiar story for data centers in Ohio

For Becky Streeter, whose retirement has been at least partially overtaken by advocating against the data center, American Township is home. For Google, it’s not even the only rural Ohio operation in the project queue.

“Tilted Gate LLC” in January said it planned to build a 500,000-square-foot data center in Franklin Furnace, in hilly southern Scioto County, for $1 billion. The county commissioners signed non-disclosure agreements with the developers.

From there, according to WSAZ, the commissioners and developers jointly revealed Google’s identity behind the project and approved a 75% property tax abatement for 15 years, partially offset by a $500,000 payment to the local school system.

Citizens voiced broad opposition at public hearings and filed a lawsuit against the county commissioners, alleging violations of state open meetings laws.

Site work on “Project Dazzler,” according to Google, is scheduled to begin this year.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Blanche also said he would consider any new information brought forward to the government about deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of powerful associates. Multiple Epstein abuse survivors attended the Blanche confirmation hearing, some wearing t-shirts depicting the black bar redactions contained within the released files.

Blanche, who previously worked as President Donald Trump’s defense attorney, appeared before a tightly divided Senate Committee on the Judiciary. 

The Republican-led panel is now split 11-10 after the sudden death Saturday of South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. A large bouquet of white roses was placed before his empty seat Wednesday.

Lawmakers volleyed partisan accusations about the weaponization of the Department of Justice under presidents from both parties. Missouri’s GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt called former Biden administration special counsel Jack Smith a “dirt bag” for his involvement in prosecuting Trump over allegations of colluding to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But it was the plan for a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that brought tough questions for Blanche from two committee Republicans whose votes he needs to advance, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. The fund was established in exchange for Trump dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for the 2019 leak of his tax returns.

With a raised voice, Tillis said he wants “to stick a fork in this turkey of a 1776 fund,” referring to the administration’s choice of making the fund exactly $1.776 billion, adding the fund “should never be paid out.”

Confirmation fight

The acting attorney general faces a possible rocky road to confirmation in the narrowly divided full Senate, assuming he is advanced by Judiciary, depending on when Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell is released from hospitalization. Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have previously opposed some items on Trump’s agenda.

Blanche’s confirmation will also be up to a handful of lame duck or retiring Republican senators whose future Senate careers were thwarted by Trump. They include Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Bill Cassidy, R-La. Both recently lost primaries when Trump endorsed their opponents.

Blanche is a former federal prosecutor who switched to private law, eventually starting his own firm and representing Trump. 

Blanche defended Trump during a New York state jury trial on charges that the then-former president falsified business records when he paid adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump was found guilty on 34 felony charges in May 2024. 

Blanche then served as the deputy at DOJ in the second Trump administration, confirmed on a party-line vote, before being named acting AG after the departure in early June of Pam Bondi.

Trump and the Republican-led Senate have elevated the president’s former personal lawyers to high-level positions in the U.S. judicial system during his second term in office. 

In addition to appointing Blanche, the president nominated former defense attorney Emil Bove to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. 

The Senate, in a narrow 50-49 vote, confirmed Bove for the lifetime position in June 2025. Collins and Murkowski broke with Republicans to oppose Bove’s confirmation.

‘Anti-weaponization’ fund

Blanche caught heat from both sides of the aisle during the hourslong hearing for signing off on the “anti-weaponization” fund for claimants he previously described as “victims of lawfare.” 

Critics quickly pounced on what they called a “slush fund” for its likely future payouts to pardoned Jan. 6, 2021 defendants, including those who assaulted police officers during the attack aimed at halting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Blanche maintains the administration scrapped the fund.

The acting attorney general sidestepped questions on whether he approved of Trump’s blanket pardon of roughly 1,600 defendants implicated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“The Constitution gives the president the full power to pardon anybody for any reason,” Blanche said.

“You don’t question his decision?” ranking member Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked.

Blanche repeated his answer.

Cornyn, displaying a blown-up copy of the IRS settlement deal, questioned Blanche on why the Department of Justice has not formally ended the fund.

“Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund?” asked Cornyn.

“No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward. There’s no modification. It’s just, it never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account,” Blanche replied.

“I’m under oath today, and I’ve said it’s dead repeatedly,” Blanche later said to Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat.

Tillis said, “I think that the courts are probably going to deal with it. But why should we waste the court capacity on this issue? If I could walk to the Senate floor with an agreed-to piece of text coming from the administration that just renders this whole thing dead?”

Blanche said the administration does “not object (to) that path.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, defended the arrangement to drop Trump’s IRS lawsuit as a “pretty darn good deal” that was settled “without the president receiving a single penny.”

Blanche met with angry Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill May 21 to sell the settlement fund as several protested it by holding out on the passage of a massive immigration funding bill to support Trump’s mass deportation agenda for the remainder of his term.

Blanche told House appropriators during a June 2 hearing that the administration would not move forward with the fund, but said he didn’t know “what that means to sign documents reversing” the fund.

Trump tax immunity

Trump’s settlement to drop his IRS lawsuit also indefinitely absolves him and his two plaintiff sons, Don Jr. and Eric, as well as the private Trump Organization, from government prosecutions and tax enforcement.

Democrats seized on the disparity. “Everyone in this room, all of us on this side, we have to follow the tax laws of the United States, and if we don’t, we can be held responsible for it to the point of even criminal prosecution,” Durbin said. 

“Why did you decide that President Trump and his family and their businesses should be exempt from that same responsibility?” the Illinois Democrat asked.

Blanche said the agreement was “typical” of settlements with the IRS, and that the agreement “included release of any past audits. It does not give any protection to the president, his family, or his organizations for any taxes they file.”

“It’s hard to explain to the American people that no one is above the law when that type of document was signed by you,” Durbin replied.

The Florida federal judge in the IRS case on Monday slammed Trump’s settlement with his own administration as using the presidency to “manipulate” the courts.

Epstein files

As expected, senators questioned the Justice Department’s handling of the legally mandated release of government files on Epstein, a process that critics and victims say fell short of full transparency and protection of victims’ identities.

Blanche defended the department’s “Herculean” effort in reviewing millions of documents related to the government’s federal investigation of Epstein 

“There were mistakes that were made, and so approximately 1% of the redactions had to be fixed after we released the Epstein files,” Blanche said. 

“Whenever we learned that any victim’s name had been improperly not redacted, we immediately took the document down and fixed it as soon as we could. That doesn’t excuse the mistakes of which I take responsibility, but it does mean that we tried to fix them,” Blanche said.

Durbin asked for a commitment that Blanche personally meet in the next month with 10 Epstein victims present at the hearing. Blanche said a sex trafficking prosecutor in his office is willing to meet any time, and that he is precluded from doing so because of ongoing litigation.

“We will never not talk to victims. We will never not do everything we can to prosecute anybody that committed any crimes against any of these women. … Any victim, if they’re here today, I would encourage them or their lawyers to meet with the FBI,” Blanche said.

“I think you ought to be in the room,” Durbin said.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said he was “stunned” at Blanche’s refusal to meet personally with victims.

“But you did meet with Ghislaine Maxwell,” Booker said, referring to Blanche’s July 2025 meeting with the convicted sex trafficker and Epstein co-conspirator shortly before she was moved to a prison with less security.

Epstein survivors submitted six letters to the committee opposing Blanche’s nomination, and Durbin also submitted for the record a letter from 1,200 former career DOJ employees who served for both parties warning against confirming Blanche.

When prompted by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to apologize to victims in the room, Blanche said his “heart breaks for every victim of any sexual crime, whether involving Mr. Epstein or somebody else.”

Pivoting the subject to a campaign refrain of Republicans, Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said she appreciated Blanche’s “commitment” to the Epstein victims and that she wished Democrats “had that same level of conviction” for “families of those who have lost loved ones at the hands of illegal aliens.”

Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, entered a handful of letters in support of Blanche’s confirmation, including from law enforcement associations.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce approved — nearly along party lines — each of the package’s 10 bills that would permanently transfer several of Education’s functions to other departments. 

The measure, largely reflecting many of the interagency agreements, or IAAs, Education has signed with other agencies, signifies a sweeping effort from Republicans in Congress to carry out the Trump administration’s plan to do away with the 46-year-old department as part of the president’s quest to return education “back to the states.” 

That drive continues, though much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.

But the legislation faces an uncertain fate. Even if passed in the full U.S. House down the line, it would face steep odds in the narrowly GOP-controlled Senate. 

The upper chamber requires at least 60 senators to advance a bill past the filibuster, and Republicans hold just 53 seats.

Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the House panel, lauded the package as the “first step toward ending the Department of Education’s reign over our nation’s education system,” during his panel’s markup. 

The Michigan Republican added that the legislation advances Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s “vision for an education system that empowers families, students, workers and local communities.” 

McMahon said “today marks a major step by Congressional leaders to cement the Trump Administration’s historic reforms to right-size the federal role in education,” in a statement after the package advanced out of the committee. 

Other departments to take over

Under multiple bills, the Department of Labor would manage Education’s programs surrounding elementary and secondary education; postsecondary education; and career, technical and adult education — mirroring earlier IAAs. 

In another piece of legislation, the Treasury Department would manage Education’s federal student aid functions, a nod to a March agreement Education signed with Treasury to take over its responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt.

That agreement marked the first step in a multiphase process toward Treasury taking on Education’s entire roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

Under other bills in the package, the State Department would manage Education’s international education and foreign language studies programs, as well as its foreign gift and contract reporting — also mirroring earlier agreements. 

Reflecting additional IAAs, the Department of Health and Human Services would manage Education’s accreditation for foreign medical schools; functions regarding child care access for low-income parents in postsecondary education; and family engagement programs for elementary and secondary education. 

The Interior Department would also manage tribal education and job training programs under the package. 

Notably, the 10-bill package does not include any efforts to transfer Education’s responsibilities regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies. 

In perhaps the Trump administration’s most far-reaching attempts yet to dismantle the Education Department, the agency in June said HHS will administer programs under the Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, while civil rights enforcement under its Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, will be transferred to the Department of Justice. 

Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the panel, said that the committee’s move to not consider either of the two actions in the package was possibly because “even my colleagues recognize how politically unpalatable such transfers would be.” 

‘Pain and suffering’

Meanwhile, the legislative package drew fierce pushback from congressional Democrats on the committee, who offered up a slew of amendments to the bills in an attempt to block the dismantling. 

Scott, a Virginia Democrat, said “it’s difficult to articulate how impractical these proposals are, to say nothing of the pain and suffering they’ll inflict on students, educators and their communities, if they were to become law.” 

He pointed to the GOP’s objective of stripping down the department as part of its intent to “return education to the states,” saying these proposals “will actually contribute to the creation of miles of bureaucratic red tape, inconsistent education policy and enforcement across the federal government and a significant waste of the taxpayers’ money.” 

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici said the bills under consideration “demonstrate that Republicans in Congress know that the Department of Education lacks the authority to transfer offices and programs to other federal agencies without congressional action, and are now trying to cover for the unlawful actions already taken.” 

The Oregon Democrat, who introduced an impeachment resolution against McMahon in June, added that the secretary “has said that it is her mission to shut down the Department of Education, something she does not have the authority to do, but that is exactly what she is doing, disguised as a series of interagency agreements.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nor was the ranking an evaluation of which state had attracted the most high-quality jobs. It was something less concrete: a measure of which states were best positioned according to the criteria on which states market themselves.

For their part, critics said the rankings don’t pay proper attention to the severe financial difficulties in which millions of now Ohioans find themselves.

Big party

Last Thursday, Ohio Republicans were triumphal about the top ranking.

The CNBC broadcast segment started with Ohio State football legend Archie Griffin declaring, “We have a winning team in Ohio, both on and off the field.” 

It cut to a celebration at the Boathouse at Columbus’s Confluence Park, replete with drone shots of Ohio State cheerleaders and an interview with Gov. Mike DeWine.

Of the many press releases that went out, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman issued one crediting policies enacted since the start of the GOP’s total legislative and executive rule in 2011.

“I want to congratulate the many members of the Ohio General Assembly who have supported legislation over the last 15 years that led to this accomplishment,” Huffman said in a written statement. 

He went on, “Through responsible policies and investments, including the elimination of Ohio’s estate tax, flattening the personal income tax, business income deductions, regulatory reform, free market energy creation, substantial support for vocational training, tools for state and local economic development, and much more, we have continued to make Ohio the best place to live, work, raise a family, and do business.”

However, the think tank Policy Matters Ohio has said that many of those and other changes since 2005 have favored corporations and the wealthy while cutting $17 billion in state tax revenue. 

Critics said that leaves huge numbers of moderate-income Ohioans facing an affordability crisis with less support from the state — and shouldering more of the burden to pay for services that remain.

“Ohio’s No. 1 ranking may be good news for businesses, but it doesn’t reflect the reality that many of the most common jobs in the state pay too little for even a single person to get by — and far too little to raise a family,” Policy Matters Executive Director Hannah Halbert said in a written statement. “Ohioans still struggle with unaffordable childcare, gaps in health coverage, and wages that have not kept pace with inflation.”

Method and metrics

The stark disagreement over the benefits of GOP economic policies raises an obvious question: When CNBC rated Ohio best for business, what was it seeking to measure?

“We’re looking at this through the lens of somebody who is selecting a site, whatever it is, a plant or a data center, how they’re making their decisions,” Scott Cohn, the CNBC reporter who covered the story, said in an interview. “That’s how this all began back in 2007 — why are companies choosing this state over that state?”

But when the CNBC team did its evaluation, it didn’t attempt an entirely objective look at which states were best for business. Rather, it based its analysis on how states were promoting themselves. 

The study determined what states’ economic-development arms collectively mentioned most in materials promoting their states. Then it sought to measure which states did best in providing those things. 

Year by year, states change how they promote themselves to businesses. The CNBC study assesses the pitches of all 50 states each year to decide what weight to give to each of the 10 criteria on which it ranks individual states.

This year, the top category was infrastructure — adequate roads, bridges, electricity, and “shovel ready” sites on which to build. And, in addition to available water, a major factor in Ohio’s success wasn’t the consequence of any government policy, it was an accident of geography.

“We go through and see how the states are marketing themselves,” Cohn said. “We’re going to their websites and tallying up what they’re mentioning the most, the things that we lump into the category of infrastructure. 

“So for example — and this really helps Ohio — almost every state… says ‘We have X amount of population within a day’s drive. Well, you can measure that, and Ohio has the most. Ohio has 143 million people within a day’s drive, more than any other state. So it gets some points for that within the category of infrastructure.”

Conversely, the rankings de-emphasize other criteria not because they’re unimportant to businesses, but because state marketing materials don’t make a big deal out of them. 

For example, a top-notch public-education system is clearly important to businesses in at least two ways: It trains their future workforce and it’s a big selling point for firms trying to attract talent.

Yet when CNBC weighted its 10 criteria, education was second-to-last, receiving only 4% of the overall ranking. 

“We look at what the states are talking about,” Cohn said. “For whatever reason, some states talk about (education) a lot, and a lot of states talk about, ‘We have a great university system.’ That counts toward a state’s weight. But it’s not what the states are saying in aggregate.”

Whack-a-mole

Cohn explained that good or bad performance on certain criteria can have the opposite effect on others.

“It’s kind of like a game of whack-a-mole, you can lower the business cost,” he said. “That’s great for businesses, but in the process you’re lowering wage costs and you’re doing all sorts of things that affect individuals. And if you have an affordability issue with individuals, well maybe you’re going to have a problem with workforce.”

As Cohn pointed out to DeWine during their interview, Ohio ranks poorly for workforce — 35th. 

“It’s a glaring weak spot,” Cohn told the governor. “Not just because the workers are not here, but because they’re not coming and many are leaving.”

In addition, because weighting depends solely on what states’ marketers think is important, many Ohioans — and maybe some businesses — could disagree with their priorities.

For example, Ohio ranked No. 1 for its low cost of doing business, which as the fifth-highest criterion, made up 11.4% of the ranking. 

Low wages helped Ohio in that regard, but Cohn explained that they hurt states in the cost-of-living category.

“Lower wage costs counts toward the cost of doing business, but maybe it comes back to bite them on cost of living,” he said.

However, because state marketers don’t emphasize it, an affordable cost of living ranked dead last, making up just 2% of the state’s overall rating.

In other words, the rankings don’t say there’s no affordability crisis in Ohio. They say that as a group, state economic marketers don’t consider that a priority when they’re selling their states.

Who wins?

So do the rankings vindicate or repudiate the economic policies Ohio Republicans have implemented since 2011?

“Neither,” Cohn said. “We gather up the data through the lens that I told you about — looking at where is a company going to locate. And if what everybody wants in their politicians is the party that’s going to attract the most business — and that’s a perfectly valid thing to want — then this says a lot about what Ohio is doing in that regard.”

But, he added, “If they’re looking for areas where the state doesn’t do as well, it speaks for itself. It’s not the best state for education. It’s not the top state for workforce. It’s not the top state for quality of life. It’s not bad, but it’s not anywhere near the top. It’s a study of the top states for business. It’s not a study of the top states for workers. But there are areas in there that you can look to, like quality of life or whatever else.”

The November midterm elections are approaching. And Ohio Democrats said that if Republicans want to use the CNBC ranking to say the economy is good for average Ohioans, they’re ignoring reality.

U.S. Sen. “Jon Husted and Ohio Republicans are bragging about the economy while hardworking Ohioans are struggling more than ever,” Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Tony Wen said in an email. “Under their leadership, inflation is up, gas prices have skyrocketed, and more than 160,000 Ohioans have lost their healthcare — but Husted still thinks everything is great. Ohioans know better, and they’ll hold him accountable in November.”

For his part, Husted took to X to tout the CNBC ranking. 

“This did not happen by accident—it has been decades of focus,” he wrote. “We’ve cut taxes, eliminated three business taxes, and invested in infrastructure and our workforce. We also made Ohio the easiest and lowest cost state to do business.”

Asked for a response to Wen’s criticism, Husted Communications Director Amy Natoce didn’t answer — other than to attempt to attack the credibility of the Ohio Capital Journal.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The study shows the percentage of Ohio students not proficient in reading has increased 4% from 2019 and Ohio students not proficient in math has jumped 6% since 2019. 

Despite those increases, Ohio fared better than the rest of the country — 70% of American fourth graders were not proficient in reading and 73% of American eighth graders were not proficient in math, according to the report.

Ohio ranked 27th in the nation overall, 12th in the nation for education, 26th for health, 27th for economic well-being, 27th for child well-being, and 33rd for family and community, according to the study released last month. This is the 37th edition of the foundation’s data book. 

“Our current rankings reveal the urgent need for policies that reduce child poverty, improve educational outcomes, and expand health coverage,” Ohio’s Children’s Defense Fund Director John Stanford said in a statement. 

“We cannot afford to wait—our children’s futures depend on it.” 

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year, one year after the law was enacted through the 2023 state budget.

The science of reading is based on decades of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine often touts the science of reading and lists it among some of the most important work he has done for Ohio’s children.

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level in the 2024-25 school year compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent state report cards that were released in September.

DeWine recently signed an academic interventions bill into law which requires school districts or individual schools to provide academic interventions for free to students who scored at a limited skill level in a state assessment test in math or English language arts, or both.

Ohio high school students not graduating on time declined — going from 18% in 2018-19 to 12% in 2023-24, according to the report. Nationally, 13% of high school students did not graduate on time. 

There were 165,000 Ohio children ages 3 and 4 not in school from 2020-24 — going from 55% from 2015-19 to 59% from 2020-24, the study said. The national rate was 54%. 

The study showed Ohio’s child poverty rate decreased since 2019 — dropping from 18% to 16% in 2024. 

There were 417,000 Ohio children living in poverty in 2024; 661,000 children whose parents lack secure employment, 632,000 children living in households with a high housing cost burden; and 38,000 teenagers not in school and not working, according to the report.  

Nationally, 15% of children were living in poverty.

Health

Nearly 9% of babies in Ohio were born with low birth weight in 2024 — totaling 11,158, according to the study. 

About 152,000 Ohio children (6%) did not have health insurance — a percentage point better from 2019. About 1.4 million Ohio children are enrolled in Medicaid. 

The percentage of Ohio children 10-17 who were overweight or obese dropped from 35% in 2018-19 to 31% in 2023-24, the study says. The national rate was 30%. 

Economic well-being

Nearly 14% of Ohio children are receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, the study says. 

About a third of Ohio children were living in single-parent families — totaling 852,000, according to the study. This is a decrease from 37% in 2019. 

Ten percent of Ohio children lived in high-poverty areas during 2020-24, a decrease from 12% in 2019. 

Nationally, 7% of children were living in high-poverty areas. 

“Every number in this report tells a story about Ohio’s children—stories of resilience, disparities, and potential,” Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio Policy and Research Manager Christian Davis said in a statement. 

“It’s time for Ohio to prioritize investments in early childhood, education, health, and family stability. Our children’s well-being should be a shared responsibility and a top priority for all policymakers.”

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.

And yet, Ohio’s leading Republican politicians can never say this. They can never acknowledge this basic fact.

They can never be honest with the public, or in public, about that very simple truth.

“Donald Trump lost the 2020 Election.” They can not say it. They’re too scared, too cowardly, too cynical, and too ethically corrupted to say it.

Every time they refuse to acknowledge the truth, they debase themselves as human beings, they debase America as a functioning democracy, and they disgrace themselves and their family name for all of history.

In those moments, all of their most amoral political instincts take hold. It’s pathetic.

Trump’s claims of voter fraud were rejected by 60 courts, Fox News had to pay out $787 million over false stories about vote rigging. That doesn’t matter. None of it matters. No fact matters. They’ve fully embraced epistemological nihilism.

But many go much further than refusing to admit a clear fact.

They repeat falsehoods. They stoke distrust. They play demagogue and paint fellow Americans as enemies. They fan the flames of wild-eyed conspiracy theories no matter the destruction it’s doing to the American Republic, because they know the manipulation is useful for them politically.

Without evidence, they make outrageous allegations of fraud, and then when they have sufficiently riled up the rubes who believe their lies, they claim the American people are “concerned about the safety of elections.”

Then, due to concerns based on their own lies, they carry out an endless string of vast, sweeping policy changes that make it far more difficult for millions of American citizens to vote.

In November 2020, then-president Donald Trump lost a free and fair election. He spent the next two-and-a-half months losing court cases over it and lying relentlessly to the American people.

The relentless lies culminated in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol attempting to stop constitutional business and overturn the results of the free and fair election.

Trump was impeached by the U.S. House for the second time because of the attempted insurrection and violent transfer of power he instigated, but Republicans in the U.S. Senate refused to convict him for it and he retained his stranglehold over the Republican Party.

Instead of holding Trump accountable for the most egregious betrayal of American democracy ever carried out by a U.S. president, Republican politicians have spent the last six years trying to justify his lies with more lies and punishing voters with new laws restricting their access to the franchise.

In the 2020 Election, Ohio’s own hyperpartisan secretary of state found only 27 possible instances of voter fraud, which represents 0.0005% of ballots cast.

Voter fraud is not a problem in Ohio. The manufactured mass hysteria over the non-existent problem is a cynical political manipulation and nothing more.

What makes it such an absolute betrayal of American democracy is that these overt and blatant lies are being used to attack citizens’ most foundational right in a constitutional republic: the right to vote.

For more than half a decade now, based on lies, Ohio Republican politicians have overhauled elections and voting in Ohio.

They enacted the strictest voter ID law in the country.

They eliminated voters’ ability to use utility bills and bank statements for proof of residency or identification.

They eliminated early voting on the Monday prior to Election Day.

They limited which documents Ohioans could use to register to vote.

They limited curbside voting as strictly as possible so someone has to be disabled to the point they can’t walk into a polling place to use it.

They limited absentee ballot drop-boxes to one per county, and it doesn’t matter if there are 12,000 voters in that county or one million.

They limited who could return an absentee ballot for someone else.

They mandated new paperwork for any family member assisting relatives.

First they changed the grace period for absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day from having 10 days to actually arrive at boards of elections, down to four days. Then they eliminated the grace period entirely.

This summer, Ohio Republican lawmakers passed a bill to require photo ID for mail-in ballots, but it was vetoed by Gov. Mike DeWine, though the gerrymandered Republican supermajority is considering overriding his veto.

And even though they’ve already enacted the strictest voter ID law in the country, Republican lawmakers have put a duplicative constitutional amendment on the ballot this November in an effort to juice GOP turnout based on the election fraud fears Republicans have drummed up that are based on all their relentless lies about the 2020 Election.

The amendment actually goes further than the law by requiring photo ID but failing to include a provision for free ID to those who would need it.

Furthermore, it telegraphs a desire to eliminate early voting opportunities by asserting that lawmakers are not required to provide any opportunity for voting other than in-person at polling places on Election Day.

Eighty Ohioans testified against the proposed amendment and only two spoke for it. That didn’t matter. It never does. It could be 1,000 to zero. They don’t care. They passed it anyway. It will be on the ballot in November.

Maybe you think all these election changes are a good thing. Maybe you don’t. But what I can’t get over is that none of them have been made in good faith.

A problem didn’t exist. It was already very hard to cheat, but now voting in Ohio is much harder because of lies.

All of these restrictions on voters and changes to Ohio elections have been built on a mountain of the most shameless lies.

And all those lies are a direct and open attack on the health and wellbeing of American democracy itself.

It’s all so reprehensible and indicative of the absolute worst in people, I just wonder when this madness in America will end. How much more pain will it take? And what will be left for future generations when it’s finally over?

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

PJM, a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that manages the supply on the largest electricity grid in the nation, announced the results Tuesday of the auction held from late June to mid July. 

The $325-per-megawatt-day price for generating capacity in 2028 and 2029 is at the maximum price under a cap initially negotiated by Pennsylvania’s Shapiro administration last year after the 2024 auction closed at a record price of $269.92 per megawatt-day. 

The cap was extended by PJM at the request of a coalition of PJM-state governors and the Trump administration to cover the latest auction and one to be held in December for 2030 and 2031.

“These auction results show that demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply,” PJM President and CEO David Mills said. “At the same time, PJM recognizes how this supply-and-demand imbalance impacts the reliability of the system and costs for consumers. We are working with government and industry leaders on multiple fronts to restore that balance by bringing on new generation as fast as possible and managing the growth of new load on the grid.”

A combination of retiring fossil fuel power plants, increased electrification of transportation and industry and proposed data center development has caused peak forecasts to increase by 66,000 megawatts by 2036. That’s nearly 80 times the output of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which is set to reopen next year exclusively to power data centers.

“Demand growth is not going away. That is the driving story here,” said Patrick Cicero, the former Pennsylvania consumer advocate who now works with the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project.

PJM also announced Tuesday that the auction fell 6,831 megawatts short of the grid manager’s capacity goal, which is a larger deficit than in last year’s auction.

“Data center load growth is degrading grid reliability, and it’s raising prices to the Governor Shapiro-negotiated cap,” said Robert Routh, Pennsylvania state lead for climate and energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So, unless PJM and states take action, this picture will continue to worsen for the foreseeable future.”

But Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, said the price reflects the competitive electricity generating industry’s willingness to invest to meet the increased demand. Recent year-over-year record lows had discouraged investment in power supply, he said in a statement.  

“Competitive power suppliers are already responding,” Snitchler added. “New supply is coming; the issue now is to address getting it connected to the system as quickly as possible.

Among PJM’s responsibilities is vetting proposals for new power plants, transmission lines and other electric infrastructure and approving their connections to the grid. It has faced intense criticism for allowing a years-long backlog of projects to linger, causing some to drop out of the market. PJM notes it has made significant progress in reducing the backlog by prioritizing shovel-ready projects.

PJM’s primary role in managing the grid is to ensure that each of its 67 million customers has the least expensive electricity available for their location at any given time. But it also must ensure the supply is reliable. 

To do that, it holds auctions for power plant operators to bid to set the price to keep their generators standing by for the peak electricity demand that comes on the hottest and coldest days of the year.

Cicero, who spoke to reporters Tuesday, ahead of PJM’s announcement, said market dynamics indicated this month’s auction would close at or near the cap. 

The last two auctions have added around $16 billion to the cost of ensuring reliability, he said. And any additional generating capacity added in the last year have not been enough to appreciably increase capacity. As a result, the increased cost will remain in place into 2028 and 2029, he said. 

“These are flat prices that are going to remain high. It’s not necessarily another spike, but it’s really, really high prices remaining,” Cicero said.

While the relationship between the auction price and what consumers see on their electric bill is not direct, some Pennsylvania utilities have increased the rate they charge people who don’t shop for their electric rates – some by up to 20%.

“This has cost the average residential consumer in Pennsylvania somewhere in the neighborhood of $220 to $320 per year in additional costs on their bill,” he said.   

In addition to extending the price cap, PJM and its members from the electricity industry have been working on additional steps to isolate residential and small business customers from the demand brought by data centers, Routh said. 

One, sought by the PJM governors and the Trump administration, is another auction to fund increases in capacity and reliability by getting data center operators and other large load customers to purchase long-term commitments for electricity. 

Routh described it as a matchmaking venue for data centers and suppliers to meet and arrange to pay for new power supplies to be built “without raising prices for everyone else.”

That process faces the same challenges blocking new electricity supplies for everyone. Those include supply chain delays, long timelines for building new infrastructure and siting and permitting hurdles. A lack of money is not among the problems, Routh noted. 

“Tech companies, data center customers that have a need for power have deep pockets,” he said. “Any power plant that can get built these days should have no problem finding buyers and arranging financing.”

This story was originally produced by Pennsylvania Capital-Star, 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 ads target Democratic Senate candidates in Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Michigan for not supporting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which the NRSC claims stopped undocumented immigrants from receiving Medicaid benefits.

This claim is false. Federal law already barred undocumented people from accessing Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) coverage. Instances of undocumented people being erroneously enrolled in these programs are extremely rare.

Republicans have made this claim about OBBB repeatedly since the legislation was introduced. Health policy experts, including the Kaiser Family Foundation and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, have repeatedly debunked it.

The law does, however, make profound changes to Medicaid. OBBB will cut about $1 trillion from the health insurance program over the next decade, resulting in up to 12 million Americans losing their coverage. The bulk of those cuts will fund tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Sens. Jon Husted (OH) and Dan Sullivan (AK) both voted for OBBB, as did Reps. Ashley Hinson (IA) and Mike Collins (GA), who are both running for Senate this year. Former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu and former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who are also running for Senate, have both publicly praised the law.

Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina, said he would have voted for OBBB “in a heartbeat.”

A tracking poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that OBBB is deeply unpopular with voters. Sixty-four percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of the law. Among independents, 71% oppose it.

President Donald Trump has proposed additional tax cuts and further cuts to government programs if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate after the 2026 elections.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio Secretary of State campaign-finance records show that Michael DeAscentis II and Melanie DeAscentis, both listed at the same New Albany address, each contributed $12,500 to the Ramaswamy campaign on June 5. DeAscentis is the chief executive of Nationwide Energy Partners, a Columbus-area submetering firm, and of the apartment developer Lifestyle Communities.

Submetering companies buy electricity in bulk and resell it to tenants in apartments and condominiums, often adding fees. The arrangement has drawn complaints for years over billing practices and the fact that submetered residents cannot shop for their own power supplier or use state utility-assistance programs.

The contributions to Ramaswamy came the same week DeAscentis directed money to two of the Statehouse’s most powerful figures. Records show he gave $16,615 to House Speaker Matt Huffman on June 5 — a contribution that lists his employer as Nationwide Energy Partners — and $10,000 to Sen. Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, on June 8. Wilkin helped shape the bill’s rate-cap provision and, according to reporting by the Columbus Dispatch and Ohio Capital Journal, chairs the Senate committee that handles utility legislation.

At issue was House Bill 173, sponsored by Rep. David Thomas, R-Jefferson. The bill would have exempted submetering resellers from Ohio’s full definition of a public utility while leaving them under some oversight by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. It followed a unanimous April ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court — written by Justice Patrick DeWine, the governor’s son — that companies buying and reselling power at a profit meet the legal definition of a utility.

Supporters, including Nationwide Energy Partners, argued the bill added consumer protections and capped submetered rates below the standard utility rate. Critics countered that it created a weaker, second tier of regulation for the industry than the court had just required.

DeWine vetoed the bill on Wednesday, June 24, siding with those critics. “While this bill does contain some consumer protections,” he wrote, “the submetering model, itself, is fundamentally flawed.” He objected that submetered customers could not choose their own generation supplier, could not access the state’s Percentage of Income Payment Program for low-income households, and could be billed for electricity used in common areas. “If this bill became law, Ohio, for the first time, would be legitimizing and legalizing this flawed submetering model,” he wrote.

Ramaswamy, whose running mate is Senate President Rob McColley, holds no vote in the legislature and had no formal role in the bill’s passage or veto. There is no indication he took any action on the measure. As governor, however, he would sign or veto legislation like it — and the donations place the head of a company directly affected by the bill among his campaign’s June contributors.

The veto leaves the Supreme Court’s ruling in place, meaning companies that buy and resell electricity at a profit remain regulated as public utilities. The bill’s sponsor has said he intends to keep working on submetering legislation, and lawmakers could attempt an override before the session ends in December.

The dispute lands as electricity costs climb across Ohio. Capacity prices in the regional PJM grid, which feeds northwest Ohio, have set records in back-to-back auctions — rising from about $29 per megawatt-day two years ago to more than $329 — driven largely by surging demand from data centers. Those costs flow through to residential bills, keeping the price of power a central concern for voters heading into the November election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.