Under a deal reached March 3, Moderna agreed to pay Genevant Sciences, a subsidiary of Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences, and its partner Arbutus Biopharma a settlement worth up to $2.25 billion to resolve patent litigation over the lipid nanoparticle technology used to deliver Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including Spikevax. A $950 million upfront payment was due on or before Wednesday, July 8, according to securities filings by both companies. A further $1.3 billion is contingent on the outcome of a federal appeal.

Ramaswamy spent the days before that deadline abroad. Hours after marking the Fourth of July at events in Lancaster and Upper Arlington, he flew by private jet from Columbus to Paris on the night of July 4 — his fifth international trip of the year, according to flight-tracking data cited by the Columbus newsletter The Rooster.

A shareholder, not a bystander

Ramaswamy founded Roivant in 2014 and served as its chief executive until 2021, stepping down from the company’s board in early 2023 to run for president. He holds no current role at the company and is not a party to the Moderna case; the settlement money is paid to the companies, not to him. But he remains one of Roivant’s largest shareholders, holding roughly 7 percent of the firm — a stake that stands to benefit from a deal that has strengthened the company’s balance sheet and its stock.

Roivant recorded a $770.2 million gain tied to the settlement in its most recent earnings. Its shares rose about 6 percent the day the deal was announced — Arbutus jumped roughly 24 percent — and Roivant’s board authorized a $1 billion share repurchase program that returns cash to shareholders.

A campaign built on the pandemic

Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who led Ohio’s early COVID-19 response, in the general election on Tuesday, November 3. He has made Acton’s 2020 record a centerpiece of his campaign, accusing her at rallies of spreading dangerous “COVID ideology,” and a super PAC backing him has aired ads that TiffinOhio.net has reported to contain false claims about her role in the shutdowns.

He has also distanced himself from the vaccine his former company’s technology helped make possible. On a July 2023 podcast appearance during his presidential run, Ramaswamy said he was vaccinated but regretted it: “Had I had the facts that I do now, as a young, thankfully healthy male, I would not have chosen to get vaccinated,” he said at the time.

His own pandemic ghosts

Ramaswamy’s public posture as a COVID skeptic sits alongside a 2020 record that ran the other way. As Roivant’s CEO, he served as an adviser on COVID-19 to then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted — now a U.S. senator — a role he described in a 2021 op-ed. During that period, the Associated Press reported, Ramaswamy supported vaccines, received one himself and advocated mask-wearing, though he said he never backed government mandates for either. A Roivant company, Datavant, pushed for a national registry that would sort Americans by immunity status, allowing those with natural immunity to “get back to normal life.” Roivant also spent $70,000 lobbying the federal government on COVID-19 drug issues in 2020 and 2021.

The central premise of his attacks on Acton has been contested by the Republican who appointed her. Gov. Mike DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy, has repeatedly said the decisions to close businesses and schools and to postpone Ohio’s 2020 primary were his own. “I told her to issue the health order,” DeWine has said of the primary postponement. “The decision was mine.” Acton’s campaign has said she is “proud of the work she did alongside Governor DeWine to put public health over politics, save lives and keep Ohioans safe.”

After entering politics, Ramaswamy moved to strip part of that history from public view. In early 2023, a Wikipedia editor who disclosed being paid by Ramaswamy removed a reference to his service on Ohio’s “COVID-19 Response Team.” Ramaswamy has called the edit a simple correction, saying the panel never met. His campaign has acknowledged paying an editor but denied the change was politically motivated.

Ramaswamy has defended his record as consistent. In an interview with the AP, he said both his support for the registry and his talks with Husted were about “getting the economy going again,” and described his overall position on the virus as “nuanced.” “As a decision maker, you have to weigh the costs and benefits of your actions,” he said. “You can’t be unmoored from the data.” His campaign referred questions about his time at Roivant to the company, which did not respond to the AP.

Critics see a contradiction

Innovation Ohio, a progressive research and communications group, has seized on the settlement. “This sums up exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is: someone who did everything he could to get rich off of the COVID pandemic,” said the group’s president, Michael McGovern. “We can’t trust him to look out for Ohioans best interest because the only thing he seems to care about is looking out for himself and his own ambitions.”

“Vivek wants to have it both ways: attack Ohio’s COVID response in public, while quietly making millions,” McGovern said. “Vivek is a total fake, and Ohioans can see it.”

The settlement TiffinOhio.net first reported in the spring resolves only part of the litigation over the vaccine technology. Genevant and Arbutus are still pursuing a separate case against Pfizer and BioNTech, whose Comirnaty shot accounts for roughly two-thirds of global COVID-19 mRNA vaccine sales.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Democrats would need a perfect political storm to flip any of Ohio’s Republican-held congressional districts. 

Increasingly, they think one could be brewing in a Cleveland-area district Trump won by 11 points.

Ohio’s 7th Congressional District is held by Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump aide who’s represented the district since 2022. Democrats hope Brian Poindexter, a union official and council member in Brook Park, will overperform in the district thanks to his blue-collar background and roots in the legacy Ford factory town.

“I think Brian’s building things up,” said Dave Brock, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party. “And if we’re going to have a Blue Wave, this is going to be one of the seats we can get.”

“If anybody else won the primary, they were essentially going to concede it to Miller,” Brock added. “With Brian, we’ve got a shot.”

Jim Renacci, a Republican who held the seat in the 2010s, said this year’s political environment reminds him of 2018. He ran for U.S. Senate that year, losing to Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown by 6 percentage points even as Republicans won every other partisan statewide office. 

“Do I think Max Miller’s going to win that seat? Yes,” Renacci said. “Do I think it’s close? Yes. Do I think he’s going to spend a lot of money? Yes.”

Why Democrats like their odds

Democrats see three fronts converging over the 7th Congressional District: a candidate with a biography that fits the district, an incumbent Republican in the middle of a tabloid-fodder divorce and a national political climate that historically hurts the party holding the White House. 

The district consists of Cuyahoga County’s affluent western suburbs, its more blue-collar or exurban southern suburbs, as well as Medina, Wayne and part of Ashland counties. 

The district, on balance, is safe Republican. But the path to victory for a Democrat would include doing well in Parma and nearby Brook Park – communities that elect Democrats to local office, but which Trump won in 2024. Sherrod Brown won the district by four percentage points in 2018, even as he won statewide by six points – showing a Democrat can win in the district, even if it’s very tough to do so.

Democrats officially rate the 7th Congressional District as a second-tier priority – it and two other Ohio districts appear on a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee list of “in play” districts. The DCCC’s “Red to Blue” district list, meanwhile, represents Republicans they view as being easier to defeat, based on their districts’ designs. None of those are in Ohio. 

Ohio’s 7th District was not included in an initial reservation of ads placed earlier this year by the House Majority PAC, a political action committee associated with House Democrats. Data provided to Signal Statewide by Medium Buying, a Republican firm in Columbus that tracks political spending, confirmed that hasn’t changed. 

Instead, Democrats have made small initial ad reservations in the two other “in play” Republican-held districts in Ohio where Trump won by at least 10 points – the 10th Congressional District, represented by Dayton Rep. Mike Turner, and 15th District, represented by Columbus Rep. Mike Carey. 

But Democrats recently have grown more bullish on the 7th District as the best of the three potential pickup opportunities, specifically because of the head-to-head matchup between Poindexter and Miller.

Part of that is due to the candidates’ personal backgrounds. Poindexter worked odd jobs before getting involved with the building trades at age 27. He became a union ironworker, working on construction sites before later taking a position as an apprentice instructor at the Ironworkers Local 17 training center**.**

Miller, in turn, is a member of one of Cleveland’s wealthiest families, which got rich by founding and later selling Forest City Enterprises, a real-estate company. After getting a job as a trusted political aide for Trump, Miller ran for Congress in 2022, vowing to defeat then-Rep. Anthony Gonzalez for voting to impeach Trump in 2020. Gonzalez dropped out, and Miller won the seat comfortably.

Democrats aren’t saying how. But they’ve signaled they may make a political issue out of Miller’s messy divorce. 

Emily Moreno has accused Miller of abusing her in court filings tied to their 2025 divorce. Miller has denied the allegation, and countersued Moreno for defamation. It’s not the first time Miller has sued an ex – in 2021, he sued Stephanie Grisham, a former aide to First Lady Melania Trump, for defamation after Grisham accused Miller of abusing her toward the end of their relationship. Comments Miller made about Grisham in connection to his divorce led Grisham to sue him this week, accusing him of violating a non-disparagement clause in their eventual legal settlement.

Miller also made some state Republicans cringe with a post in May in which he called out his former father-in-law, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, for funding and enabling “his daughter’s malicious campaign to ruin my life.”

Tabloids and other non-Ohio media have followed along, providing coverage complete with photos, statements from lawyers and police videos.

Several race-rating websites cited the divorce in part when they recently downgraded Miller’s chances of getting reelected. The Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections still view Republicans as likely to win the district, but now give Democrats a chance of winning. This distinction could force Republicans to change their plans and unexpectedly defend the seat if Democrats see enough of a political opening to fund ads in the district.

Likely trying to entice potential donors, Poindexter’s campaign released an internal poll last week that it said showed Miller with a narrow 44%-43% lead. Perhaps more notably, it showed Trump’s disapproval rate at 54%, which would be a dramatic shift in sentiment from the president’s double-digit victory. 

Kyle Kondik, managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball, in an interview called the Ohio 7th Congressional District race a “sleeper.” 

“I think there’s something going on there. Miller’s favored – but I could see it being competitive,” Kondik said. 

Tom Coyne, a Republican former mayor of Brook Park, is among those who think Poindexter could win.

Coyne, a vocal Trump supporter and former longtime Democrat, said in an interview that some district voters may have soured on the president due to the war in Iran. Coyne said he personally supports Trump’s rationale for attacking the country, but said the president has done a poor job at explaining it. He also said there are independent voters in the region who support Trump but aren’t wedded to either major party.

“If Brian runs an independent campaign on his own, on working man’s values, then I think he has a good chance,” Coyne said. “If he is part of the Bernie Sanders total program there with [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani and company, I would be shocked if Brook Park would support that.”

Kevin Kussmaul, a Republican city councilman in Parma, said Miller has delivered for Parma since getting elected to Congress, such as by helping attract federal funding to deal with flooding issues, and maintaining close ties with the city’s large Iranian-American population.

“I don’t think there’s a hesitation not to vote for Max,” said Kussmaul, the first elected Republican to serve on Parma City Council since the 1980s. “But they’re very cognizant of prices right now. So, it will be very interesting to see what happens on the national front, and what President Trump does for the rest of the summer.”

The Bernie factor

Poindexter won a crowded primary election in May, thanks to eclectic support that unified more left-wing and centrist elements of the Democratic Party coalition. 

Several voters interviewed for this story said they became interested in Poindexter after he got an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont. Sanders came to Parma Heights the Friday before the election to hold a rally for Poindexter.

In his remarks, Sanders name-dropped New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s become increasingly influential on the left since getting elected last summer. The audience cheered, according to a recording posted by Sanders’ political operation. Mamdani has other ties to Poindexter – they also share a consulting firm, FIGHT Agency, which helped Mamdani in his improbable victory, and is backing progressive and union-backed Democratic candidates in other high-profile races.

“What we are trying to do, with, I think, some success, and with Brian’s help… is build a new political movement in this country,” Sanders said.

Meanwhile, a PAC funded by Anthropic, the AI company, spent $1 million on pro-Poindexter ads, while a PAC associated with Blue Dog Coalition, a centrist Democratic group, spent another $360,000 on pro-Poindexter mailers, according to federal campaign finance records.

Poindexter said in an interview he doesn’t know why the AI-affiliated group spent money on his race. But he said it shows that someone with resources decided the district is winnable for a Democrat. 

“I think they see in me somebody who can win this seat, and they made the decision to invest in the race,” he said.

Clayton Henson, Miller’s campaign manager, cited the late pro-Poindexter spending spree in a statement provided for this story.

“Congressman Miller will be reelected. A special interest PAC bought a primary win for Poindexter against a group of underfunded candidates. That’s not an option for the general election. Over the course of this campaign, voters will learn about every extreme position Poindexter has taken.”

National and state Republicans in turn have tried to tie other Democratic candidates in Ohio to Mamdani, and are likely to do the same with Poindexter.

Zach Bannon, a spokesperson for the National Republican Campaign Committee, issued a statement for this story that offers a preview of what to expect from Republicans if the race becomes competitive.

“Radical far-left liberals are working to bring the socialist wave to Ohio through Democrat Brian Poindexter,” Bannon said. “With support from Mamdani’s Working Families Party and AOC’s Progressive Caucus to Bernie Sanders himself, Poindexter has proven he’s all-in for socialism which is one of many reasons he will be rejected this fall.”

‘I’m not a Democratic socialist‘

Poindexter has held a couple town hall rallies since securing the Democratic nomination, first in affluent, suburban Bay Village in late June and then again last week in Brook Park.

About 40 people filled green plastic chairs in a library conference room to watch Poindexter, who gave a 10-minute speech before fielding questions for another 30 minutes or so. 

During his speech, Poindexter described how he was first inspired to run for office in 2016, when he saw Sanders speak at Cleveland State University while campaigning for president that year.

“I liked what Bernie had to say, because he was saying the things that I knew were wrong,” Poindexter said. “Working people were working harder and getting less.” Fast-forwarding a decade, Poindexter said he was floored when Sanders agreed to speak at his campaign rally in May.

“It was,” Poindexter said, “​​like Santa Claus coming to your house for Christmas dinner. It was the best gift I could ever get.”

Poindexter then immediately pivoted to playing pre-emptive defense.

“A lot of people don’t like Bernie Sanders’ politics,” Poindexter said. “A lot of people in our area go, ‘He’s a Democratic Socialist.’ And that’s a big buzzword right now on all the cable networks and stuff, right? But I also think a lot of people in our district respect Bernie Sanders, because he’s stood firm on what he’s been fighting for for so long.”

Poindexter made a similar point in an interview following the event when asked how he thought Sanders’ backing might play in his Trump-supporting district.

“Even the people who don’t agree with Sen. Sanders’ politics respect his commitment to the things he cares about… So, I think it’s a net positive. And regardless of what people think, I’m proud to have his support.”

During the event in Brook Park, an audience member asked Poindexter about the term “Democratic socialist,” which has increased in cachet after left-wing candidates won congressional Democratic Primary elections last month in New York and Colorado. 

“How do you embrace people who are going to accuse you of being a commie, because I’m dealing with the same thing myself,” she said.

“They see a ‘D’ next to my name, and they go, ‘Oh, you’re a commie,” Poindexter said. He went on to say that Democratic Socialists are part of the Democratic tent, but so are moderate Democratic groups, who also support his campaign.

“I’m not a Democratic Socialist, if that’s what people want to hear,” he said. “However, they have some ideas I like, like lifting the cap on Social Security.” 

Poindexter went on to name-drop a senatorial Bernie who supports the idea – Sen. Bernie Moreno, the Ohio Republican.

The Sanders’ endorsement likely played well with the audience at the library, some of whom wore T-shirts that promoted the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and the Working Families Party. 

Nan Mager, a retired prison therapist who lives in Fairview Park, said she voted for Poindexter in the primary election after learning that Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Sanders-aligned Democratic congressman from California, had endorsed him. She said she thinks Poindexter is the right candidate to defeat Miller, with his background as an ironworker contrasting with Miller’s background coming from generational wealth.

“I’m hoping Brian can break through to people who are suffering financially because of what’s happening in Washington,” Mager said. 

Another attendee, Sam Sheffield, also cited the Sanders endorsement as a positive in an interview. He said he also liked Poindexter’s views on workers’ rights.

Finally, Sheffield, a lawyer from Seven Hills, said he thinks Poindexter “would be the strongest candidate to take on Max Miller.” 

“And I think unseating Max Miller was probably my primary motivation.”

Nickie Antonio, a Lakewood lawmaker who’s the top Democrat in the state senate, said a decade ago, she would have thought Sanders was too “far left” to be an effective campaign asset in Ohio.

“Today in 2026, Bernie is speaking the truth of where we’re at in this country,” said Antonio, who spoke at the Sanders-Poindexter rally in May. “It is so far to the right, they are so far to the extreme, that Bernie is talking about issues that affect the middle, as well as anybody on any side of the middle,” Antonio said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

After enacting large swaths of their agenda during the last year and a half, GOP lawmakers can’t seem to agree on what comes next, with senators openly debating each other on social media and a group of far-right House lawmakers blocking work on the floor, forcing the speaker to send them home early for the Fourth of July break. The infighting and limited time in session could prevent Republicans from notching any more wins before voters head to the polls in November.

The disagreements, largely over a voter identification bill known as the SAVE America Act, have held up the annual government funding measures needed to avoid another shutdown and a defense policy package that provides lawmakers one of their best opportunities to shape the country’s military objectives. 

Agreement on a farm bill to address agriculture and food safety net programs is years overdue with few signs of true momentum. And lawmakers are no closer to reauthorizing a foreign surveillance program that lapsed earlier this year for the first time in decades. 

On top of all that, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wants to use the complex budget reconciliation process to pass a third party-line bill, though his Senate counterparts aren’t fully on board with that idea. 

Johnson said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream” in early July that he believes the package could include elements of the voter identification bill, possibly clearing the way for other legislation to move forward. He said the reluctance from some Republican senators “is based upon what they think may be in it.” 

“What we’re planning to do is send over a bill that will be irresistible for any Republican. A really incredible piece of legislation that will get the job done, meaning that we will continue to increase affordability; we will reduce fraud, waste and abuse in government; and we’ll secure elections,” Johnson said. “Every Republican will vote for that if packaged correctly. And that’s what we’re planning to do right now.” 

Lawmakers’ time to get that done will be extremely limited when combined with other work on Congress’ to-do list. 

Both chambers return to the nation’s capital on July 13 but will be out for nearly all of August and October. In total, the House will be in session for about 24 days and the Senate at work on Capitol Hill for approximately 28 days ahead of the November midterm elections. 

GOP argues for keeping majorities

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said during a late June press conference he wants to “get as much done as we can in the amount of time we have left between now and the midterm elections.”

“There are things that I believe will create a record of accomplishment that our candidates can run on that will enable us to take an argument to the American people that will persuade them that they want to keep majorities here in Congress, in the United States Senate and in the House, that are Republican to work with the president to get good things done for this country,” he said.

While GOP senators “have differences of opinion,” Thune said, they agree that their goals should be “to keep the country safe, to put more money in the pockets of the American people and to give them better opportunities to get ahead.”

Republican senators, however, do not agree when it comes to the SAVE America Act that would, among other things, require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot. 

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee posted to social media in early July that the chamber must pass that package, even if that means changing the rule that requires at least 60 lawmakers vote to cut off debate. Republicans control the chamber with 53 seats.

“History will not look kindly on us if we don’t pass the SAVE America Act,” he wrote. “Neither will voters.”

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn responded in a post of his own: “Then show us the votes!”

Filibuster fight

Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the slim majority in the House and narrow majority in the Senate combined with President Donald Trump’s focus on the voter identification bill has led to “a lot of negotiation between different factions within the party about what is going to be on the agenda.”

While the House can pass bills with a simple majority, the Senate needs bipartisan support for most bills to move past procedural votes. This requires compromise between Republicans and Democrats in the upper chamber on some of the more pressing and politically fraught issues. 

That requirement often results in changes to House-passed bills or an inability to move forward with them at all — leading to considerable tension between GOP lawmakers who want to keep the procedural step and those that want to get rid of it.

The 60-vote threshold gives Democrats a chance to force compromise, but it also gives them a way to slow down or gridlock the Senate during an election year, compounding the challenges Republican leaders face from within their own party. 

This year is no exception. Democratic leaders must balance calling on voters to reject Republican incumbents while on the campaign trail and then work with some of those very lawmakers to negotiate certain must-pass bills when back on Capitol Hill. 

“This, really unfortunately, is a part of a longer term trend that we’ve seen for quite a while in Congress, which is that the minority party does not have a lot of incentive to cooperate with the majority,” Thorning said. “And so, you know, it’s not unusual to see the minority party sort of trying to posture and position itself to deny the majority party perceived legislative wins.”

That calculation is particularly acute on government funding ahead of the Oct. 1 deadline, following three shutdowns of varying impact and length during the last year.

“I would say on appropriations, the difficulty there on funding the government is that it’s never clear which way the blame is going to cut,” Thorning said, adding it would be “a pretty risky assumption” that a funding lapse this year would be blamed on Republicans. 

“If Democrats were to deny the appropriations process from going forward and the government were shut down, it’s not clear who the voters would blame,” Thorning said. “And that would really be happening for the first time ever right up to an election. You know, voters have rarely had the opportunity to weigh in quite that proximate to a government shutdown on who they do or don’t blame. So that’s sort of uncharted territory.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

If Trump does not sign the measure, it would become law at 12:01 a.m. Saturday under a provision of the Constitution that gives the president 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto a bill. Trump has said he would not sign the bill to pressure the U.S. Senate to pass an unrelated election security measure he considers a higher priority.

The constitutional provision does not apply if Congress is adjourned, resulting in what is called a pocket veto, but the current July Fourth recess does not count as an adjournment, experts agree.

“This would be considered a recess so the bill will become law without signature 10 days after presentment,” Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, wrote in an email to States Newsroom. 

The White House has not publicly communicated its legal position and spokespeople did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday. 

Trump has vetoed only two other bills passed by the GOP-controlled Congress during his second term. Both were noncontroversial and targeted to local projects in Florida and Colorado.

‘A huge problem’

Groups representing a vast array of housing interests, from low-income renters to bankers, have endorsed the wide-ranging legislation that packages together numerous bills affecting every corner of the industry.

“Housing affordability is a huge problem for almost everybody,” Alys Cohen, the director of federal housing advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, said in an interview. “And so there’s broad consensus that Congress needs to do something about that, period. So, as a result, they have a lot of different stakeholders coming together to really get something done.”

The bill, called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, generally seeks to lower housing costs by expanding the supply, while also adjusting loan programs backed by the federal government. 

Estimates of the number of housing units needed to meet demand vary, but it is “probably” near 4 million units, Kristen Klurfield, an associate director for housing policy at the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center, said.

The package includes an assortment of smaller bills to update regulations on manufactured homes, loosen requirements for home construction and adjust a rural loan program to help lower income people qualify for and keep mortgages. The wide scope of the bill gives every segment of the policy space a reason to support it.

“In general it modernizes federal programs,” Klurfield said. “It incentivizes pro-housing policies locally, streamlines regulations that have been hindering housing production and really expands options for affordable housing financing. And so we think that the bill tackles the problem from these several angles, and that’s really what it’s going to take to chart a path forward.”

Trump quiet

As the package was gaining momentum in Congress last month, White House staff said Trump supported it. After it passed both chambers of Congress with broad bipartisan votes, he was set to sign it at a high-profile ceremony at the Capitol. 

But the president changed course and canceled the signing ceremony at the last minute in a protest of Congress’ failure to pass an election security measure, the SAVE America Act, he considers a top priority.

Since the Senate passed the housing measure, 85-5, and the House cleared it, 358-32, in June, Trump has disparaged the bill as “a big yawn” and “unimportant” compared to the election bill. 

That bill would introduce a series of restrictions on voting, especially vote-by-mail, and would require voters to provide photo ID to cast ballots. Critics say it raises new barriers to voting while attempting to limit noncitizen voting, which is exceedingly rare. The GOP-controlled House has passed a version of the SAVE America Act, but it does not have the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate.

Trump has not commented on the bill in several days and spent Wednesday attending a NATO conference in Turkey.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The losses come after the Republican-controlled Congress last year allowed pandemic-era subsidies to buy insurance on ACA exchanges to expire. That caused premiums to double for most of the 25.2 million Americans who got their insurance there.

After the subsidies expired, national enrollment dropped by 2.6 million in February 2026 when compared to February 2025, the AP reported. That’s about a 10% drop.

In Ohio, the losses went much deeper. 

Enrollment dropped from just under half a million in February 2025 to 336,000 four months ago. That’s a loss of nearly a third of enrollees, 32.4% or 161,385 people.

Oklahoma, the state with the next-highest losses, saw a decrease of 32.3%.

Among neighboring states, Michigan and Indiana also saw big losses of more than 25%. Meanwhile, Kentucky and West Virginia lost 14.3% and 13.1%, respectively. 

Pennsylvania lost just 1.2% of its enrollees. 

Congressional Republicans — including Ohio’s senators — allowed the subsidies to expire months after voting in favor of President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

The legislation kept Trump’s 2017 tax cuts from expiring. That provision is estimated to have created a $1 trillion windfall over 10 years for the richest 1% of Americans while the law cut a similar amount from Medicaid and nutrition assistance.

During his first term, Trump tried repeatedly to repeal the ACA — or Obamacare — but he was unsuccessful. However, the provisions in Trump’s 2025 spending bill have diminished former President Barack Obama’s signature program.

Simply dropping coverage purchased on Obamacare exchanges doesn’t mean people didn’t get it elsewhere, but some are likely to become uninsured. 

The subsidies helped bring down the share of uninsured Americans to its lowest level ever. With them expiring Dec. 31 and with the Trump bill’s Medicaid cuts, it’s reasonable to assume that the portion of Ohioans who lack health insurance is going to go up substantially this year, said Natasha Murphy, health policy director at the Center for American Progress.

“While it’s still too early to quantify the full increase in the uninsured population for 2026, the direction is becoming increasingly clear,” Murphy said in an email. “Early marketplace enrollment data already show coverage declines, and the combination of the loss of enhanced premium tax credits and other recent federal policy changes is making health insurance harder to afford, leaving many families without a realistic alternative.”

The cuts to Medicaid are also leading some insurers to exit states that expanded eligibility to include Americans making 138% or less of federal poverty guidelines. For example, the Arkansas Advocate on Monday reported that Centene — the largest provider of Medicaid managed care in the United States — was exiting that state’s Medicaid program.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nearly half said unaccepted health insurance was the reason their child did not receive mental healthcare treatment while 40% said provider availability and 29% said cost (people surveyed could select more than one barrier). 

“Many young Ohioans experience mental health challenges, and families often have difficulty navigating the mental healthcare and insurance systems,” according to the study. 

“Accessing needed mental health treatment is important, especially for children, because mental health conditions often continue into adulthood.” 

The average out-of-pocket cost for an individual 60-minute psychotherapy visit with an out-of-network provider cost $55 in 2021, according to the study.  

“If a child needs to receive treatment from an out-of-network provider for therapy once a week … the family would pay an average of $220 per month,” the study said.

Seeing an in-network provider came with a $28 out-of-pocket price tag, it showed.

That cost jumps to $164 for someone without health insurance or someone who pays without insurance, the study said.

“Healthcare for mental health issues can be expensive, and as many mental health conditions are chronic, they often require ongoing treatment,” according to the study. “Costs of care and prescription drugs can accumulate quickly with or without insurance.”

OhioGuidestone — Ohio’s largest community behavioral health provider that is not a federally qualified health center — charges $142 per hour for therapeutic behavioral services. They charge $206 per day for their day treatment group and $41 per hour for group psychotherapy.  

Just under half of Ohio children were on Medicaid and 46% had commercial insurance in 2023. 

Health Policy Institute of Ohio found commercial plans rarely cover therapeutic behavioral health support, case management, intensive home-based treatment, behavioral health nursing, crisis services/mobile response, and peer recovery services. 

“One of the most important takeaways from this brief is unlike traditional physical health care, it tends to be that insurance problems are more substantial for kids who are on commercial insurance compared to a program like Medicaid,” said Health Policy Institute of Ohio Analyst Brian O’Rourke.

“This can range from really narrow provider networks in terms of difficulty finding an in-network behavioral health provider to help with those mental health needs,” he said. “It could include really high out-of-pocket costs, even when you do find a provider in network, and then limitations on the types of covered services.”

An Ohio patient was 1.6 times more likely to see an out-of-network provider for a behavioral health office visit and 3.6 times more likely to see an out-of-network provider for inpatient behavioral healthcare. 

The state has a lack of mental health providers and 75 Ohio counties are mental health shortage areas, according to a study last year from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. 

Ohio behavioral health clinicians are reimbursed an average of 18% less than medical or surgical clinicians, which can “lead some providers to not accept insurance and instead require patients to self-pay, which is out of reach for many families,” according to the study. 

Sometimes having a health insurance plan is not always enough. 

Going without behavioral health services over time can ultimately make things worse, O’Rourke said.

“If someone’s going through with untreated severe anxiety or depression, they’re going to have to deal with the burdens of that condition, but also it’s going to affect their school performance, potentially their ability to find a job and secure employment,” he said.

Ohio lawmakers have introduced a handful of insurance related bills. 

Ohio House Bill 219 would create network adequacy standards for Ohio health insurers. Ohio state Rep. Kellie Deeter, R-Norwalk, introduced the bill which has had two hearings so far. 

Ohio House Bill 220 prohibits health insurers from retroactively denying a prior authorization for mental health or substance use disorder treatment. Ohio state Rep. Heidi Workman, R-Rootstown, introduced the bill which passed the House earlier this year. 

Ohio House Bill 709 would require private insurers to cover telehealth mental health services. Ohio state Reps. Karen Brownlee, D-Symmes Twp., and Meredith Craig, R-Smithville, introduced the bipartisan bill earlier this year and it has had one hearing so far. 

The lawmakers are on break and will return after the November election. Any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered. 

Health Policy Institute of Ohio recommends the state monitor costs of behavioral healthcare, expand provider availability, and consider changes related to insurance limitations and mental health parity. 

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 Republicans should underscore their affinity with the president’s campaign to call out “improper ideology”— coloring America’s origin story with politically biased interpretations that cannot be trusted.

Trump has repeatedly railed against “overly ideological” presentations at the Smithsonian Institution, especially the National Museum of American History, to federally funded historical sites and national park programs, exhibits, signs, brochures.

The White House insists on “restoring truth and sanity” to the way “American history is presented and taught.”

Trump issued an executive order last year to bring “objective facts” back to that storytelling which he claims have been replaced “with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Ohio’s GOP overlords must show their fealty to the EO that decrees museums “should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination.”

They can start by acknowledging the ideological indoctrination rolling into the state fair on July 26. Transparency is always in the public interest.

Such notice would at least inform thousands of unsuspecting fairgoers that these so-called Freedom Trucks heavily promote a Christian conservative narrative of American history to school visitors with ahistorical Christian Nationalist fiction.

Citizens will learn that America was uniquely founded on biblical principles and divine law. Historians dispute that slant as flat out wrong.

The built-in bias of the gargantuan museum trucks is unsurprising considering who Trump’s Freedom 250 project tapped to create the interactive displays featured in the six mobile exhibitions crisscrossing the country.

PragerU, a far-right media organization that churns out misleading and inaccurate edutainment videos, produced the slick, digital interactives showcased in the tractor-trailers coming to select cities and states all year.

Hillsdale College, a right-wing conservative Christian college in Michigan (that also helped craft Project 2025) wrote the historical narratives that guests will read nationwide.

Many of those people won’t know (without the aforementioned disclaimer) that the traveling “Founders Museum,” pulling up in a semi to an event near you, is distinctly aligned with the political and religious right’s view of American history. 

But the focus of the trucked in production is on white men and Christianity.

For the most part, this multimedia expo steers clear of slavery, injustice, and oppression. The marginalized get only a glancing notice.

In this sanitized version of the birth of a nation, pivotal patriotic moments of the American Revolution are highlighted while the roles and historic struggle of enslaved people, Native Americans, and women are downplayed.

This immersive experience, paid for with over $14 million in taxpayer money, avoids any portrayal of America’s past or present in a negative light.

The digital romp through the revolution is largely a one-sided, feel-good, pro-American version of history with a pronounced Christian overlay.

It omits complex historical truths but gives prominence to letters on religious freedom, the faith of the Founders and religious artifacts.

It intentionally presents a skewed tribute to American greatness with passing attention to the few wrinkles in history that were ironed out in time.

The walls of the truck musems overflow with texts, QR codes, AI avatars of founding fathers and other historical figures, that all bang the drum for American exceptionalism. 

The spectacle is packaged to attract mass appeal, like propaganda about America’s “golden age” was marketed to put a positive sheen on costly tariffs and a reckless Middle East war.

The roadshow starts with AI-generated videos of George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God” — a statement the first president is not documented as saying — and John Adams mouthing the words of right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.” 

One section in the PragerU extravaganza, called Voices of Liberty, features triumphal accounts from everyday Americans that appear to be fake.

If those narratives are manufactured, said the head of the American Historical Association, “it tells us that their approach to history is a politicized invention designed to make political arguments.”

The last thing visitors see before exiting the trucks is a video of the twice-impeached, attempted coup plotter himself thanking PragerU (for delivering a partisan vehicle to brainwash the masses) and gushing about America as “the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality and prosperity in the history of the world.”

A nearby board quotes Trump’s State of the Union address last year heralding the dawn of the “golden age” and pumping Americans to “get ready for an incredible future” (of sticker shock price hikes tied to destructive trade wars and a massive military campaign to affect foreign regime change and neutralize a potential nuclear threat — which accomplished neither).

As local communities and states get wise to the AI-generated fiction passing as historic fact — that multiple historians pan as inaccurate — many are cancelling Freedom Truck appearances after blowback from residents who complain the exhibit uses patriotism as a disguise to push white Christian nationalism mixed with Trump self-promotion.

At least 11 states have declined to participate.

Ohio has already hosted one tractor-trailer museum in Chillicothe and will do so again at the state fair in Columbus.

A transparent disclaimer would serve Ohioans. But don’t expect it. Because not all distorted narratives “driven by ideology rather than truth” are improper depictions of history, according to Trump’s EO.

Only those that represent America’s story in full, not the extremely curated right-wing make-believe designed to indoctrinate.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The city’s rules got stricter over time. In 1954, a Columbus apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units had to have at least 100 parking spaces; by 2022, the minimum was 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, the mandate grew from nine parking spaces to 34.

But in recent years, housing shortages have prompted Columbus and other cities and states to scale back or even eliminate minimum parking requirements. The need to provide parking makes projects more expensive, raising costs for developers that they often pass on to residents. In some cases, the rules prevent projects from ever being built.

Since 2019, at least 14 states have enacted 34 laws reducing or eliminating parking minimums, according to the Parking Reform Network, a coalition of groups that opposes minimums. Since 2017, 116 cities, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Denver, Hartford, Minneapolis and San Francisco, have removed all parking minimums citywide.

Catie Gould, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank that is part of the Parking Reform Network, said the idea of repealing parking mandates used to be confined to urban planners’ policy debates. Now it’s become mainstream, she said, as the need for more affordable housing has risen to the top of the national agenda.

“I don’t think parking reform would be happening if we weren’t having a housing crisis,” Gould said, adding that many parking minimums aren’t based on any rational formula or proof of demand.

“We know people still drive, and if you drive, you need parking, and nobody’s arguing about that,” she said. “The question is who decides how much parking you should need.”

In some cities, residents have pushed back against the changes, arguing that eliminating on-site parking lots merely creates more congestion and crowding on public streets. Opponents also have questioned whether developers will simply pocket the savings, rather than make units more affordable. And they note that older people and those with disabilities will have the hardest time coping with an absence of off-street parking.

But the growing movement has unified some groups, such as developers and environmentalists, who are typically at odds.

“From the developer’s side, parking is the big thing that has to be solved early on to determine feasibility of a project,” said Matthew Fitzsimmons, an architect and project manager at the architectural firm HCM Design who been involved in building more than 11,000 residential units, including a project in Baltimore.

Eliminating or reducing parking minimums, Fitzsimmons said, allows developers to use land and money that would have be devoted to “very expensive structured parking” for better amenities or design features for a project.

For Ryan Carter, policy director for Catawba Riverkeeper, which is dedicated to preserving and protecting the Catawba-Wateree River Basin in North and South Carolina, fewer parking lots means less water pollution: Carter noted that even one inch of rain on a single acre of impervious parking surface can generate 27,000 gallons of storm runoff into the river basin.

California goes first

In the fall of 2022, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the first statewide ban on parking minimums. The law, which went into effect at the beginning of 2023, prohibits city and county officials from imposing parking requirements for housing developments or businesses within a half mile of a transit station.

California, which consistently ranks among the worst states for affordable housing, has followed up with additional measures, including a law reducing parking requirements in areas zoned for residential development and a law restricting local governments from increasing minimum parking requirements for renovations and additions to single-family homes.

The state also has instituted a cap on parking requirements for multifamily housing developments and approved a measure allowing developers to use shared parking spaces to meet parking minimum requirements.

Oregon has also taken sweeping action, enacting a law in 2023 that prohibits or restricts parking minimums in 48 cities and three counties located in the state’s eight metropolitan regions with populations of at least 50,000.

In the past three years, states including Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire and Washington also have enacted laws that restrict or prohibit parking minimums, with many of them focusing on developments near mass transit hubs.

In April, Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed legislation that prohibits localities from imposing parking minimums within a half mile of mass transit stations. And just this week, North Carolina Democratic Gov. Josh Stein signed a measure that eliminates minimum parking mandates in most of the counties in his state.

“This bill gives North Carolina another tool in the toolbox to build more homes and make housing more affordable,” Stein said in a news release. “This change will lower rents for people.”

Local authority

Some local leaders have bristled at state efforts to limit local zoning authority.

Betsy Gara, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, testified against the legislation in her state, arguing that “municipalities are in the best position to determine whether eliminating or modifying minimum parking requirements will pose any public safety or other issues in their community.”

In written testimony, Gara noted that on areas without sufficient off-street parking, vehicles may be parked haphazardly on the street, potentially blocking emergency vehicles and snow plows and limiting access to fire hydrants and loading docks.

But Virginia Democratic Del. Irene Shin, the sponsor of the legislation in her state, said the shortage of affordable housing has become so acute that state lawmakers had to act.

Shin said that in her hometown of Herndon in Fairfax County, parking minimums requiring multifamily buildings to provide 1.5 parking spaces for each one-bedroom unit and two for larger units have inhibited much-needed residential development.

Forty-five percent of renter households in Fairfax County spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, meaning they are “cost-burdened” under federal housing standards.

“We’ve come to a point where the state is much more interested in stepping in to increase housing because the localities on their own just haven’t been doing enough,” Shin said.

Gould of the Sightline Institute acknowledged that the elimination of parking minimums will place additional burdens on cities, which will have to manage curbside parking for residents and businesses with strategies such as residential parking permits, parking meters and loading zones.

She pointed to her own Portland, Oregon, neighborhood, where a 12-story subsidized affordable housing building is under construction near the city’s light rail. She supports the project, but worries that the city has not done enough to proactively manage street parking before the new residents arrive.

“Many cities and towns aren’t really prepared for that scenario,” she said.

This story was updated to correct the spelling of Betsy Gara’s name. Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached  rsequeira@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Georgia Republican state Rep. Beth Camp sponsored a bill to expand contraceptive access in her state after her daughter faced a two-month delay renewing her birth control prescription. The new law, passed in April and signed in May by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, allows pharmacists to prescribe contraception methods such as birth control pills and shots directly to patients without a doctor’s signature.

Current Georgia law requires patients to receive a birth control prescription from a doctor, which they can then fill at a pharmacy. Camp has said the new policy could help increase access to contraception in areas with primary care provider shortages.

“In our state, we have such a challenge with access for medical professionals,” Camp told the House Health Committee earlier this year. “This is just really, to me, opening up a whole new stream of opportunities for women to be able to access contraception.”

In Maryland, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore in May signed a measure that requires public higher education institutions and community colleges to annually submit a report on contraception access to the Maryland Higher Education Commission. It also requires the commission  to submit a report on contraception access to the General Assembly and requires each community college to provide students with access to all methods of over-the-counter contraception.

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee in March signed into law a bipartisan bill that requires private health care plans to cover a yearlong supply of birth control. The state’s Medicaid program, TennCare, already provides a 12-month supply of birth control. The measure is set to take effect July 1, 2027.

And Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger in April signed a new law establishing the right to contraception and allowing people to sue if their rights are violated. Spanberger also signed another law requiring health insurance companies to cover both prescription and over-the-counter contraceptives without cost-sharing. Both laws went into effect this month.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A sharply divided 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on July 2 that such immigrants must receive a bond hearing within 90 days.  One of the two judges said 30 days would be a better time limit. 

The dissenting judge  said having no bond was appropriate, calling the Trump policy “constitutionally sound.” 

The 2025 policy has faced widespread rebellion among federal judges, even Trump appointees, with many of them freeing immigration prisoners and calling the policy unconstitutional. Other appeals courts have also struck it down in a conflict likely to be heard in October by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Last week’s ruling affects three of the states with some of the largest detention centers — Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Immigrants from across the county often  are transferred to those states. 

“Since ICE moves people it has detained so quickly and frequently, isolating them from their lawyers, families and support systems, many New Yorkers are held at detention centers in these states,” said Reed Dunlea, a spokesperson for the New York Immigration Coalition. 

The American Immigration Council, which was a party in the case, noted that the case turned on three longtime Texas residents with no criminal history and U.S. citizen children, all detained in traffic stops. 

The decision “affirms that constitutional rights do not disappear simply because someone is in immigration proceedings,” said Rebecca Cassier, an attorney for the council who argued in the case, in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security, in an unattributed statement to Stateline, said it disagrees with the decision and looks forward to Supreme Court review: “DHS strongly disagrees with the Fifth Circuit panel and is confident in its legal position regarding mandatory detention.”

It’s a partial reversal of the same appeals court’s ruling in February that greenlighted limitless detention for some immigrants in those states despite conflicting rulings for other states that struck down the policy as unconstitutional. As of now only the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the detention policy, covering centers in seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. 

One federal court in California struck down the mandatory detention policy nationwide in a class-action lawsuit. The ruling was stayed pending appeal in March but remains in effect in part of California and has often been cited by other state judges in freeing immigration prisoners, according to a Stateline review of recent immigration rulings. 

The immigrant detention population peaked in January at an all-time high of more than 70,000 people. It declined to about 60,000 in April as fewer non-criminal immigrants were detained in the wake of controversy and protests over enforcement in Minnesota and other places. 

There are some signs that fewer non-criminals are being detained even as arrests have surged in recent days in an attempt by the Trump administration to double the number of arrests to 2,000 a day. The share of immigration arrests that led to detention dropped from 38% last year to 17% between March and May. 

Fewer than 30% of immigrants detained in April had criminal convictions, including traffic offenses and immigration crimes. The others had only immigration violations or pending criminal charges. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He had developed the schedule of an owl. And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over. Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Chavez offered to show them documents that proved he wasn’t living in hiding. Immigration authorities had granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status because, as a toddler, he’d been abandoned by his parents in Honduras and had come to this country on his own when he was 14. His sister, who’d migrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, offered to help take care of him. A lawyer was helping him pursue permanent residency.

“I’m legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers. But the officers, he said, weren’t having it. One of them told him, “Your papers are of no use to me.”

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on a path toward deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said during a video call from detention. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chavez is hardly alone. A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office. In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed.

Before Trump returned to office last year, Chavez would have likely been given a ticket and allowed to return to his sister. But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has moved to systematically roll back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country. Those policies were based on laws that had been implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed unaccompanied immigrant minors — ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults — are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation.

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and are able to prove in family court that they had been abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home countries.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands. To make its case, his administration points to the record 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden.

Neither those children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, say Trump administration officials. As a result, administration officials say, some of the children became victims of abuse or exploitation. Alarming numbers of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk for trafficking, injury and wage theft.

Other minors, the administration has said, became criminals. It put out a July 2025 government report that said since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners were found to have criminal arrest records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sex offenses. The administration says the best way to stop such abuses and criminality is to disincentivize immigrant children from coming in the first place.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage Biden did.” Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided via Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated with outside experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data.

Advocates argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to cast all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light. They say that some of their clients who have been living in the U.S. for years, including those, like Chavez, who have since turned 18, face serious risks if sent back to their home countries. The majority of the unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States in the last decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic turmoil, violence and political upheaval. Some came from families riven by poverty and domestic violence. Some, like Chavez, have no parents to go back to.

“These children have been through incredibly harrowing and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal defense organization. “And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s claims that its policies are aimed at protecting minors, he said, “If you’re worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them.”

Deporation orders for 25 minors in three hours

Sometimes the deportation orders issued in immigration court have been coming so fast that lawyers say even they have a hard time explaining them to their clients. Within a span of three hours on a single morning in April in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning. Some of the hearings were only a few minutes long, and some of the minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ. The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case. But Sponzo ordered the girl to be deported anyway.

In another case, an attorney pleaded for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum petition for her client from Guatemala. The attorney said her client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it hard for her to gather information she needed for the case. Sponzo politely denied the request, saying, “I empathize and thank you for your efforts.” Then she ordered the child deported.

A high school senior from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with side-swept black hair and wearing a short sleeve athletic shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with piled-up clothes on the bed and an American flag tacked on the wall. He stayed on mute while his lawyer asked for more time for his applications for SIJ and asylum to be processed. Sponzo said no and ordered him deported. His lawyer said in an interview her client is now afraid he could be picked up by ICE at any time.

At the end of the day, several of the attorneys said they felt blindsided by the judge’s rapid-fire denials. Although they all said they would appeal her rulings, which could buy their clients some time to stay in the U.S., one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.”

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile dockets in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, there was widespread recognition that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum petitions to work their way through the backlogged system. For SIJ recipients, getting a green card often takes years. Judges typically gave minors that time. Now the authorities overseeing immigration courts have instructed them not to do so. Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of the more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office. Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believe they were pushed out because the administration saw them as not aligned with its agenda. But they also say they’ve received no official explanation for their firings. Sponzo was also fired recently. She could not be reached for comment.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

It’s not just the overhaul of the immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant kids. Early on in Trump’s second term, officials moved to curb funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. It also put an end to a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action,” which protected minors who had been granted SIJ from deportation. SIJ on its own does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover those with SIJ until they could get their green cards.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal assistance and access to deferred action for SIJ recipients. Despite those rulings, some legal advocates say they still have not been paid what they’re owed. And earlier this month, several groups said federal agents appeared at their Washington-area offices, seeking to look at client files, even though they didn’t have warrants. The advocates said they saw the move as an attempt to intimidate them_._

As for granting deferred action, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would do so only under “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.” DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having SIJ “does NOT confer lawful status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.” The agency did not respond to a question about the agents who visited advocates’ offices.

Over the last year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 of the unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden in order to check on their well-being. The majority of all the minors who entered the country in recent years had been released to one or both parents in the United States or to other close relatives.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June press conference that some of the welfare checks found minors were doing fine with their families. But he asserted that he’d also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals. “We start digging into these cases and you start hearing absolute horrific things,” he said.

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond. A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and had previously been charged with crimes including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they’d indicted less than a handful of people on charges of smuggling or exploiting immigrant minors.

No officials from DHS or the Justice Department explained what had become of any of the children connected to those indictments. As for immigrants who had entered the U.S. as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the process of sending them back.”

Unsafe and unsanitary conditions

Soon after Chavez arrived in detention, one of the men in his cell recognized the teen’s pattern of sleeping through the day as a silent cry for help. Carlos Della Valle, who had migrated to the United States from Mexico, was attuned to Chavez’s struggles because he had a son around the same age. Even in detention, Chavez, with a head full of  tousled black hair and big brown eyes, had an easy laugh and smile. Della Valle worried that Chavez was “losing valuable time that he’s never going to get back.”

Winn was a tough place, advocates and detainees said. Two migrants died there earlier this year. One of the deaths was reportedly caused by cardiovascular disease, and authorities have not determined a cause for the other.

A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General described unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Winn, including leaking ceilings, dirty food prep areas and an incident in which a guard put a detainee in a prohibited choke hold. A DHS spokesperson said that the agency is working to address the issues raised in the report, adding, “our death rates are lower than most state prisons.”

Della Valle began nudging young Chavez out of bed in the mornings and put him to work helping keep their cellblock clean.

Detainees were given an hour a day outside, sometimes less than that. Della Valle told Chavez that keeping himself busy, in whatever constructive ways possible, was the only way to make it through the monotony with his sanity intact.

Chavez briefly took a job in the barber shop that paid the standard wage for someone in detention —  $1 a day — but he said that giving haircuts to around 80 men in a shift was so grueling that he only lasted a month. Instead, Chavez and Della Valle pored over passages from the Bible together. They sat together for most every meal. Chavez learned to mix packets of powdered juice just the way Della Valle liked it.

Della Valle offered to help Chavez navigate the immigration system. He knew it well. In 1997 he’d twice illegally entered the United States. He was deported the first time but illegally entered again, married a U.S. citizen soon after and settled in Pennsylvania.

Because of his reentry, which is a felony, he has been ineligible to regularize his status. But he lived underground with little worry. Immigration authorities generally avoided targeting immigrants with long ties to their communities, like him. Not anymore.

Authorities intercepted Della Valle when he and his wife were returning from a Virgin Islands vacation, though they released him on bond at the time. Months later, however, he was taken into ICE detention. By the time he met Chavez, he had spent months being transferred among close to a dozen holding facilities. He worried about what detention might do to Chavez. Other men in his cellblock, who nicknamed Chavez “El Niño,” worried too.

“It was hard to see him, you know, because he’s just a boy. He’s not a grown man,”  Della Valle said. “I had to do whatever I could for him.”

Federal courts push back

While the administration has made progress bending immigration courts to its will, there’s evidence that federal courts, where tens of thousands of immigrants have challenged their detentions as illegal, are pushing back.

The National Immigration Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, tracked the cases of 263 immigrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors and SIJ applicants. The group found that federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 of them since the start of the second Trump administration. In March, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown issued a scathing rebuke in one such case, writing, “The laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

The administration can set policy, he wrote, but he added that “it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws — a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.”

Among those recently released was 20-year-old Fredy Martinez. Born in Honduras, he was a teenager when he crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. He had graduated from high school in Texas and was delivering a DoorDash order on his bike when he was detained, according to court documents about his case. He was held for eight months at a sprawling and deeply troubled tent detention camp in El Paso, Texas — which has seen a measles outbreak and detainee deaths, including one ruled a homicide — before a federal judge found his detention was illegal and ordered him released. DHS did not respond to a question about the center.

Another teenager named Carlos from Guatemala said in an interview that he was detained on his way to work at a car wash in Rockland County, New York, when he was 18, despite having been granted SIJ and deferred action. He was flown over 1,000 miles to a detention facility in Louisiana, though not the same one as Chavez. Carlos asked to be identified only by his first name because of his ongoing immigration case.

After his arrest, he said, “I was just thinking that I would never see my family again.” Carlos was held for more than two months before a federal judge set him free.

The DHS spokesperson did not answer questions about any individual cases. They said federal court rulings against the administration “should come as no surprise,” since “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate.”

‘I had so many plans’

Six months into his detention, Chavez is on his own. He was ordered deported but is appealing the decision and filed a habeas petition.

Della Valle has been released, thanks to his wife’s outspoken advocacy. His release was bittersweet for Chavez. But Della Valle has not forgotten him.

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, have helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, to pay off his outstanding traffic tickets and prepare his defense. The couple started a letter-writing campaign for him. They’ve passed out flyers with a picture of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it in and send him messages of encouragement.

Della Valle said he feels pangs of guilt about leaving Chavez behind. He still speaks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but worries his words don’t carry the same weight now that he’s out. Della Valle tries to convince himself that Chavez will be OK, saying, “I think me being out might be good for him because he knows that there’s hope.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has been moved to different cells multiple times. One had only a single functional shower for dozens of men. The video call system often malfunctioned. Someone stole his small notebook, where he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in touch with outside. One night he dreamt he was free. When he woke up and realized he was still in detention, he panicked and had trouble breathing.

He said he has been trying to keep up the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each passing week makes it harder.

In a series of interviews from detention, Chavez worried about losing half his junior year of high school. He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he is unclear if he will be able to make the assignments up to be able to graduate on time. His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments he worries it will all be for nothing. He missed the birth of his new nephew, and he is unsure if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined.”

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.

Lewis Hurst, 60, of Republic, informed the board of his retirement during the meeting, according to a source with direct knowledge of the proceedings. As of publication, the board had not issued a public statement confirming the announcement.

The retirement follows Hurst’s guilty plea July 2 in Sandusky Municipal Court to one count of theft, a first-degree misdemeanor, reduced from the fifth-degree felony originally filed, according to court records. The court sentenced him to 30 days in jail and suspended the entire term, imposed a $500 fine with $250 suspended, and assessed $140 in court costs. Hurst was ordered to pay $857.99 in restitution; court records show a check for that amount was issued to Best Buy.

The charge stemmed from a January 24 incident. According to a Perkins Township Police Department investigation report obtained by TiffinOhio.net, a store manager reported inventory discrepancies on a specific computer model, and the store identified a credit-card transaction tied to Hurst. Perkins Township Police Officer Michael Todhunter wrote that surveillance footage showed a man placing a price sticker from a $499 computer onto the box of a $1,299 HP Omen R5 8500F computer before buying it at the lower price. Investigators used license-plate camera data and a Bureau of Motor Vehicles photo to identify Hurst, the report states.

The Seneca County Board of Developmental Disabilities placed Hurst on paid administrative leave following a special meeting Saturday, March 28. The board described the action as a “private personnel issue” that is “not otherwise related to Mr. Hurst’s leadership,” according to a statement reported by the Advertiser-Tribune, and named Natasha Nichols, its director of service and support administration, interim superintendent.

Hurst continued to appear publicly as superintendent after the case was filed. On March 10 — more than a month after the warrant issued — he told the Seneca County Commissioners the district was in “good financial shape,” according to the Advertiser-Tribune.

The Seneca County Opportunity Center, which operates under the county Board of Developmental Disabilities, provides services and supports for people with developmental disabilities and is funded in part by local taxpayers.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio’s new business of leasing about 22,000 acres of its publicly owned lands to the oil and gas industry has grown into a $314 million gusher. 

The bulk of that money comes from one-time signing bonuses for mineral rights to natural gas trapped beneath 6,200 acres of Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County ($62 million) and 14,800 acres of land at Jockey Hollow and Egypt Valley wildlife areas ($238 million), which butt up against one another in Harrison County, according to an analysis from Signal Statewide. 

And the first royalty checks have begun to arrive. Salt Fork State Park became Ohio’s first major leasing deal in early 2024, with an agreement spanning 5,700 acres of one of the largest parks in the state’s fleet. It’s now among the first to start producing. 

After the signing bonus, West Virginia-based Infinity Natural Resources has paid $11.3 million from 20% of royalties on gross production between the first payments in October 2025 and the most recent data from May 2026, according to new data from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. That’s about $1.4 million per month. 

In general terms, about one-third of all the lease money stays with the park that hosts the development, with the rest freeing up budget space for any number of legislative priorities. 

Most project sites have produced nothing so far, including Leesville, Zepernick and Keen wildlife areas, according to ODNR spokesperson Andy Chow. A 302-acre lease at Valley Run Wildlife Area, in Carroll County, has made Ohio about $86,000 to date.

Infinity last month won a bid for another 513 underground acres at Salt Fork State Park, which could also add to the royalty checks down the line. 

The leases rely on fracking, an oil and gas extraction process technically known as hydraulic fracturing, where operators drill thousands of feet downward from just outside the park before turning 90 degrees and reaching laterally beneath them. From the bore, they spray a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to free natural gas from shale, and pump it back up to the surface level to process and sell. 

A handful of out-of-state companies – Gulfport Appalachia, Ascent Resources and Grenadier Energy – will split the acreage of Egypt Valley and Jockey Hollow, per bids selected by state officials last month. It remains to be seen if the larger land mass equates to bigger royalty checks for the state. 

‘It’s really not about the money’

Mike Chadsey, a spokesman for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said the lease bonus payments and long-term royalty deals provide a “meaningful” source of state funds that don’t come from taxpayers’ pockets. 

“It’s a great example of how responsible energy development can deliver lasting economic benefits while helping preserve and improve the places Ohio families will enjoy for generations to come,” he said. 

“Through responsible state lands development and Ohio’s strong regulatory oversight, our industry continues to create jobs, generate public revenue, and provide the reliable energy that powers our economy and enhances the quality of life for all Ohioans.”

The state Oil and Gas Land Management Commission for more than two years now has steadily gone about its review and, in almost all cases, acceptance of applications for mineral rights leases under Ohio’s state parks, wildlife areas, roadways, and even a state prison. 

Its members have faced regular opposition from environmentalists associated with Save Ohio Parks, a grassroots organization formed by longtime climate advocates from Southeast Ohio. That has included public comments, media campaigns, stuffed public meetings, and occasional heckling during OGLMC’s meetings. 

The total dollar number hasn’t swayed Melinda Zemper, a steering committee member. 

“Whether it’s $200 million or $300 million, the fact is, when you have water depleted from our freshwater resources and converted into radioactive waste brine that has the potential to contaminate our aquifers and groundwater, that’s not a good tradeoff,” she said in an interview, referring to industrial waste that stems from the fracking process. 

“It’s really not about the money for Save Ohio Parks, it’s about preserving our natural lands for future generations and ensuring we have a livable planet.”

Where does fracking money go?

Generally speaking, some of the money stays with the park that hosted the drilling. The rest goes to the state. 

By law, at least 30% of the money must go toward capital improvements at the park – things like campsites, lodges and bathrooms. 

At Salt Fork, the state’s largest state park and oldest fracking lease site, a state board in 2024 approved $20 million in construction to renovate its lodge, beach house, splash pad and roadways, before increases worth another $3 million were approved this year. 

However, state lawmakers have paired the cash infusion from the leases with roughly dollar-for-dollar general revenue fund cuts. This essentially gives architects of Ohio’s $96 billion budget some new cash to spend on any given legislative priority or tax cut. 

The current leasing process was effectively created by 2023 legislation passed by statehouse Republicans and signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In the wake of Politico’s explosive Monday report that an ex-girlfriend of Platner’s alleged he sexually assaulted her in 2021, the political newcomer’s supporters in Congress and Democratic circles in Washington, D.C., rescinded their endorsements and sought a new candidate in the race that is seen as crucial to Senate control. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said it would pull all its resources from the race as long as Platner was the nominee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for him to drop out and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who gave a critical early boost to Platner in the race for the Democratic nomination, said he told Platner directly he should “step aside.”

Even Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said Platner should withdraw.

And key outside Democratic groups, including Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and the Sanders-founded Our Revolution PAC, also withdrew their endorsements after the Politico report came out.

Platner has denied the accusation and, as of Tuesday afternoon, was still the Democratic nominee. But he raised the possibility he would leave the race Monday, saying in a short direct-to-camera video that he was “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

Under state law, he must withdraw by July 13, and the party would have until July 27 to replace him.

Four Senate seats

Monday and Tuesday, national Democrats seemed eager to move on from the oysterman and first-time candidate, who gained nationwide attention for both his energetic economic populist campaign and his personal scandals, in an effort to preserve one of the party’s best chances to pick up a Senate seat this year. 

Democrats need to flip four Senate seats to win control of the chamber, with Collins the only Republican up for reelection in a state President Donald Trump lost in 2024. 

Elections forecasters generally considered the Maine race a toss-up before the latest news about Platner.

The Cook Political Report rates a North Carolina seat being vacated by retiring Republican Thom Tillis as leaning toward Democrats, while Republican incumbents facing strong Democratic challengers in Alaska and Ohio are tossups, as is an open race to replace Democrat Gary Peters in Michigan.

If Collins wins reelection, Democrats would have to sweep those races and pick up at least one seat currently seen as favoring the GOP to tilt the balance in the Senate, now controlled by Republicans with 53 seats.

The national environment generally gives Democrats an advantage, given Trump’s poor poll ratings and trends that favor the party not in the White House in midterm elections. 

But Collins’ electoral strength — she outperformed Trump by 15 percentage points in 2020, the last time she was on the ballot, to remain the only New England Republican in the Senate — has beguiled Democrats for decades. 

Quick consolidation 

Replacing Platner and quickly coalescing around another candidate could be the party’s best chance to keep the map competitive.

Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic strategist and co-founder at D.C.-based ROKK Solutions, said Maine Democrats should be mindful of the party’s loss in the 2024 presidential race following the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket.

“A replacement could win if everyone gets on the same page quickly,” he said in a Tuesday interview. “Drawing from some of the lessons of 2024, it would be helpful if there could be a process where voters do not think that this person was thrust upon them and they had a choice.”

Several potential replacements have expressed interest since the Politico story published.

Former state CDC Director Nirav D. Shah, who finished second in the gubernatorial primary last month, said he had fielded “hundreds of encouraging messages” and that he was evaluating his next move.

Jordan Wood, who finished third in the primary for the U.S. House seat held by retiring Rep. Jared Golden, indicated he would appreciate consideration.

“If my fellow Maine Democrats decide through an open and democratic process that I am the best candidate to defeat Susan Collins, I would be humbled by their trust,” Wood said in a statement.

Our Revolution, which supports progressive candidates, warned “the Democratic establishment” to heed primary voters’ wishes if and when a replacement is selected. 

The Hill reported Tuesday the group is backing former state Senate President Troy Jackson, who finished third in the gubernatorial primary.

Spokespeople for Platner’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment Tuesday.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Trump/Republican spending law made the largest cuts ever to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is largely used by children, older adults, and those with disabilities.

The cuts to SNAP have impacted millions of in-need Americans.

Not only did the spending law cause major damage, but the longest-ever federal shutdown that followed it meant even those who were able to get benefits couldn’t get them in a timely fashion, according to Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the national Food Research & Action Center.

While all 50 states saw severe impacts, Plata-Nino said states like Arizona saw a more than 50% drop in SNAP benefits. Florida and Georgia each saw nearly 700,000 people lose benefits, despite still needing the help, she said.

“It means that kids are going to have less to eat,” Plata-Nino said. “For families, it might mean that there’s just no food on the table, and they may not be able to pay rent because they have to pay for this.”

Ohio saw a 7% drop in SNAP since the cuts, amounting to about 100,000 people.

While the Ohio Association of Foodbanks also serves people at poverty levels slightly higher than those who qualify for SNAP, executive director Joree Novotny said food banks work with SNAP to “fill shortfalls, prevent hunger, and promote nutrition,” even as demand at food banks rises.

Novotny said the association is partnering with the state and counties to protect SNAP access, as numerous factors push down on the economic livelihood of Ohioans, including inflation, consumer prices, and other costs.

SNAP benefit theft has also impacted the system, she said, adding to the “general economic strain” for thousands of Ohio families.

“All this means continued pressure on Ohio’s food banks and their local hunger relief partners, while at the same time, food supply from retailer and manufacturer donations and federal commodity programs is down,” Novotny told the Capital Journal.

Modernization of the SNAP cards used to purchase items has been approved by the Ohio General Assembly, and Novotny praised legislative action to give food banks emergency funds when the federal government shutdown held back SNAP benefits.

“These efforts and more will be important to food security for Ohio families and the continued strength of Ohio’s interconnected food supply chain,” according to Novotny.

On top of drastic cuts, the spending bill also changed the way states contribute, bumping the administrative costs a state pays from 50% to 75%.

“That means that SNAP has become a line item in the budget, and Ohio is looking at paying approximately $160 million additionally… to keep the program going,” Plata-Nino said.

States can also decide to opt out of the program if the costs are too high, but currently Ohio plans to continue.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services said lawmakers “helped cover the gap” for the increase, which takes effect in October.

An important part of the analysis of individual state SNAP programs is their error rate, or payment accuracy rate.

The rate shows how often states see common errors as part of their SNAP benefits participation.

Fraud is not considered as part of the error rate, but things like a failure to report income, incorrect makeup of a household, or miscalculating a household’s income or expenses are included, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

The analysis of the error rates is done both by the states and by the federal government, and sometimes those separate analyses can differ, according to Plata-Nino.

It’s important that the error rates are accurately noted, because the number determines how much the federal government will contribute to states, and an inaccurate rate could mean less money coming to state programs, under the new law.

Ohio has set its focus on the error rates for SNAP.

According to a press release on June 25, the job and family services department said the payment accuracy rate for SNAP in Ohio has improved, down to 6.76% in 2025 compared with 2024, when the rate was 9.13%.

“We have been working closely with counties to improve payment accuracy by reducing common errors in the SNAP program,” said department director Matt Damschroder in a statement. “Together, we’ve made significant progress over the past year and remain committed to becoming even more efficient stewards of these critical public resources.”

The department noted the importance of the lower rate, as the changes in federal SNAP cost-sharing create a line in the sand for states.

States with error rates under 6% will continue to see 100% of benefit costs funded, whereas states above 6% will pay “an increasing percentage of benefit costs,” according to the department.

The 2025 error rate is not going to be used to identify the cost-sharing the state will have, but Damschroder and the department said it “demonstrates that Ohio’s improvement can significantly reduce potential costs.”

If the 2024 rate of 9.13% was used to calculate Ohio’s costs, the state would have had to come up with $321 million. Under the 2025 rate, the cost would be $160 million.

The state said about 1.4 million Ohioans use SNAP benefits monthly, at a cost of more than $270 million.

Plata-Nino said there’s still hope that the SNAP cuts could be undone via a Farm Bill that’s still being debated in Congress.

She said “at minimum,” the Food Research & Action Center and other organizations have asked for Congress to delay the implementation of the changes in cost-sharing for all states.

While current drafts of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House versions are “cost-neutral,” meaning there would be no change for the SNAP program, Democrats are attempting to hold off until changes can be made, according to Plata-Nino.

Still, without a crystal ball, it’s hard to know how the Republican majority and President Donald Trump will move forward.

“We just don’t know how this administration is going to act,” she said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I love the variety that’s in there,” she said. “They like the apple crisps a lot. We don’t usually get those. We love the fresh fruit, and I love that we’re able to come here every week.” 

The New Carlisle location is one of four weekly mobile routes Children’s Hunger Alliance has throughout Ohio this summer that distributes ready-to-eat meals for families to take home to their children. Each child can get a box. 

The shelf stable meals include five days worth of breakfasts, dinners, milk and snacks. The mobile routes also offer fruit bags with apples and oranges this summer. 

“It is helpful because the girls like to snack a lot, and it is snacky food, but it’s also filling, and it’s healthy stuff for them, and they enjoy picking out what their meals are each day,” Moore said. 

The New Carlisle mobile route goes from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Wednesdays and about a dozen cars were lined up to receive their food boxes by 10 a.m. as the temperature was in the 80s, but the humidity was making it feel like it was in the 90s. 

About 150 food boxes were distributed on Wednesday. Another 176 boxes were given out the week before, and 226 were passed out on June 17, said Diane Miller Ryan, Children’s Hunger Alliance director of community outreach. 

The other mobile routes are in Coshocton on Tuesdays, Sabina on Wednesdays, and Troy on Thursdays. 

The Troy site distributes at least 178 boxes a week, the Sabina site averages 75 boxes, and the Coschoton site gives out more than 100 boxes a week, Ryan said. 

“During the summer — unless the kids are going to a summer camp or something like that, that actually serves the food — they don’t have any access to it, so this gives them access that they can get food and just help them, because everybody knows the price of food is outrageous now,” Ryan said. 

More than 505,000, or 1 in 5, Ohio children struggle with hunger and summer is typically the hungriest time of the year for students who receive free or reduced school meals.  

Nearly 29% of Ohio students participated in the school breakfast program and 57.3% of students participated in the school lunch program during the 2024-25 school year, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. 

“During the school year, more than 900,000 children across Ohio count on the stability of a healthy meal at school each day, but when summer arrives, that dependable source of nutrition disappears,” Children’s Hunger Alliance President and CEO Michelle M. Brown said in a statement. 

“For many families, that means stretching tight budgets even further, while often scrambling for affordable childcare or summer camps.” 

Romy Wilson picks up food boxes at the New Carlisle site every week this summer. 

“It’s a big help,” she said. 

Beth Thomas picked up three boxes on Wednesday. 

“The kids really enjoy them,” she said. 

Samantha Kennedy said her kids, 11 and 8, like the snacks and the milk. 

“I love that it gives my kids the ability to grab lunch on their own,” she said. 

“It’s wonderful that I don’t have to answer the question, ‘what’s for lunch?’ It also gives them some self-confidence to be able to get their own food.” 

Shawna Vanmeter said her kids like seeing what they get every week. 

“Their favorite thing is probably the beef sticks and the juices,” she said. 

One woman expressed her appreciation for the boxes and her kids said it’s like Christmas. 

The New Carlisle boxes include Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, waffles, chocolate milk, a turkey stick, fruit juice, Cheerios, a beef teriyaki stick, a pepperoni stick, and pepperoni pizza crackers. 

“It looks like a lot of snacky things, but it’s whole grain crackers, or meat sticks,” Ryan said. 

“It’s stuff that kids will eat. The big thing is you have to get kids to eat things, so we try to make it as healthy as possible.”

Children’s Hunger Alliance has about 145 summer meal sites statewide that provide food for children that are sponsored through the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program. 

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The bill makes a number of policy changes to increase home supply like streamlining federal regulations, restricting institutional investors, and incentivizing local governments to lower housing barriers.

This follows an unprecedented rise in housing costs fueled by antiquated construction rules, underbuilding during the Great Recession, and rising inflation.

Though Ohio has enjoyed a relatively affordable cost of living for decades, the state has not been immune to these national housing trends.

The average Ohio house cost 65% more in January 2026 than it did in January 2020.

Without enough homes to meet the country’s growing demand, prices are going up and, with them, the median age of first-time homebuyers which now tops 40 years old. 

But Ohio doesn’t just have a housing supply issue. It also has a housing choice issue.

Increasingly, buyers do not have the freedom to choose the type of home that best fits their family’s unique wants and needs, constrained by local zoning regulations that often ban historic housing styles. 

In Ohio, only 3% of all homes are duplexes which Dr. Jason Reece, professor of City and Regional Planning at the Ohio State University, has called America’s “original workforce housing” because of their natural affordability and power to build family wealth through sweat equity. 

These so-called “missing middle” homes — duplexes, triplexes, and small townhomes — previously played a crucial role in expanding homeownership opportunities to middle-income families.

In the past, a young family that purchased a duplex could use their spare unit to generate extra rental income. They could also offer decent housing to family members at the start of their career or in their twilight years. This not only kept expenses low but also made family caregiving easier.

In theory, this path to the middle class is still possible.

In a recent analysis my firm Scioto Analysis conducted with the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio, we estimated a typical family can now earn or save nearly $1.3 million over a lifetime through duplex homeownership. And that doesn’t include the value fo the equity that the home itself builds over time. 

But Ohio families can only benefit from a duplex if they can find one.

We also mapped the zoning code rules in all eleven of central Ohio’s counties and estimated that duplexes were prohibited on 79% of all parcels.

In some communities, including those facing intense job growth pressures, they’re banned entirely. 

This isn’t just a problem in Ohio.

Across the country, duplexes and other traditional styles have gradually been removed from the marketplace.

Consumers have more freedom than ever to choose the kinds of food they eat or the places where they get their news, but they have fewer housing choices than their grandparents. 

From Maine to Montana to Arizona, and many places in between, cities and states are confronting this challenge with laws aimed at re-legalizing the duplex and restoring that tradition of choice. 

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act offers Ohio an opportunity to join them.

In particular, local communities will soon be able to learn zoning and land-use “best practices” from national research and case studies, compete for planning grants to localize these strategies, and seek a share of more than $200 million in competitive innovation funds to make these plans a reality. 

The state can accelerate this work, too, with its own reforms and supports, many of which were already laid out in the Ohio Senate Select Committee’s “Housing Reimagined” report and the Home Matters to Ohio plan.  

Each of these tools would make building housing in Ohio easier, which will improve prices and quality while expanding meaningful resident choice. And that will benefit everyone.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In the years ahead, the country can continue to follow the path blazed by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to bring states under the authority of a more powerful federal government led by him. Or it can move in a different direction, one where states become a heavier counterweight to an aggressive White House and rebalance the relationship between the states and the federal government.

The United States’ foundations are undergoing a significant stress test, experts say, raising questions about whether a radical reconception of the nation lies ahead. The federalism that has helped bind the states — and therefore, the nation — together is fraying, pulled apart by a president who demonstrates little regard for many of the nation’s core principles.

David Adkins, executive director and CEO of the Council of State Governments, a national group that represents all three branches of state government, said state-federal tensions were escalating long before Trump.

“I wonder if we will come to a breaking point in which the institutions of government no longer serve the society in which we live,” said Adkins, a former Kansas Republican state lawmaker.

“And again,” he said, “we will be required to balance personal liberty and freedoms against what powers we want the government to exercise.”

While a long line of modern presidents have expanded the powers of their office, Trump has wielded the executive branch as a weapon to punish states and those state leaders he views as enemies. Federal dollars and resources have become a form of leverage he has tried to use to pursue his political aims and deliver the retribution he promised to, if reelected. He is trying to assert an unprecedented level of White House control over state-run elections.

How states — and the people — respond will forever shape the nation.

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, Stateline has been exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the fourth in an occasional series examining the fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

As the Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing its agenda on immigration, election restrictions and other issues, Democratic states have been developing playbooks of resistance that could endure even after Trump’s time in office. They have enacted laws aimed at regulating the behavior of federal agents and preventing any attempts to illegally subvert the November midterm elections, for instance.

At least eight states have adopted laws limiting masking by law enforcement, according to Prosecutors Alliance Action, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports the legislation. The mask restrictions are in response to the widespread use of masks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and other federal agents, as well as anger over the deployment of agents in places such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

Some states have also taken action to thwart any federal attempt to take over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are run by the states. Administration officials have refused to rule out sending federal agents or troops to the polls, something already prohibited under federal law except in extremely narrow circumstances.

In late May, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that prohibits election officials from providing federal agents with access to voter lists or technology absent a court order. And New Mexico lawmakers earlier this year passed a bill to prohibit troops at polling places.

More recently, officials in some states threatened legislation to undercut Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund by taxing payments at 100%. Critics argued that the fund would be used to pay off the president’s allies. The U.S. Department of Justice has said it is backing off plans for the fund amid bipartisan opposition in Congress, but leaders have refused to confirm that in writing and a federal judge has said a lawsuit against the fund can proceed.

Collectively, these efforts offer a window into how states are testing ways to push back against the White House. While the Trump administration is challenging some of these measures in court, Democratic state lawmakers have demonstrated that state-level resistance to increasingly aggressive exercises of federal power is possible.

“It is incumbent upon state legislators and state governments to protect their people from this incredible overreach and this display of horrors and egregious behaviors we are seeing from the federal government,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Amanda Cappelletti, a Democrat who has been pushing restrictions on ICE.

In response to Stateline’s questions for this series, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “The Trump Administration faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

Rethinking the Constitution

Conservatives have long complained that the federal government has grown too large and too powerful. As Democrats fight Trump, some Republicans see an opportunity to forge a new bipartisan consensus in favor of states’ authority.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Cris Dush, a Republican, said the federal government has been overreaching since at least Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in the early 20th century. He argues that too many powers have been ceded to the executive branch that belong to legislators. 

“And that’s why we have a republic, not a democracy and not a king. It’s not supposed to go with the whims of either the public or whoever the chief executive is, and that’s why you’re now starting to see Democrats get on board with this,” Dush said.

“I’m glad to welcome anybody to this party that wants to come, because it’s all about getting the legislative authority back.”

Dush supports a convention of the states to draft proposed changes to the Constitution that limit federal power. The idea of calling a convention has long percolated in statehouses, especially among Republicans, but support for the idea appears to have grown in recent years.

The states know what the potential dangers are, and they’re getting better prepared.

– Former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures demand one but sets out few details about how such a gathering would operate. Any amendments proposed by a convention would need to be approved by three-fourths of the states.

Several different campaigns are pushing states to demand a convention, including one focused on a balanced budget amendment and another that seeks term limits. Collectively, 28 state legislatures have called for a convention, according to the good government group Common Cause, which opposes a convention. Thirty-six states must call for a convention to trigger one.

Former Utah Republican Gov. Gary Herbert has pushed for a balanced budget amendment to rein in federal spending and the ballooning national debt for more than 15 years. He said that states must lead the effort because Congress lacks the courage to confront the issue. 

“The burgeoning debt is just the result of not having appropriate balance between the state and federal government,” he said.

While conservatives and liberals fear a so-called runaway convention that could radically reshape the face of American government, Herbert said those same fears were present 250 years ago as the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to reshape the Articles of Confederation into the current Constitution.

“Well, the result was pretty good,” he said. “You know, we got this great Constitution everybody says was really a divinely inspired kind of a thing. … The Founding Fathers were brilliant in putting the Constitution together and said, ‘Here’s a role for the federal government, but here’s a larger role even for the states.’”

Stitt, the Oklahoma governor, said he wants states to have more control of federal spending. Bypassing Washington, D.C.’s bureaucracy would give states more authority and stewardship over federal taxpayer dollars, he said, forcing states to live within their means and end incentives to freely accept federal dollars rather than lose them to another state.

“So we have to change that incentive, and I think that’s a reasonable way to do it,” he said in an interview. “Now, Oklahoma would handle our own roads, bridges, etcetera, and I just think that the incentive would be totally different, and there would truly be 50 laboratories of democracy.”

Stitt is chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association. He’s criticized Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into blue states. But he said presidents of both parties have wielded the growing might of the federal government to influence policies across the country.

He pointed to Trump’s efforts to kill already-approved offshore wind energy projects, and he highlighted the Keystone Pipeline extension, which was thwarted by Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden but embraced by Trump. He called those sorts of turnabouts “un-American.”

“We’re in a terrible situation if this continues to happen in our country,” he said. “This is like what we’ve made fun of in these Third World countries from dictator to dictator.”

Unlike Stitt, critics of a convention of the states fear it could result in a dramatic overhaul of the Constitution that would endanger core liberties and freedoms. And because the Constitution provides few rules for how a convention would work, they worry the process would be susceptible to influence by wealthy interests.

Adkins, the Council of State Governments CEO, said a convention of the states could become more likely as state-federal tensions increase. He said states should begin having dispassionate conversations about how they would respond if a convention is called, what it would look like, and who would be in charge.

“Those are a lot of questions that we just don’t know about,” Adkins said. “But that’s sort of the ultimate nuclear option for the states in a dysfunctional federal system.”

States are ‘better prepared’

Whether a convention of the states ever takes place, the conversation surrounding the idea underscores the depth of frustration with the current state-federal relationship.

Last year a Gallup survey found that 62% of Americans believe the federal government has too much power, the highest percentage recorded since 2002. It was also the first time since 2007 that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say the federal government is too powerful.

But what happens once Trump leaves office?Will at least some anger at the federal government dissipate?

Trump is a very unpopular president when compared against the past four executives to hold the White House. His disapproval rating stood at 58% on July 2, according to a New York Times daily average of polling on the president. Just 39% of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, down from nearly 50% in the weeks after his inauguration in January 2025.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, said the way Trump has pushed the envelope could become a new normal “if the wrong people get elected.” But few people who run for president want to bully states, she said.

“They’re not looking to be king. They’re not looking to be a dictator,” Kelly said. “And there is plenty to do just with the responsibilities and the authority that the federal government traditionally has that there’s no need to go that way.”

A presidential administration that makes clear it will give states as much leeway as possible as it advances its agenda will go far in rebuilding relationships between the states and the federal government, said former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

But if not, states have learned from the Trump era.

“The states know what the potential dangers are,” Whitman said, “and they’re getting better prepared.”

In the birthplace of the nation, Philadelphians this spring were gearing up for a raucous Independence Day celebration. But feelings were mixed in this liberal stronghold, said Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton, a Democrat who represents parts of Philadelphia.

She said Trump misunderstands the distinct powers of the states and is “trampling the American order” by seeking to upend American federalism. 

She and other Democrats in the closely divided commonwealth are trying to push back on the federal government through words and deeds.

But she said this administration hasn’t soured the excitement and pride in the American experiment. Republican and Democratic lawmakers were eager to participate in special sessions outside of Harrisburg this year in Philadelphia, where the founders signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

“People recognize the challenges of the hour, and they make every effort to engage politically so we can get out of this mess,” she said. “But it doesn’t fully dampen the mood of being grateful for what this country still represents, and the potential that it still has.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify comments from David Adkins, executive director and CEO of the Council of State Governments.

States Newsroom reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@statesnewsroom.com. 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 complaint centers on 15 payments the campaign committee — Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio — made to American Express between April 11, 2025, and June 2, 2026, totaling $509,473.01. Rather than list each purchase with a vendor, date, purpose and amount, the complaint says, the committee reported each month’s credit-card bill as a single expenditure, naming “American Express” as the payee and describing the purpose only as a credit-card payment.

Ohio law, the complaint argues, requires campaigns to itemize each individual transaction and to keep supporting documentation for credit-card purchases. By reporting only a monthly total, it alleges, the committee filed reports that are neither complete nor accurate.

The complaint was filed by state Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, the Senate’s Democratic whip, who cites more than two decades of filing campaign-finance disclosures himself — through years of elected office and party work — along with his review of the committee’s public filings. Smith is a Democrat and Ramaswamy the Republican nominee for governor, a partisan backdrop the complaint does not obscure. The dollar figures at its center, however, come from the campaign’s own reports and match the totals the Ohio Capital Journal independently tallied.

The underlying spending was first reported in June by the Ohio Capital Journal, which found the campaign had put $509,473 on a credit card — roughly $280,892 of it since April — without disclosing individual transactions. TiffinOhio.net carried that reporting at the time. The complaint now asks the state to act on it.

The spending represents less than 2% of the campaign’s overall expenditures, and the expenses may all be legitimate; reporting them as a single monthly reimbursement simply makes it impossible for the public to see what they were. Phil Richter, who led the now-dissolved Ohio Elections Commission, told the Ohio Capital Journal that the reporting is the kind of issue auditors handle routinely and is “not that out of the ordinary” as long as a campaign eventually supplies documentation, which it has 21 days to do once formally asked.

Other campaign-finance specialists interviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal took a harder view, describing Ohio’s itemization requirement as unambiguous and calling the lump-sum reporting an outlier for its size. They said that even if every dollar was spent legitimately, routing the disclosure through a single credit-card line removes the public’s ability to judge how a candidate is spending campaign money.

The complaint lands in an office with a potential conflict. The Public Integrity Division sits within the office of Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, has endorsed Ramaswamy and is himself on the November ballot, running for state auditor. Campaign-finance oversight was moved under the secretary of state’s office at the start of 2026, after Republican lawmakers eliminated the independent Ohio Elections Commission — a change good-government groups warned at the time could open the door to favoritism or selective enforcement.

The complaint cites several provisions of Ohio law, among them the statute governing the contents of campaign-finance reports and a separate provision barring a statewide candidate’s committee from filing an incomplete or inaccurate statement. It also points to a secretary of state rule and to the state campaign-finance handbook, which instructs committees that pay a credit-card company directly to list each purchase separately — with the vendor, address, date and amount — and to attach the card statement.

Ramaswamy has itemized this kind of spending before. During his 2024 presidential campaign, the Ohio Capital Journal reported, his committee disclosed individual credit-card purchases; in Ohio, it has reported only monthly totals. The committee’s treasurer, Kevin Broghamer, is an experienced compliance professional whose firm has counted U.S. Sen. Jon Husted and the Ohio Republican Party among its clients, according to that reporting.

Neither Ramaswamy nor the campaign has publicly addressed the reporting. The campaign did not respond to repeated inquiries from the Ohio Capital Journal, and a campaign press secretary who said the office would look into the matter did not provide documentation by that outlet’s deadline.

No ruling has been issued on the complaint. The secretary of state’s office had not produced the underlying credit-card documentation in response to earlier public-records requests and, as of the Ohio Capital Journal’s late-June reporting, had not said whether it had opened any review. Ohio’s next statewide campaign-finance reports are not due until October — weeks before the November 3 general election, in which Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Pepper, a Cincinnati attorney and former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, is running as the running mate of Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor. Several of Ohio’s largest labor organizations, including the United Auto Workers, have endorsed the Acton-Pepper ticket. The Lima event was organized by the Ohio Democratic Party.

Pepper framed his remarks around Ramaswamy’s past statements on organized labor. “Ramaswamy often talks about the unions he wants to get rid of. Anyone who thinks it’s his job to get rid of the unions he doesn’t like is a threat to all unions,” Pepper said. “We’ve got a guy who says Ohioans are lazy, mediocre and not working hard enough, and every step he proposes would make life harder for everyone except for billionaires like himself.”

Jeff Adams, president of United Auto Workers Local 1219 in Lima, said the race carries high stakes for local families. “There is too much at stake in this election for Lima’s families. We can’t afford a billionaire who will take away our jobs and call our workers lazy,” Adams said.

Gary McPheron, secretary-treasurer of the Lima Building Trades, said union members were weighing the candidates’ records. “Our members are watching to see which candidate will stand alongside them in good and bad times, and that’s not Vivek Ramaswamy. Instead of fighting for Ohio workers, Ramaswamy would take away our jobs and make already high costs even worse,” McPheron said. “Ramaswamy is an out-of-touch billionaire who can’t be trusted to keep jobs in Ohio or lower costs for working families. Our members and Ohioans across the state are working harder than ever. We can’t afford Vivek Ramaswamy.”

The Democrats’ criticism draws on Ramaswamy’s recent public record. In a December 2024 social media post — before he entered the governor’s race — Ramaswamy argued that top U.S. technology companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers because, he wrote, American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” He called for a culture that prioritizes hard work over what he described as laziness. The post addressed American culture broadly rather than Ohio workers specifically, and it drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Ramaswamy did not describe Ohioans as lazy in those words; the “lazy” characterization reflects how Pepper and other Democrats have summarized the post. On unions, Ramaswamy has said he might seek to dismantle Ohio’s public-school teachers’ unions while proposing merit-based teacher pay, according to reporting on his education platform.

A biotech fortune built on a failed drug

Much of the “billionaire” framing the union leaders used traces to how Ramaswamy made his money. In December 2014, a company under his Roivant Sciences umbrella bought the experimental Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million, after GSK had run four failed trials on it. Ramaswamy built a subsidiary, Axovant, around the drug and took it public in 2015 in what was then the largest biotech IPO on record, raising about $315 million and reaching a valuation near $3 billion — even though the company had about eight employees at the time, two of them Ramaswamy’s mother and brother. He reported roughly $38 million in income that year, most of it capital gains. In September 2017, intepirdine failed its late-stage trial; Axovant’s stock fell about 75% in a single day and never recovered. Ramaswamy was largely insulated from the losses because he held his stake through the parent firm, Roivant.

Ramaswamy has called Axovant his “single greatest failure” and said he does not regret how it was run. His campaign has said the drug failed as the vast majority of Alzheimer’s treatments do, and that he was “forced to sell a tiny portion” of his shares in 2015 to bring in an outside investor. No regulator has charged Ramaswamy with wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crime. Critics have been blunter. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who tracks Ramaswamy’s business dealings, told Fortune that “everything about him is a scam,” and told the Associated Press that his biotech record was “classic ‘pump and dump.’” Ramaswamy rejects those characterizations.

Ramaswamy co-founded the anti-ESG investment firm Strive Asset Management in Columbus in 2022. In November 2024, the firm announced it was relocating its headquarters from Columbus to Dallas, moving most of its Columbus staff and roughly $1.7 billion in assets under management to Texas. He launched his campaign for governor about three months later, in February 2025. Separately, the Associated Press has reported that a Roivant subsidiary, Genevant Sciences, and a partner firm reached a $2.25 billion settlement with Moderna over vaccine technology — part of a pandemic-era record TiffinOhio.net has examined in detail.

A self-funded campaign and questions about who benefits

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

His signature tax proposals have drawn scrutiny over who would benefit. Ramaswamy has proposed phasing out Ohio’s income tax beginning with the capital gains tax; the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission has estimated that step alone would cost the state between $615 million and $645 million a year, with nearly 82% of the benefit flowing to Ohioans earning more than $200,000. His own April 6 filing with the Ohio Ethics Commission disclosed $768,968 in capital gains from a stock sale — the kind of income his plan would exempt. Independent analyses by the Legislative Service Commission, Policy Matters Ohio, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the progressive group Innovation Ohio have reached a common conclusion: his tax agenda would deliver its largest benefits to wealthy Ohioans and corporations while shifting costs toward working families. Innovation Ohio has estimated that his plan to roll property taxes back to 2021 levels would cut roughly $6.6 billion a year from local budgets, including about $4 billion from schools, with no replacement revenue identified.

Ramaswamy has also faced questions about promoting industries he holds a personal financial stake in. His financial disclosure shows holdings in cryptocurrency and in Strive, which has committed much of its treasury to Bitcoin, even as he has urged Ohio to expand crypto and data-center development that the governor’s office would help regulate. His campaign has not publicly addressed the overlap between his holdings and the policies he supports.

Ramaswamy has centered his campaign on cutting taxes and regulation, arguing that lower taxes would spur growth that lifts the whole state. At his February 2025 launch, he pledged to make Ohio “the top state in the country to start and grow a business,” called for eliminating the state income tax and rolling back property taxes, and said he would cut business regulations. His running mate is Ohio Senate President Rob McColley. The Ohio Democratic Party’s announcement of Tuesday’s event did not include a response from Ramaswamy’s campaign.

Ramaswamy won the Republican primary in May and faces Acton in the Nov. 3 general election. The winner will succeed Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The sharpest attacks on Ramaswamy’s identity have not come from Democrat Amy Acton’s campaign. They have come from far-right activists, conservative event audiences, online commentators and, during the Republican primary, one of his own GOP opponents — questioning his Hindu faith, his vegetarian diet, his Indian heritage and, in some corners, whether the Cincinnati-born candidate is truly American.

The facts of Ramaswamy’s biography are not in serious dispute. A biotech entrepreneur and 2024 Republican presidential candidate, he was born in Cincinnati to parents who immigrated legally from India, was raised Hindu, and went on to Harvard and Yale before winning the 2026 Republican nomination for governor. He faces Acton, the state’s former health director, in the Nov. 3 general election.

A primary rival questioned his citizenship

The most direct Ohio example came from Casey Putsch, a Perrysburg automotive entrepreneur and Tiffin native who challenged Ramaswamy in the GOP primary. In April, Putsch posted a video firing a rifle and inviting Ramaswamy to play “Cowboys versus Indians,” then adding, “Don’t worry, it’s feather, not dot” — a racialized reference distinguishing Indigenous people from people of Indian descent. Dr. Deepak Sarma, a Case Western Reserve University professor of Indian religions, called the video “one hundred percent” a threat. Putsch denied it was racist or threatening, describing it as a joke protected by the First and Second Amendments.

Putsch’s attacks extended to Ramaswamy’s gun credentials. In a separate video, he canceled his NRA membership on camera after the group’s political arm endorsed Ramaswamy, replaying clips from Ramaswamy’s 2023 NRA speech in which the candidate acknowledged growing up in an “anti-gun household” and having visited a shooting range “probably less than I can count on two hands.” Putsch told an NRA representative there was “nothing remotely American about” Ramaswamy.

Putsch also repeatedly questioned Ramaswamy’s citizenship. Told by a reporter that Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati, Putsch responded that he was “born to Indian foreign nationals who came here just to have an anchor baby,” and in the same interview called him “questionably American.” NBC News has reported that Putsch routinely refers to Ramaswamy as an “Indian anchor baby,” a term that undermines the citizenship guaranteed to U.S.-born children of immigrants under the 14th Amendment.

Turning Point USA crowds questioned his faith

The theme has surfaced nationally. At a Turning Point USA forum at Montana State University in October 2025, Ramaswamy’s Hindu identity was challenged by several students. “Jesus Christ is God, and there is no other God,” one said. “How can you represent the constituents of Ohio who are 64% Christian if you are not a part of that faith?” Another asked why he would have “Christian values.” Ramaswamy responded by citing the U.S. Constitution’s ban on religious tests for public office, according to Religion News Service.

When Ramaswamy headlined another Turning Point USA event at Ohio State University on April 21, 2026, audience members pressed him on immigration and Israel. That event, WOSU reported, did not veer into the attacks on his religion seen in Montana, where some questioned whether a practicing Hindu could lead Ohio.

A fight rooted in the H-1B backlash

The tension predates the governor’s race. In late 2024, Ramaswamy and Elon Musk set off a backlash among Trump supporters by defending the H-1B visa program and high-skilled immigration. CBS News reported that their stance split Republicans, and Axios described the dispute as a “MAGA-world civil war” over race, immigration and American identity. The conflict intensified after Trump named Indian-born venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser, and after Ramaswamy argued in a widely shared post that American culture had “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

‘Anchor baby’ attacks go national

Far-right commentator Nick Fuentes has targeted Ramaswamy directly. After Ramaswamy argued in a New York Times essay that American identity is rooted in civic ideals rather than ancestry — writing that “no matter your ancestry,” a naturalized citizen is “every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant” — Fuentes wrote that Ramaswamy was “an actual anchor baby” and that “foreigners who have no right to be here don’t get to lecture me about what it is to be American.”

That framing has blended with a renewed national fight over birthright citizenship. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict it. Hours later, the Justice Department directed prosecutors to prioritize investigations of “birth tourism schemes,” keeping the issue alive on the right even after the court upheld broad citizenship protections for people born on U.S. soil.

An outsider in the movement he champions

Ramaswamy’s case is striking because he rose to prominence attacking corporate diversity programs and liberal identity politics. Yet in the Ohio race, much of the pressure he has faced from his right has been explicitly identity-based. The Washington Post reported in May that Ramaswamy, after building a career denouncing “wokeness,” was confronting racist and nativist attacks in his run for governor, including from Putsch, who the paper said called him “not a real American.”

Ramaswamy remains backed by prominent Republicans, including Trump, and won the primary easily. But the attacks from the far right underscore a divide in the party: a candidate can champion “America First” politics and still be treated by some in that movement as an outsider — and, for a Hindu son of Indian immigrants born in Ohio, face questions from within his own coalition about whether being born here is enough.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Seneca County deputies fatally shot a Bloomville man during an attempted arrest Tuesday morning, according to the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office, in a shooting that is now under review by the state.

The Sheriff’s Office identified the man as Jeffrey R. Sergent, 43, of Bloomville. In a written release, Sheriff Fredrick W. Stevens said the shooting happened at about 10:17 a.m. Tuesday, July 7, near the intersection of Township Road 8 and State Route 67.

According to the release, a Bloomville police unit and Seneca County deputies attempted to stop a pickup truck driven by Sergent, who the Sheriff’s Office said faced felony domestic violence charges and whom deputies were trying to take into custody on those charges. Officers partially blocked the truck between their cruisers and guardrails on either side of the roadway and spent about 10 minutes trying to persuade him to step out, the release said.

Stevens said Sergent refused to get out, displayed several knives from his pocket during the negotiation, rolled up his windows and would not speak. As additional deputies arrived, the Sheriff’s Office said, Sergent put the truck in reverse in an attempt to leave but was blocked by the Bloomville police vehicle, then shifted into drive. Deputies positioned in front of and beside the truck fired into it, striking him, according to the release. Stevens wrote that deputies fired “before he could run one of them over.”

The truck struck the push bar on the front of a deputy’s cruiser hard enough to bend it, the release said, but officers were able to move out of the way.

EMS was called to the scene, according to the Sheriff’s Office, and deputies who checked for a pulse did not find one — a finding the release said EMS confirmed when it arrived. One deputy was treated for a hand injury from broken glass, the release said.

The Seneca County Coroner’s Office took jurisdiction over Sergent’s body, according to a release the office issued Wednesday. Coroner Dr. Zachary K. West and Investigator Amy Dickman responded to the scene Tuesday, and the body was taken to the Lucas County Coroner’s Office for a postmortem examination, the release said.

That examination, performed Wednesday, July 8, found that Sergent had a gunshot wound to the head and a gunshot wound to the arm, according to the coroner’s office. Dr. West took part in the examination along with Dr. Dwayne Wolf, a forensic pathologist with the Lucas County Coroner’s Office. Projectiles recovered from Sergent’s body were turned over to BCI, the release said.

The coroner’s office said the final cause and manner of death, along with a toxicology report, remain pending and will be determined once the investigation is complete.

The Sheriff’s Office said it contacted the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) to process the scene and investigate the shooting. The deputies involved have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete, according to the release.

While the coroner’s office has confirmed that Sergent died of gunshot wounds, the account of how the shooting unfolded comes from the Sheriff’s Office. The office has not said how many deputies fired or how many shots were fired, and it has declined to release the involved deputies’ names, saying they are considered crime victims whose information is protected under Ohio law. TiffinOhio.net has not independently verified the circumstances of the shooting, and BCI’s findings have not been released.

This is a developing story. Check TiffinOhio.net for updates.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Reuben J. Guilkey II, 29, of Tiffin died of injuries sustained in the June 30 crash on Greeley Street, Sgt. Jared Watson of the Tiffin Police Department told The Advertiser-Tribune, which first reported his death. Watson said Monday afternoon that Guilkey had died of his injuries but that the exact time of death was not known.

Guilkey was wearing a helmet at the time of the crash, and impairment is not believed to be a factor, Watson said. He was operating a Suzuki GSXR 750 “at a rate greater than 60 mph,” Watson said, on a street posted at 25 mph.

According to police, Guilkey was traveling eastbound Tuesday evening when he lost control, struck a utility pole and guide wire and continued eastbound before the motorcycle overturned, ejecting him. Tiffin police and the Tiffin Fire and Rescue Division responded and found the rider seriously injured. He was taken to Mercy Health – Tiffin Hospital and then flown by Life Flight to Mercy Health – St. Vincent Medical Center, a Level I trauma center in Toledo.

Watson urged motorcyclists to operate their vehicles according to their skill level and to be mindful of speed, and he asked other drivers to stay alert for motorcycles on the roadway.

TiffinOhio.net first reported the crash on July 1, when the department said the wreck was reported around 8:30 p.m. June 30 near Greeley and McCollum streets and that no other vehicles were involved.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The meeting also featured the presentation of a Tiffin Police Department Life-Saving Award and a detailed briefing on a new stormwater permit tied to pollution limits for the Sandusky River. Council members present cast every recorded vote 7–0.

Sergeant honored for talking a teen through a crisis

Police Chief David Pauly presented Sgt. Jared Watson with the department’s Life-Saving Award — the second of Watson’s career — for his response to a June 1 mental health emergency involving a 13-year-old.

According to the citation Pauly read into the record, officers responded that evening to a report of a teenager in a severe mental health crisis who was suicidal and had access to a firearm. A crisis hotline worker relayed that the teen had said he would harm himself if police did not leave. After the teen disconnected from the hotline, Watson established phone contact and, over about 30 minutes, built rapport and persuaded him to put the weapon down, leave the residence and accept help. The teen surrendered peacefully, was taken into protective custody without incident, and was transported to a hospital. Officers later confirmed he had immediate access to a loaded firearm.

Pauly said the outcome “was not the result of chance,” but the product of Watson’s training and crisis-intervention skills. Watson turned the recognition toward his colleagues: “I have my name on the certificate, but there were … 10 other guys that were out there that without them, it was a team,” he told council.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Traffic signal set for West Market and Teakwood

Council passed Ordinance 2026-45, authorizing a Local Public Agency agreement with the Ohio Department of Transportation and the procurement of construction services for the West Market Street and Teakwood Drive Traffic Signal Improvement Project. The work includes protected left turns at West Market Street.

The project is backed by an ODOT Abbreviated Safety Funding grant that covers 90% of eligible design, construction and inspection costs, up to a maximum of $102,724.90. The ordinance also appropriated $50,000 into the State Highway Improvement Fund for the preliminary engineering phase. Council suspended its reading rule and passed the measure as an emergency; a committee report noted a consultant-authorization deadline of Aug. 15 as the reason for the expedited timeline.

Sewer replacement bids authorized for Shawhan and Second avenues

Ordinance 2026-47 authorizes City Administrator Nick Dutro to prepare plans and specifications, advertise for and receive bids, and execute a contract for the Shawhan Avenue and Second Avenue Sewer Replacement Project. Funding for the work is already in place. One council member noted the project involves a $150,000 grant and that prompt passage would help the city meet a grant deadline. Council suspended its reading rule and passed the ordinance as an emergency.

2027 tax budget adopted

Council adopted the city’s Fiscal Year 2027 tax budget (Ordinance 2026-41) and directed the finance director to deliver it to the Seneca County Auditor by July 20. The measure was passed as an emergency to satisfy state law, which requires municipalities to adopt a tax budget on or before July 15. The tax budget is a required annual filing that precedes the county budget commission’s review.

Fire/Rescue residency repeal advances

A proposal to eliminate the Fire/Rescue Division’s residency requirement (Ordinance 2026-46) received a first reading and remains pending. It advanced from the Personnel and Labor Committee, which recommended repeal on a 3–0 vote at its June 22 meeting.

According to the committee report, the city currently uses a modified rule requiring firefighters to live within a 45-mile radius, but Fire Chief Rob Chappell has asked to remove it to widen the applicant pool. The report said the department is fully staffed, that there is currently no requirement for off-duty members to answer emergency recalls — with more than half the department not responding to a recall — and that the division relies heavily on mutual aid. Committee members were also told that many area departments have already eliminated residency rules. A council vote on the repeal is expected at a future meeting.

New stormwater permit ties city to Sandusky River pollutant limits

Dutro briefed council on a new state stormwater permit for the city’s municipal separate storm sewer system, or MS4. The city’s current permit took effect April 1, 2021 and expired March 31, 2026; the city is now in the draft period for the renewal. A draft of the general permit has been circulated to council, and the public-comment period ends Aug. 4, after which the city will apply for a new permit through the Ohio EPA.

Under the new permit, the Sandusky River and Sandusky Bay tributaries have been designated for a total maximum daily load, or TMDL, addressing total phosphorus, nitrate and nitrite, total suspended solids and sediment. Dutro said the city already meets many of the incoming requirements but will need new public-outreach measures — including messaging on proper salt storage — and, at some point, a stormwater project that could require council funding. Ordinance updates tied to the permit are also expected within a year of its approval.

Dutro reported that the City Engineer’s Office completed 251 construction-site inspections in 2025, resulting in four noted violations and 19 verbal corrections that were resolved within a week. He added that a 2024 project eliminated 18 septic systems in the city. The Water Pollution Control Center’s permit is up for renewal on the same timeline, with a possible reclassification from a Category 3 to a Category 4 facility still to be determined.

Finance department reports fifth state audit award

Finance Director Jill Lindhorst delivered the department’s annual report, highlighting its fifth Auditor of State Award, earned in 2024 for clean audits and adherence to generally accepted accounting principles. She reported that 2025 income tax receipts were up 2.75% over 2024, and that the sewer revenue office billed $7,837,635.30 across 8,896 accounts, up 1,009 accounts from the prior year. Lindhorst also outlined efficiency goals for the coming years, including a new credit-card payment processor, expanded electronic payments and records, and steps to reduce postage costs.

Also from the meeting

• Trilogy sewer easement (Ord. 2026-37): Passed 7–0 on third reading, authorizing the mayor to negotiate and enter into a sanitary sewer easement with Trilogy Real Estate Tiffin, LLC.

• License-plate-reader refund (Ord. 2026-48): Passed 7–0, appropriating a $17,382.76 refund into the General Capital Improvement Fund for two license-plate-reader cameras that were not used. Councilmember Kevin Roessner said suspending the reading rule would let the city begin earning interest on the returned funds sooner.

• Committee assignments: A request to issue an RFP for the sale and development of city-owned real estate adjacent to City Lot 6 (Mayor’s Request 26-28) will be taken up at a Committee of the Whole on Monday, July 20 at 6 p.m. A federal grants compliance study (26-29) went to the Finance Committee, and a stormwater easement (26-30) went to the Streets, Sidewalks and Sewers Committee, which meets Monday, July 13 at 5:15 p.m.

• Tiffin East Park sale: Dutro said the National Park Service has agreed to revert the roughly four-acre former Louisa K. Fast Park — recently renamed Tiffin East Park — back to the federal government to be sold, clearing a last hurdle in a multi-year process. The General Services Administration is expected to list the property in an online auction in the coming months.

• Tax office closure: The city tax department will be closed Wednesday, July 8 through Friday, July 10 for annual training in Columbus.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The estimates are of total average electricity costs from June to September. They were done using data from Heatmap News, which collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create the Electricity Price Hub.

“The United States is currently experiencing record energy demand driven by data center growth, domestic manufacturing, and electrification,” the report said. “And we simply aren’t bringing on new energy quickly enough or in large enough quantities to affordably meet rising demand.” 

The estimated increase in Ohioans’ electricity bills comes after a big jump last year. Between May and July 2025, they saw a 108% spike, the report said.

There are other estimates saying that this summer’s increases will be lower — about 7.5% over last year. However, the Third Way report said that Heatmap data show the average Ohioan’s May 2026 bills were 14% higher than in 2025.

“If costs increase at a similar rate as last year, July bills will be around $238,” the report said. “And total electricity bills for summer 2026 could exceed $780.”

That puts Ohioans and other Americans in a financial bind.

“The affordability challenge is growing,” said the National Energy Assistance Directors Association and the Center for Poverty, Energy and Climate. “One in six American households is behind on its utility bills, utilities disconnected electric service approximately 13.5 million times in 2024, and nearly 40 percent of households earning less than $50,000 report difficulty paying energy bills.”  

In Ohio, electricity increases can be particularly galling, given that consumers were forced to pay hundreds of millions in subsidies over the last several years as a result of what was likely the biggest bribery and money-laundering conspiracy in state history.

In addition, Ohio utilities have been allowed to keep more than $1 billion in rate increases the state regulator allowed, but the state Supreme Court later declared to be illegal.

And Ohioans last month learned that former Gov. John Kasich gave corporate giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta 40-year tax breaks worth billions to build electricity-sucking data centers. 

Third Way said more generation is needed. It faulted the Trump administration for blocking obvious solutions to the problem.

“To grow domestic energy generation and mitigate the impact of rising electricity demand, increasing clean energy deployment is a natural next step,” the report said.

“Clean energy sources like wind, solar, and batteries take less time to build and aren’t subject to the same kind of supply chain shortages and price fluctuations that plague natural gas. But the Trump Administration has stymied clean energy deployment by undermining financing for clean energy, imposing administrative roadblocks that delay project reviews, and formally deprioritizing low-cost resources like solar and wind in federal directives.”

At the same time, the Trump administration is putting up federal funds to prop up aging coal-fired plants in Ohio — including one that just lost subsidies that were created by the corrupt 2019 utility bailout.

Francesca Hsie, Deputy Director of Electricity for Third Way, said Trump’s approach is only increasing Ohioans’ electric bills.

“Ohioans are staring down electricity bills that could cost more than $800 this summer,” she said in an email.

“Instead of working to lower those costs, the Trump administration is attacking the very clean energy generation that could help meet the state’s record electricity demand and forcing aging coal plants to stay open long after their scheduled closure.”

She added, “That’s the opposite of an affordability strategy — it will make Ohioan’s energy bills higher long into the future. At a time when families across Ohio and the U.S. are struggling with rising costs, federal, state, and local governments must work together to lower electricity prices by expanding clean energy and modernizing our grid.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Since then, court decisions like Citizens United have chipped away at campaign finance restrictions in the name of free speech.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for a 6-3 majority, placed significant emphasis on political parties’ First Amendment rights.

“The Constitution’s text matters,” he wrote. “Contrary to that text, the political-party coordinated-expenditure limitations directly abridge the freedom of speech of political parties.”

Political parties and affiliated campaign committees could already spend an unlimited amount of money in races, but those expenditures had to be done independently. The decision means they’ll now be able to coordinate messaging with their favored candidates.

Many observers criticized the decision as yet another example of the high court weakening campaign finance laws. But others suggested it might not be that bad. If giving to parties is more effective, more donors might choose that path, which requires more disclosure than the Super PACs and dark money groups which have come to play an increasingly prominent role in politics.

Where the case began

Four days before the 2022 general election, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, J.D. Vance and U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot filed a lawsuit in Ohio challenging the limit on coordinated spending.

Two campaign committees focused on electing Republicans to Congress, National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, signed on, too.

Vance would go on to win his race. Chabot would not.

The plaintiffs are notable, because in both cases their Democratic opponent was able to outraise them — in Vance’s case, dramatically so.

Despite a $15 million boost from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, during the summer of 2022, some Republicans were wringing their hands over Vance’s sluggish fundraising. In the end his opponent, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, raised $56.4 million; Vance brought in just $15.2 million.

In their initial court filing, Vance, Chabot, and the GOP committees, warned limits on parties’ coordinated spending pose substantial harm to “core First Amendment-protected activities.”

“And this harm has only grown starker in recent years,” they wrote, “as the rise of spending by Super PACs and other outside groups — which, unlike party committees, can engage in unlimited fundraising to influence voters — has diminished the parties’ role in the political landscape.”

Notably, Republican-aligned Super PACs poured tens of millions of dollars into Ohio to help Vance across the finish line.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision and reactions

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case out of Colorado in which it upheld the statute limiting coordinated spending between parties and candidates.

When the case involving Vance and Chabot made it before The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges again upheld those limits, citing the 2001 decision.

“But in a series of insightful opinions,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “a majority of the judges on the Court of Appeals questioned that precedent in light of more recent First Amendment decisions.”

Kavanaugh reasoned that subsequent campaign finance decisions have hollowed out that earlier decision to the point that it’s “akin to a three-legged stool where all three legs have already been knocked out.”

In years since, he wrote, the court has employed more stringent analysis of first amendment cases and narrowed the scope of permissible restrictions to fighting quid pro quo corruption.

Some parties to the case argued the issue was moot and the court shouldn’t weigh in.

The Trump administration had already decided it wouldn’t defend the coordination limits, and an executive branch agency, the Federal Elections Commission, is charged with enforcing the rules.

Does Vice President Vance really face a threat of enforcement from the administration’s own agency? And after all, he’s no longer a candidate for office, right?

Kavanaugh wrote the court “need not speculate” on Vance’s potential future runs for office.

The Vice President, widely seen as a likely presidential contender in 2028, has maintained his campaign account and statement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Kavanaugh insisted.

Defenders of the coordination limits argued they keep donors from circumventing contribution limits by giving to the party with directions to funnel it to a given candidate — a practice known as earmarking. But Kavanaugh dismissed that argument.

Between contribution limits, earmarking rules, and disclosure of donations, the government already has all the tools it needs to keep donors from evading campaign finance limits.

“Courts cannot simply say, ‘what’s the harm in allowing just one more regulation’ when that regulation would limit freedom of speech,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Last year, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed an amicus brief defending the coordination limits along with the League of Women Voters and Common Cause.

CLC Founder and President Trevor Potter previously served as a Republican appointee and chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

After the decision, he said “Striking down these limits will enable wealthy individuals to give huge sums to party committees with every expectation that the money will be spent directly to benefit their preferred candidates. American voters will be the ones who pay the greatest price.”

League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said the court had “opened the floodgates to unlimited political spending that will drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” and Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomon said the decision “invited even more corruption into our elections and further tilted the scales against the American people.”

On the other hand, NYU School of Law Professor Samuel Isaacharoff called the decision “a welcome correction.”

The 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case upholding coordination limits placed caps on parties but left outside groups with few restrictions. That didn’t mean donors stopped spending, Isaacharoff wrote, they simply stopped giving to parties. As a result, single-issue or candidate-specific groups have taken on a larger and larger role — to our detriment, Isaacharoff contends.

“Weakening parties relative to unaccountable outside spenders does not reduce the influence of money in politics,” he wrote. “It severs influence from responsibility. A Super PAC owes nothing to a platform, a coalition, or a future election in the way a party does.”

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Last year, Ohio legislators almost unanimously enacted a sweeping law meant to get energy generation online faster and meet surging electricity demand.

The law, Ohio House Bill 15, is meant to be apply evenly to all types of energy when it comes to adding new generation, according to some leading state lawmakers.

“We said we’re going to have a level playing field. Let the free market work,” Republican Sen. Brian Chavez, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, said of HB 15 during a legislative panel at the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners in Columbus last week.

Yet now state lawmakers are advancing a bill that would expand preferences for natural gas and nuclear generation while adding even more hurdles for solar and wind — energy sources that the state has already stymied over the last decade.

On June 10, the Republican-dominated Ohio Senate voted along straight party lines to pass Senate Bill 294, which is based on a model bill from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and calls for electricity generation to ​“employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” Louisiana and Utah have passed similar laws, and bills are also under consideration in Arizona, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and West Virginia, according to an April report from ALEC.

But the bill’s current definition of ​“reliable” could cause the Ohio Power Siting Board to block many utility-scale solar and wind projects, even after many groups testified against the original version, introduced in the General Assembly last October.

“We need more supply, not less,” said Democratic Sen. Kent Smith, ranking minority member of the Senate Energy Committee, who also spoke at the conference. He cited calls by both grid operator PJM Interconnection and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for an all-of-the-above approach to adding new generation. ​“We need to be generation-agnostic. We need to let the market work.”

Chavez said the current version of SB 294 could allow solar and wind to qualify as reliable if they are combined with batteries. And developers wouldn’t need to meet the bill’s criteria for projects that are below the threshold needed for state review: under 50 megawatts for solar and under 5 MW for wind.

“If it goes to the Power Siting Board, we just said you have to have 50% reliability,” said Chavez, who has worked in and has had multiple connections to the oil and gas industry. But, he continued, ​“flat land is at a premium. … So we would say, if you’re going to put your bigger power supplies in Ohio, you shall consider if it is dispatchable more than 50% of the time.”

Still, it’s not clear how many wind or solar projects could qualify. SB 294 mandates that any ​“reliable energy source” have a ​“site-combined minimum capacity factor” of 50%. The capacity factor describes the ratio of a generator’s actual electricity output over the course of a year to the maximum that source could theoretically produce.

The average capacity factor for photovoltaic solar farms in the United States was just 24.4% last year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. If solar projects are required to install enough battery storage to reach a 50% threshold, project costs would significantly increase.

“Capacity factors are not measures of reliability and the wrong thing to focus on,” said Andrew Linhares, Midwest director of state affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association. ​“Ohio won’t solve its energy challenges by sidelining solar and storage, which are the fastest-growing and most affordable sources of new power on the grid.”

Further, SB 294 demands that power be readily available and dispatchable ​“at all times” of high usage and ​“in times of need.” Facilities often discharge batteries’ energy at high-usage times to take advantage of higher prices, but whether that could qualify as ​“at all times” is also unclear.

The bill’s focus on the reliability of any single resource is misguided because of how the grid functions, according to Democratic Rep. Tristan Rader, the ranking minority member of the House Energy Committee, who spoke at the conference as well. ​“That’s why we have peaker plants.”

While states issue permits for different facilities, and state policies affect what types of generation investments they attract, PJM is responsible for ensuring the reliable operation of the regional grid for Ohio and all or parts of a dozen other states and the District of Columbia.

“PJM is not favoring or disfavoring any resources class during this time when we need every megawatt of power generated to manage our supply/​demand imbalance being driven by data center growth,” said spokesperson Jeffrey Shields.

The grid operator already accounts for variability in power production and the likelihood that resources will be able to supply electricity when needed, noted Evan Vaughan, executive director for MAREC Action, who also attended last week’s conference and heard the Ohio lawmakers’ comments. The tool for that is a metric called the effective load-carrying capacity, which is meant to capture how reliable a given resource is for purposes of PJM’s capacity market.

“Ultimately, the grid is reliable because it is a diverse mix of resources,” Vaughan said. ​“It’s not reliable because of any one particular resource.”

No single facility is immune from problems. PJM tweaked its methodology for calculating effective load-carrying capacity after multiple gas plants failed during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022. That storm’s high winds also caused water levels to fall near the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio. Numerous gas plants also failed during Winter Storm Fern this January, while wind farms performed above their expected output, according to a Grid Strategies report for the Niskanen Center, which was released in March.

Affordability remains a major issue, too. Prices reflect energy markets, the capacity market, and an ancillary services market, which helps maintain balance on the electric grid and minimize blackouts.

“If you look at the wholesale price in each of those markets, energy is actually the biggest factor in a consumer’s bill, not capacity,” Vaughan said. And while there are roles in the system for different types of generation, ​“energy is provided best by cheap electrons, which is what wind and solar provide.”

Proponents of SB 294 during its Senate hearings included ALEC and the Heartland Institute, which both have multiple links to fossil fuel interests and a history of undermining climate science and lobbying against renewables. The Oil & Gas Workers Association also supported the bill.

Opponents include the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum, American Clean Power, the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition, multiple environmental organizations, and dozens of individuals.

The bill is now in the Ohio House, where it was introduced on June 16 and is likely to be taken up when lawmakers return from their summer recess.

While the bill no longer states that its requirements apply ​“in all cases,” as in the original version, it does preserve other siting criteria under Ohio law — including a requirement that projects serve the ​“public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

Serving the public interest broadly is a good thing. However, officials at the Power Siting Board have taken a narrow view in some cases where local townships have objected to solar and wind projects, treating such opposition as ​“controlling” on the public interest question, even over environmental, economic, and other considerations. If SB 294 becomes law, there’s a risk that regulators might similarly rely on it to rule against renewable energy projects — in contrast to the state’s lax stance toward permitting fossil fuel infrastructure.

“If you create a policy, that policy drives investments,” said Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis. And when and if it’s passed by the General Assembly, ​“it’s out there. It is policy.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Among other things, S.B. 1 created a mechanism to fire tenured professors who exhibit political bias in the classroom, and it included a list of “controversial subjects” that would need to be taught differently than other topics.

As a professor myself, it was far easier in 2025 to count the committee meetings that didn’t mention SB1, compared to the ones that did.

This summer marks a year since S.B. 1 went into effect. So far no professors have been fired yet. But what casual observers may not realize is that while S.B. 1 was being implemented the legislature continued to brainstorm ideas for new restrictions on higher ed.

During the legislative session this spring we finally got a glimpse of what that might entail.

In February, the “Enact the S.B. 1 Compliance Supplemental Appropriation Act” was introduced as Ohio House Bill 698 (HB 698).

The word to notice in that title is “Appropriation” which of course means money.

After describing many pages of new diversity, equity and inclusion related paperwork for university administrators, the bill outlines a mechanism for public colleges and universities to lose out on funds they would normally receive from the state of Ohio — something called the “state share of instruction”.

These are funds that public colleges and universities receive based on how many students choose to enroll, and how effective the institution is at educating and graduating them.

H.B. 698 proposes an additional process that ties an unspecified percentage of those funds to a to-be-determined anti-DEI evaluation process run by an unspecified member of the Ohio Department of Higher Education.

The outcome of this process could ultimately lead to cuts ranging from millions of dollars per year to tens or potentially over a hundred million dollars per year for larger campuses like Ohio State University and Ohio University at a time when federal research funds are under threat, and when universities are facing other budget issues, including the rising cost of living and healthcare.

In May, the Ohio House committee on Workforce and Higher Education hosted the first opposition hearing for H.B. 698.

For most of the witness testimony it was a natural opportunity to relitigate S.B. 1.

Some academic majors that were underenrolled have been eliminated as a result of the bill. The few public colleges with faculty unions no longer have the right to strike even though many other types of unions can strike in Ohio, including the unions for life-and-death essential workers like nurses.

Other witnesses discussed how OSU and other colleges have “overcomplied” with SB1 by inventing rules that do not appear in the bill, like when then-president Ted Carter overturned decades of precedent and banned students from chalking sidewalks at OSU — a ban that remains in effect.

I ended up being the last witness to testify against H.B. 698 at the hearing.

I used my three minutes to point out that cuts to the state share of instruction will affect payroll — including staff and instructors in every department — which crosses a new line in the sand.

That was my central point: keep your hands off the salaries of tens of thousands of hard working faculty, staff and graduate students in public colleges across our state, many of whom have little to do with the culture war issues the legislature is trying to fight.

I am not the best person to predict — either from the time remaining in the legislative calendar or the number of votes — whether H.B. 698 will end up on the governor’s desk.

But even if H.B. 698 doesn’t make it to the finish line, the bill says a lot about what the future might be for legislative oversight of higher education in Ohio.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Now, as the feds block new permits and dangle billion-dollar buyout offers to convince developers to walk away from their projects, state leaders are hoping some companies share their conviction that the industry can be revived after Trump leaves office.

“Any honest assessment of where we need to be to meet our climate goals depends on a thriving offshore wind sector,” said New York state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, a Democrat.

New York and many other East Coast states have set aggressive targets for offshore wind power, both to meet rising energy demands and transition to clean energy sources. But Trump’s attacks on the industry threaten to scare off companies from making the massive long-term investments required to pursue offshore wind projects.

“If there’s no business opportunity here, then they’re not going to stay here and invest here,” Gounardes said. “They’re not going to lay around with good intentions doing nothing, and we’re going to lose out because of that.”

Federal opposition

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced a $129 million deal with Duke Energy to relinquish its lease to build an offshore wind farm off the coast of North Carolina. The company pledged to reinvest the money into other forms of energy.

Since March, Trump officials have struck four such agreements totaling more than $2.5 billion to get developers to give up on their offshore wind plans. Some analysts say the federal government’s ability to blockade pending projects has caused some companies to reconsider their investments.

“If you have a lease that appears to be going nowhere for at least the next three years, you want to pivot to other options,” said Timothy Fox, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners LLC, an independent research firm. “There’s still a lot of leases out there, but the Trump administration has made this aggressive push, and we think there could be future similar announcements.”

According to Fox, developers hold leases for roughly two dozen other offshore wind areas, agreements that could be targeted for similar buyout deals.

While developers consider buyout offers from the federal government, state leaders say such deals are illegal. Seven states filed a lawsuit earlier this month saying the administration lacks the authority to cancel the leases and pay out funds, focused on a March deal with TotalEnergies to block a project off of New York.

The lawsuit challenges the administration’s use of a federal fund set aside to pay court judgments and settlements of lawsuits against the government. The deal, state attorneys general argue, “is not the result of a compromise settlement between adverse parties, but rather an agreement resulting from [federal officials’] pretextual national security concerns and TotalEnergies’ desire to receive unauthorized compensation for an expensive offshore wind lease.”

The state of California has also announced that it intends to file a lawsuit over another buyout targeting a lease area off the state’s Pacific coast.

Since taking office, Trump has halted permits and leases for other planned offshore wind projects, canceled hundreds of millions in funding to support manufacturing and ports and ended clean energy tax credits. His administration also issued stop-work orders for five offshore wind projects that were already under construction, but courts have overturned those orders and allowed work to resume.

Aside from the five wind farms currently being built, progress on dozens of other pending projects has ground to a halt.

“There’s little to be done if the federal government still controls the permits, leases and pace of development,” said Fox, the researcher.

State goals

The clash comes as many East Coast states have been counting heavily on the maturation of the offshore wind industry to meet their energy needs. Eight Atlantic states have committed to building more than 45 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040 — enough to power more than 30 million homes. They’ve made major investments in ports, manufacturing facilities, transmission infrastructure and workforce training.

In addition to their climate goals, many states are facing surging energy demands, largely driven by data centers and artificial intelligence.

State leaders say that offshore wind farms can harness massive amounts of electricity, especially during nighttime and winter periods when solar power is in short supply. For heavily populated East Coast states, with limited areas to put sprawling energy projects on land, tapping into strong winds over the ocean has become a major part of their strategy.

“Offshore wind is key to a future that allows us to move off of fossil fuels,” said Maryland state Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat who has been a strong backer of offshore wind. “Every time the (Trump administration) makes these moves, it reminds me that their numbers show how much offshore (wind) would allow us to retire fossil fuel plants.”

Trump has long opposed offshore wind, falsely asserting that it harms whales, is unreliable and drives up energy costs. While offshore wind generation is intermittent, it has a much higher capacity factor than onshore renewables, meaning that it operates for longer periods at its maximum output level. New offshore wind projects have capacity factors that match some gas and coal-fired power plants, according to the International Energy Agency.

While still more expensive than onshore renewables, offshore wind projects globally produce electricity at a rate cheaper than natural gas and coal plants, according to Energy Solutions Intelligence, a digital consulting platform.

Backers and energy analysts say offshore wind in the U.S. should become cheaper over time as supply chains mature and investments in ports and other infrastructure pay off.

The Department of the Interior did not grant a Stateline interview request about its buyout deals for offshore wind projects, but the agency has claimed in statements that the deals will lower energy prices.

Changing plans

Many state leaders acknowledge that the delays caused by Trump’s opposition will cause them to miss their targets for building new projects over the next 5 to 10 years. But they say the industry is still essential for meeting their long-term climate goals and energy needs.

“I don’t think anyone is at the point of saying no offshore wind ever again,” said Gounardes, the New York lawmaker. “It might not be part of the alchemy in the near future, but it certainly must be part of the alchemy to meet our overall goals.”

For now, state leaders are hoping their ongoing commitments to offshore wind will convince developers to wait out the remainder of Trump’s term and stay in the U.S. market.

“[The buyouts] are a blow to the industry, but it’s not a death knell but there are other projects out there that are still in some stage of development,” said Sam Schacht, project director for offshore wind with the Clean Energy States Alliance, a nonprofit coalition of state energy agencies.

“There’s this bad news story happening about the attempts to erode these future projects, while at the same time there’s a very positive story about the projects that are under construction and producing power now and their ability to capably meet states’ power demands.”

While states play the waiting game with offshore wind, they’re making new plans to meet their energy needs in the near term. Lawmakers in Maryland have invested in battery storage, which Charkoudian described as a “no-regrets” option that can help meet energy needs today while complementing offshore wind once it comes online.

Other states, including New York and New Jersey, have looked at increasing subsidies for nuclear power.

“I wouldn’t say that they’re giving up on offshore wind, but states are pivoting to other carbon-free resources that  are favored by this administration, namely nuclear power,” said Fox, the energy researcher.

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@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.

And their numbers are growing — another 80 proposed projects cataloged by the Data Center Proposal Tracker would more than double the current 71 active sites in the commonwealth. 

An increasing number of Pennsylvanians are concerned about the resource-hungry facilities’ impact on energy prices and water consumption, but there is very little research about potential impacts to physical or public health. 

“There are still, relatively, very few studies that directly examine the health impacts of data centers themselves. Much of the evidence comes from related fields,” said Neha Gour, a PhD candidate at George Mason University. “Rapid data center expansion is happening now while the research is still emerging.” 

Gour and two other climate and health colleagues published an analysis in February, narrowing in on Virginia’s so-called Data Center Alley, the largest concentration of data centers in the world.

They concluded that while there are “significant health and environmental challenges that demand urgent action,” there are ways to design and operate the facilities safely. 

“By prioritizing sustainability, data centers can achieve responsible growth without compromising public health,” the paper read. 

One focus was to identify ways to take health into consideration “from the very start” of projects. It listed several, specific recommendations related to site selection and energy production that could minimize any potential impacts.

“Data centers themselves are not new,” said Gour. “What has changed today is a rapid growth in both the number of data centers and the scale or size of data centers.” 

Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, called the facilities “essential digital infrastructure” that power online purchases, telehealth appointments and virtual learning. 

“At a time when the average American household has 21 connected devices, data centers enable the essential services and cutting-edge technologies that drive our economy and enhance our quality of life,” he said in a statement. 

“The data center industry will continue to work with residents, communities, and policymakers across Pennsylvania to ensure the sustainable use of water, energy, and other natural resources, while promoting the continued responsible development of this important 21st-century industry,” Diorio continued.

From noise pollution to climate change

The most immediate and direct health impact of data centers that Gour and her colleagues identified is noise pollution. Facilities operate 24/7 at a constant hum, at decibels levels that are near or even exceed federal recommendations.

In the short term, noise disrupts sleep and annoys neighbors. Long-term risks include heart disease, permanent hearing loss and chronic stress. But Gour differentiated between solutions for existing buildings and proposals, the latter of which can simply be built further from dense populations. 

“If we’re smart about where we put new data centers, we can reduce the problem of noise pollution instead of trying to fix it later,” she said. 

Buffer zones or adding greenery between facilities and residential areas can dampen the noise, but “the most effective fix” is reducing it — for example, re-engineering fan mounts to be quieter. 

The larger health concerns are not unique to data centers, but rather a reflection of the continued reliance on fossil fuels to meet electricity demand — thereby adding to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that often have negative health consequences, the paper added. 

“One of the most important points we make in our paper is that data centers should be understood within the broader energy and environmental systems in which they operate,” said Gour. “The issue is not data centers in isolation, but how their expansion interacts with existing infrastructure and energy systems.”

Factors include location, power sources, cooling factors (such as water use) and surrounding communities. Facilities located in states with a higher mix of renewable energy would have less of an impact than states that use a lot of coal or natural gas, such as Pennsylvania. 

Some data centers use air-polluting diesel generators as a backstop, a source many likely used during this weekend’s heatwave when the nation’s largest electricity grid — which includes the commonwealth — pushed large customers to use them to prevent blackouts. 

Diorio noted that prior legislative analysis from Virginia found that the use of these backup generators is “minimal,” and “rarely run for prolonged periods,” making up 7% of permitted emissions. 

To keep cool, the buildings use a lot of water — some more than the entire country of Denmark. Authors urged operators to reduce their consumption through targeted cooling methods and recycle water to ease pressure on drinking water supplies. 

The report from Virginia also noted  that “most (data centers) use similar or less (water) than other large commercial and industrial water users,” roughly 6.7 million gallons a year. The average home uses less than 500,000 gallons annually. 

“Collectively, the data center industry used significantly less water than other essential industries in 2025, including the agriculture, power, food and beverage, and semiconductor sectors,” said Diorio, using numbers from the Virginia analysis. 

However, the need is likely to grow as more facilities come into operation.

Local governments and state officials could make following such recommendations a requirement, even cutting off data centers during droughts. But the Pennsylvania legislature has taken a largely piecemeal approach, rather than adopting comprehensive change. Additionally, a plan to incentivize “responsible” data center operations is voluntary. 

More transparency and community engagement

Gour, who said her next project would focus on public perceptions surrounding data centers, named community engagement and transparency as crucial components for future construction.

“One of the things we realized while writing the paper is that many of the concerns, particularly community concerns surrounding data centers, are not purely technical, they’re also about trust,” said Gour. “We felt it was important to acknowledge that many of these projects are being built in places where people live, where people work and where people are raising their families. 

“Communities often have legitimate questions about issues like noise, water use, electricity demand and land use. They’re looking for clear information about how those concerns are being addressed during the construction phase,” she continued. 

A bill that advanced through the state House last week would require public meetings to gain certain certifications, though it met opposition from some Republicans. Currently, many of these discussions occur in tense, often combative zoning meetings — where municipalities are only approving if an application meets the criteria and not ruling the project itself.

“Data centers strive to be good neighbors in the Pennsylvania communities where they operate. Data center companies take compliance and accountability seriously, and only build where they are authorized to do so under local, state, regional, and federal ordinances, rules, and regulations,” added Diorio. 

He noted that the industry supported nearly 130,000 jobs across the commonwealth in 2024, generating $1.9 billion in state and local taxes. Gour and others pointed out, however, that those dollars don’t always reach the neediest.

Moving forward, Gour pushed for environmental monitoring around data centers to better understand their impacts on communities, alongside long-term studies to monitor neighborhood health.

“Ultimately, our message is that technological development and community well-being should not be viewed as competing priorities. They can be advanced together through evidence-based planning,” Gour said. 

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 Highway Patrol said the crash happened July 6, 2026, at 2:15 p.m. on SR 163 at Elliston Trowbridge Road in Ottawa County.

Investigators said Joseph Hartford, 19, of Genoa was driving a 2011 Chevrolet Malibu south on Elliston Trowbridge Road when he failed to yield at a stop sign and struck a 2017 Jeep Compass traveling east on SR 163. The Jeep was driven by Danny Avery, 60, of Perrysburg.

According to the patrol, both vehicles left the right side of SR 163 after the collision. Avery’s vehicle overturned, and he was ejected. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Hartford was not injured. Neither driver was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, the patrol said.

The crash remains under investigation, and no charges have been filed.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol was assisted at the scene by the Clay Township Police Department, the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office, the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Ottawa County Coroner’s Office, Benton Carroll Fire and EMS, and Greer’s Towing.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

No public call for Creech to step down from gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, his legislative ally Gary Click, or the Ohio Republican Party appears in the endorsement materials, campaign statements, or public reporting reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. Creech, who was never criminally charged, has denied the allegations and called them “demonstrably false.”

Instead of pressure to leave office, Creech has received the opposite. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed him for re-election in February, Huffman restored him to four committee seats — though not to the House Agriculture Committee chairmanship he had lost — and Creech went on to win his May 5 primary. He now stands as the party’s nominee for a fourth term in House District 40.

What the allegations say

A minor female relative accused Creech in 2023 of climbing into bed and under the covers with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau. Text messages showed the minor complaining that Creech had been rubbing her legs and grabbing her waist, according to NBC4.

Creech told BCI investigators he had gotten into bed with the minor in his underwear but denied the sexual nature of the allegations, including that he touched her more than once.

Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, appointed as a special prosecutor after local officials recused themselves because of personal ties to Creech, declined to file charges. He wrote that Creech’s “behavior during the time of the investigation was concerning and suspicious,” but that “the evidence falls short of the threshold needed for prosecution.” The case was closed in October 2024.

From ‘consider resigning’ to a party endorsement

When the allegations became public in May 2025, Huffman removed Creech from all four of his committee assignments, including the chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee, and asked him to consider resigning. “I did ask him to consider resigning,” the Lima Republican said at the time, adding that the matter was “very serious” and that he did not believe Creech could serve effectively “with this in the public sphere.”

Creech did not resign. By February 2026, Huffman had reversed course — restoring Creech’s committee seats and signing a letter requesting that the Ohio Republican Party endorse his re-election. The party did.

Huffman explained the reversal by pointing to the absence of any criminal action. Ten months on, he said, the allegations “either weren’t true” or it “wasn’t clear if they were true,” and “there are no authorities taking any action.”

Ramaswamy touted the endorsement, then went quiet

Creech was an early backer of Ramaswamy, attending his gubernatorial campaign launch and endorsing him more than a year before the primary. Ramaswamy’s campaign promoted Creech’s support in an April 2025 press release touting endorsements from 38 Ohio House Republicans.

After TiffinOhio.net reported in April 2026 that the endorsement remained live months after the allegations surfaced, Ramaswamy’s campaign quietly removed both Creech and Click from its endorsements page, a change captured in Web Archive snapshots. Click’s name was restored within hours; Creech’s was not. Ramaswamy has not publicly addressed the allegations or called for Creech to step down.

Click, an ally, shares Creech’s ‘parental alienation’ framing

Creech responded to the allegations on his official Facebook page by describing his accuser’s account as “textbook parental alienation” — a disputed concept that a 2023 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women described as “unfounded and unscientific” and often used in custody disputes to undermine abuse allegations.

Weeks later, Click introduced House Bill 693, the “Affirming Families First Act,” which he is sponsoring with Rep. Josh Williams (R-Sylvania Twp.). The bill would write a statutory definition of “parental alienation” into Ohio law. Click, who like Creech survived a contested May 5 primary, has not called on Creech to resign.

What comes next

Creech, a fourth-generation farmer and former Preble County commissioner, represents House District 40, covering Preble County and parts of Butler and Montgomery counties. He advances to the November 3 general election against Democrat Timothy Hornbacker and Libertarian Joshua A. Umbaugh.

In May 2025, House Minority Leader Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington) called the allegations, “if true, … very serious and concerning,” and said elected officials “are expected to uphold higher standards,” while noting that any sanction rested with the House’s Republican majority. No prominent Ohio Republican has since publicly called for Creech to leave office.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Husted testified remotely on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, as a defense witness in the case against two former FirstEnergy executives accused of bribing Ohio’s top utility regulator to help pass House Bill 6 — the 2019 law Husted championed as lieutenant governor. He told jurors he recalled little of a pivotal 2018 dinner with the executives, describing it as an occasion for the company to “say ‘hi’ and congratulate us on winning,” according to reporting by WOSU and The Associated Press. Neither Husted nor Gov. Mike DeWine has been charged or accused of wrongdoing in the scheme.

But the scandal that grew out of House Bill 6 has shadowed Husted for years — and it is still costing the Ohioans he now represents in Washington.

A bailout that keeps taking from ratepayers

House Bill 6, signed by DeWine on July 23, 2019, forced Ohio utility customers to subsidize a set of failing power plants. It provided a roughly $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants tied to FirstEnergy, extended subsidies to two aging coal plants owned in part by Ohio utilities, and gutted the state’s renewable-energy and energy-efficiency standards.

The nuclear subsidies were partially repealed in 2021 after the scandal broke. The coal subsidies, however, stayed on the books far longer. According to the Common Cause Ohio scandal timeline, Ohioans propped up those coal plants at a cost of more than $445,000 a day until the last remnant of HB 6 finally ended when House Bill 15 took effect on Aug. 14, 2025. The total tab for the coal subsidies alone exceeded $500 million, paid by ratepayers.

The costs have not stopped there. In November 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio found that FirstEnergy violated state law and commission orders, and ordered the company to pay a combined $250.70 million in customer restitution and civil forfeitures. Ohio households, meanwhile, have paid more for electricity in the years since HB 6 took effect, as TiffinOhio.net has previously reported.

How the scheme worked, and who paid for it

Federal prosecutors described what happened as likely the largest bribery and money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of Ohio. FirstEnergy funneled roughly $60 million through Generation Now, a dark-money nonprofit tied to then-House Speaker Larry Householder, to help elect friendly lawmakers, install Householder as speaker, pass HB 6, and then defeat a citizen referendum that sought to repeal it.

The consequences have reached the top of Ohio’s Republican political class. Householder is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence after being convicted of racketeering in 2023; the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up his appeal in April 2026. Former Ohio Republican Party chair Matt Borges was convicted in the same case. FirstEnergy admitted to the scheme, entering a $230 million deferred-prosecution agreement in 2021 and later paying $100 million to settle securities-fraud charges. American Electric Power, which benefited from the coal subsidies, paid $19 million to settle related charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At the regulatory center of the case was Sam Randazzo, the DeWine-appointed PUCO chair who prosecutors say accepted $4.3 million from FirstEnergy. Randazzo was charged in state and federal court and died by suicide in April 2024. The two executives accused of arranging his payment — former CEO Chuck Jones and former lobbyist Michael Dowling — are the defendants in the trial in which Husted testified. That trial ended in a mistrial in the spring of 2026; a Summit County grand jury reindicted the pair in June, and a retrial is scheduled for September 2026.

Husted’s proximity to the scheme

Husted was lieutenant governor-elect and then lieutenant governor during the period when the scheme unfolded. Prosecutors say the bribery was aimed in part at securing the very bailout he championed. His name has surfaced repeatedly in the case: he was among the defense witnesses the executives listed, and he was present at the December 2018 dinner with DeWine, Jones and Dowling that prosecutors have treated as pivotal.

Public records reported by cleveland.com in 2024 also showed that FirstEnergy made a secret $1 million payment to a group supporting Husted’s campaign, before the scandal became public. Husted declined at the time to say whether he had known about the contribution. TiffinOhio.net has separately reported on his official calendar entries tied to key figures in the scandal.

Husted has consistently denied knowledge of the corruption. In his March 2026 testimony, he said he did not recall the substance of the 2018 dinner and maintained that Randazzo was not FirstEnergy’s preferred candidate to lead the PUCO. He has not been charged with any crime, and no court has found that he broke the law. What the record establishes is proximity: to the company, to the money, and to the bailout at the heart of the case.

The scandal reaches the 88th District

The HB 6 story is not only a Columbus story. It runs through Seneca and Sandusky counties, too.

Before he was elected, state Rep. Gary Click — the Vickery Republican who represents Ohio’s 88th House District — used his campaign committee to publicly defend HB 6 during the 2019 fight over the referendum to repeal it. As TiffinOhio.net previously documented, a sponsored Facebook ad paid for by The Committee to Elect Gary Click ran Sept. 20–22, 2019, during the closing stretch of the signature drive. In it, Click endorsed the law, added the hashtag “#YestoHB6,” and tagged then-Speaker Householder, Gov. DeWine and then-Senate President Larry Obhof. The ad ran while a FirstEnergy-linked dark-money group spent roughly $16.5 million on advertising — including messaging that falsely suggested Chinese interests were behind the repeal effort — to keep HB 6 on the books.

Click’s defense of the law did not end there. As of this reporting, the issues page on his campaign website, garyclick.com, still describes the bailout in favorable terms. “House Bill 6 was a necessary investment, providing stability by preserving nuclear energy in Ohio,” the page reads. “Wind turbines, on the other hand, tend to drain our resources, add nothing to the stability of the grid and disrupt our rural neighborhoods.” The Internet Archive shows the same language on the page in May 2026, during Click’s re-election year — nearly three years after Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and months into the bribery trial of the two former FirstEnergy executives.

What it means for Ohioans now

Five years on, the machinery of the scandal is still grinding through Ohio’s courts and regulators — and Ohioans are still paying for it, through past subsidies, restitution proceedings and the rate cases now moving before the PUCO. Attorney General Dave Yost has called it the corruption case of the century.

The pattern the case laid bare — a speaker in prison, a former party chair convicted, a DeWine-appointed regulator dead before trial, a utility admitting it bribed public officials — sits squarely within the Republican leadership that has controlled Ohio’s statehouse throughout. Years after the arrests, the bailout still has defenders in that leadership: Click’s campaign continues to call it a necessary investment, and Husted, who rose through the same ranks and championed the law at its center, now asks Ohio voters to return him to the Senate in the Nov. 3, 2026, special election against Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Husted has said his role in HB 6 is a matter he is willing to discuss, and he has denied any wrongdoing; he has not been charged. The retrial of the FirstEnergy executives — the case that put a sitting senator on the witness stand — is set to begin in the fall, in the middle of his campaign.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Some major events were canceled. Organizers for the annual National Independence Day Parade in Washington, D.C., called off the event due to the extreme heat, as did organizers for the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade in Philadelphia.

On Saturday night, the Great American State Fair and National Mall were ordered evacauated as a storm threatened, throwing into doubt the rest of the night’s programming. “Freedom 250 will share updates on programming and doors reopening — please stay close to our official channels for updates,” Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.

Alvarez released a statement later saying the event would resume at 9:30 Eastern time.

Forecasters predicted temperatures would reach around 100 degrees, with the possibility of an all-time record of 101 degrees in the nation’s capital, according to AccuWeather. Heat indexes were expected to reach 110 to 115 degrees.

The neighborhood Capitol Hill Fourth of July Parade however, went on, though shortened to one hour, instead of the usual two-hour event. 

Some high school marching bands that traveled across the country to perform in the national parade, including those from Minnesota and Nebraska, switched last minute to march in the community Capitol Hill event.

“We flew in on Wednesday and were able to go sightseeing, and then last night we heard that the parade was canceled,” said Cassidy Moody, 28, the color guard coach for Grand Island Senior High School in Grand Island, Nebraska. 

“When they found out this parade was happening, they were super pumped they could play their instruments in Washington,” Moody said, adding their tour guide connected them to parade organizers.

“This is so fun. I’m trying not to cry.”

Time capsule, concerts, block parties, ceremonies

Other events up and down the sweltering East Coast carried on, including the burial in Philadelphia of a congressionally mandated time capsule to be unearthed, and opened, in 2276. 

The capsule, organized by the bipartisan America250 commission, contains contributions from each state and territory; sports memorabilia, including an Olympic gold medal; a 1GB digital archive from the Library of Congress; and a pocket Constitution signed by each Supreme Court justice, among hundreds of other items.

Congress commissioned America250 in 2016 to plan ways to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The commission is hosting events across the country Saturday, including block parties in Boston; Charleston, South Carolina; Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

The famous Times Square New Year’s Eve ball dropped eight times on Friday to ring in the Fourth of July, representing the eight time zones in the territories and continental United States. The first occurred at 10 a.m. Eastern Friday when midnight struck in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The America250 commission also scheduled an Independence Day benefit concert in Los Angeles, featuring Chris Stapleton, the Smashing Pumpkins, Chaka Khan and other artists. Tickets cost $17.76.

Other events included the Virginia 250 commission’s naturalization ceremony for immigrants from 36 nations. The ceremony took place at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in Charlottesville, Virginia, where there was also a live reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Not all were celebrating the ideals of the United States Saturday. 

Hundreds of members of the neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front marched through the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C., holding upside-down American flags. States Newsroom also witnessed the masked men boarding the city’s Metro while National Guard members looked on.

Military flyovers and another Trump speech

Trump promised his administration’s Freedom 250 Salute to America events would go forward on the National Mall despite the heat, though organizers revised the schedule and publicized the presence of cooling tents and hydration stations. America250 and Freedom 250 diverged over the past year and each created dueling program offerings and merchandise to mark the semiquincentennial.

The Freedom 250 Great American State Fair on the mall shut down at 5 p.m. on Friday due to the heat and its Fourth of July opening was postponed from 10 a.m. to noon. 

Military flyovers were scheduled to begin at 1:15 p.m. Eastern and occur several times an hour until nearly 8 p.m. Visitors and residents in D.C. can expect to see multiple different aircraft, including F-22 Raptors, a B-1 bomber and a MV-22 Osprey, an aircraft that takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter but flies like a plane.

The administration promised a world record-breaking fireworks display, set to begin at 10:30 p.m. Eastern, later than in other years. The Western Pennsylvania-based Pyrotechino is expected to shoot off more than 850,000 fireworks, according to local news reports. Some people already were in line at 3:15 p.m.

Air quality forecasters predict “unhealthy” levels of air pollution, including small particulate matter that can enter the bloodstream, until at least July 5.

Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks at 9:45 p.m. Eastern, one of numerous appearances the president scheduled tied to the holiday. 

On July 1 in Medora, North Dakota for the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library during his Freedom 250 tour, Trump said he planned a lengthy speech on Independence Day despite heat warnings.

“July 4, it’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out, and I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything,” he said.

Trump also spoke at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota Friday, on the eve of the semiquincentennial. Prior to a celebratory fireworks display, Trump focused his comments on labeling communism as a “mortal threat to American liberty.” 

Trump kicked off the state fair on June 24 on the National Mall with a another 25-minute speech that refashioned much of his 2024 presidential campaign rhetoric.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Monthly emergency department visits for tick bites in April spiked to their highest level since 2017 and continued to remain high throughout May and June, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tick bite tracker.

Though it’s hard to predict what the rest of the season will look like, given that tick activity depends on a number of different factors, there has definitely been a recent geographic expansion of the area ticks inhabit, said Pilar Fernandez, a disease ecologist and assistant professor at Washington State University. 

The tiny blood-suckers, which tend to thrive in warmer climates, are spreading to places that used to be too cold for their existence, she said during a July 1 SciLine media briefing, as temperatures rise in the United States and around the world.

With more ticks comes a greater risk of individuals developing tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, Alpha-gal syndrome and anaplasmosis. That’s why researchers are encouraging people to know their facts and learn how to protect themselves from bites as they venture outdoors. 

What’s going on this year?

According to the CDC, an estimated 31 million people are bitten by ticks each year, with most encounters taking place between April and October. But in 2026, ER visits began rising as early as March. 

Weekly ER trips for tick bites are also up in every U.S. region except for South Central as of June 28, the online tick tracker shows. 

Global warming is certainly one reason behind this recent surge in tick activity, though Fernandez said the whole picture is much more complicated.

Because ticks can live for up to two to three years, it’s difficult to understand the delayed seasonal effects of increased temperatures or precipitation on their population, she said.

Other factors including local environmental conditions and how much time people spend outside can have an impact on annual tick encounters, she added. 

Every spring and summer, she said, people ask her if it’s going to be a “big year” for ticks, which is “a really hard question to answer, because it’s not equal across all locations.” 

Most tick cases are recorded in the Northeast and Midwest, but different species of ticks are found in every region of the country. And as the population expands into areas where people are unaware of how to protect themselves and unaccustomed to checking for bites, the threat of contracting a tick-borne infection grows, Fernandez said. 

Tick-borne diseases

Ticks carry pathogens that they then pass on to humans by biting into their skin and feeding on their blood. An untreated tick bite can lead to the development of one of nearly 20 different human diseases in the U.S., the most common of which is Lyme disease — about 476,000 patients are treated annually, according to the CDC. 

Another tick-borne infection that has been on the rise is Alpha-gal syndrome, which causes people to experience a serious allergic reaction after they eat red meat or other animal products that contain the sugar molecule alpha-gal. It is most commonly associated with the lone star species of tick distributed throughout the Northeastern, Southern and Midwestern United States. 

Initial symptoms of tick-borne illnesses are unspecific and often the same as those that come with regular sickness, such as a fever, headache, muscle aches and joint pain, according to Alvaro Toledo, an associate professor in the Department of Entomology at Rutgers who also spoke at the July 1 media briefing. 

“Physicians need to be vigilant and aware if they receive a patient with symptoms that are compatible with a tick-borne disease,” he said.

What if you find a tick?

If one discovers a tick on the skin, Toledo said the proper response is to first quickly remove the tick with tweezers by pinching and pulling it up in a vertical motion, then disinfecting the area and monitoring for signs of sickness. 

People should not, on the other hand, deal with a tick by burning it off or applying petroleum jelly to the bite, said University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor Adela Oliva Chavez, a tick researcher, at the briefing. 

“Those are myths,” she warned. 

Ticks typically do not transmit infection until after they have been attached to the skin for 24 hours, which is why the CDC recommends people aim to remove the pests as soon as possible within the first day.   

However, experts say the most effective way to prevent tickborne disease in humans is by limiting exposure to ticks in the first place.  

Toledo said people should use chemical sprays such as permethrin on their clothing and classic bug repellents on their skin to keep ticks away. It’s also a good idea to wear long, light-colored clothing when spending time in forests and other highly vegetated areas where ticks are abundant. 

But, he added as a reminder to the public, there is “no zero-risk zone anywhere when you go out … even in your backyard, risk is not zero.” 

Individuals can further reduce their chance of acquiring a tick bite by checking their pets just as often themselves, according to Oliva Chavez. Dogs and cats can easily bring ticks into the house from outside, and if they aren’t yet attached to the animal’s flesh, they can make their way onto humans, she said. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Senate Bill 315 is awaiting Gov. Mike DeWine’s signature. Among other ways it seeks to reduce fraud it:

• Requires the Ohio Department of Medicaid to suspend payments if the state attorney general or auditor submit a credible allegation of fraud

• Enhances criminal penalties for fraud

• Requires electronic verification of home-care visits if the provider doesn’t live in the home

• Provides whistleblower protections

When Scioto Analysis surveyed 13 economists on whether the reforms would be beneficial, they mostly seemed to say that it’s hard to tell.

They were first asked whether they agreed that “Medicaid fraud prevention programs that increase penalties and require additional verification and inspections will create fiscal savings that outweigh the administrative costs of running them.”

Five agreed, four disagreed, two were uncertain and one had no opinion.

Michael Jones of the University of Cincinnati said he believed the savings would outweigh the costs.

“A low-cost verification system that confirms identity and eligibility at the moment that services are provided should produce a positive (return on investment) for Ohio,” he wrote in the comment section of the survey. “Ohio should be implementing electronic visit verification for nearly every service that is reimbursed.”

But Curtis Reynolds of Kent State University said it was hard to see how the increased administrative cost would pay for itself.

“This is always the challenge: more verification/inspections are costly and I do not think that there will be much fiscal savings,” he wrote. “Medicaid fraud does exist but the estimates are that it is not a large percentage of total spending.”

The economists were also asked whether they agreed that “Medicaid fraud prevention programs that increase penalties and require additional verification and inspections will reduce access for vulnerable populations like people with disabilities.”

This time they divided evenly. Four agreed, four disagreed and five were uncertain.

“Vulnerable people are likely to get snared by the fraud prevention program which may penalize people who Medicaid is supposed to help,” wrote Charles Kroncke of Mount St. Joseph University, who agreed the new regs would cut some access for the disabled.

But Jonathan Andreas of Bluffton University said the new rules could benefit the disabled in the long run.

“It will undoubtedly reduce access in the short run because of inevitable false positives which reduce necessary care,” he wrote. “But in the long run, IF it increases the efficiency of Medicaid, it could increase care because of helping channel scarce dollars to the patients who really need them rather than to fraudsters.”

The panelists were also divided on the overall economic effect of the new rules, should they become law.

They were asked if they agreed that “Medicaid fraud prevention programs that increase penalties and require additional verification and inspections will generate a greater economic return than expanding benefits for recipients.”

Two agreed, three disagreed, five said they were uncertain and one had no opinion.

Andy Welki of John Carroll University said the new rules could create better public sentiment about Medicaid, which itself could produce a benefit.

“Confidence in a well run system promotes greater support,” he wrote.

But David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati said it’s too early to tell whether the benefits will outweigh the costs.

“We won’t know the extent of fraud currently committed or prevented until such measures are enacted,” he wrote. “Expanding benefits for current recipients would increase costs, fraud, and access to care.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a press release Kroger CEO Greg Foran praised Giant Eagle as a “high-quality regional grocer” and touted its “fresh products, pharmacy, private label and customer loyalty.”

“We evaluated the opportunity carefully, and the strategic fit is clear,” he went on. “Giant Eagle expands our reach into attractive adjacent markets, allowing us to do what we do best: Run outstanding stores, deliver fresh foods and convenient meal solutions at affordable prices, and take care of our customers and associates every single day.”

Despite emphasizing adjacent markets, much of Giant Eagle’s territory overlaps with Kroger — already the largest traditional grocery chain in the country. With previously competitive stores operating under the same shingle, some Giant Eagle locations are certain to close or get sold off. The press release notes the companies “expect to make limited Giant Eagle store divestitures.”

In 2024, federal regulators shot down a similar deal in which Kroger attempted to purchase Albertsons. But with a very different administration in the White House, it’s possible the Federal Trade Commission will view the latest deal differently.

The deal’s implications

Giant Eagle CEO Bill Artman offered a rose-tinted view of the agreement, calling it “an exciting next chapter for our Team Members, customers, vendors and community partners.”

“Together with Kroger,” he added, “we will be well-positioned to advance our strategy and deliver better quality and service, better everyday value, and a better shopping experience for our customers, while providing greater growth opportunities for our dedicated Team Members.”

Rob Moore, a public policy researcher and principal of Scioto Analysis, said there’s some credence for a positive outlook.

“Our instinct is to be worried about consolidations because of reductions in competition in the market, but the deal is not necessarily bad for consumers,” he said. “Larger grocery stores can sometimes lead to more efficiencies in purchasing, logistics, and technology deployment.”

But Moore stressed, “these efficiencies only matter to consumers if they lead to lower prices, better service, or better access to food.”

American Economic Liberties Project Director of Policy and Advocacy Morgan Harper warned the deal could be a lose, lose, lose.

“What we usually see with these large grocery store mergers is that they have detrimental impacts for both workers, and consumers, and other small businesses, suppliers, that try to provide products to a Kroger.”

If the deal means some stores are redundant, Harper said, it’s safe to assume some workers will get pink slips. With less competition, she added, the grocery giant gains even greater pricing power. That could mean higher prices in the aisle, as well as a harder bargain for the companies making the products that end up there.

“A combined Kroger could become the only game in town,” she said. “Especially right now with so many people struggling to keep up with how costs are increasing across the board, this is the type of transaction that could exacerbate that in the form of higher food costs.”

The most recent Consumer Price Index report showed the cost of groceries climbed 2.7% over the past year.

Harper doesn’t expect the Trump administration FTC to pursue the merger as aggressively as it did during President Biden’s tenure, but that’s not the only enforcement mechanism available. State attorneys general have the authority to investigate, and if they determine the deal is anti-competitive, they could sue to block it.

And Harper noted there’s some positive, recent precedent for state AGs going it alone.

“That’s what we’re seeing with Live Nation-TicketMaster,” she said, “the feds settled and the state AGs continued that case.”

Although the Live Nation case is far from over, in April, a jury determined the company was acting as a monopoly.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Athens-based university is set to receive $10 million from a fund through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, meant to offset cuts made by to Medicaid made by Congress.

Ohio was awarded a total of $202 million through the fund, and Ohio University’s portion is the first specific award to be announced.

“We are excited to see the first of the funds going out to begin the important work of improving the health and well-being of Ohioans in our rural communities,” DeWine said in a statement announcing the award.

According to the announcement, the university plans to address healthcare workforce needs with the money, by funding expanded “healthcare exploration” for grade school and high school students through summer camps and career fairs, along with programs for college students. The university also plans to expand apprenticeships for high school students and graduate.

“This investment recognizes Ohio University’s longstanding commitment to rural communities and also puts that experience to work in collaboration statewide to expand innovative workforce development programs, strengthen partnerships, and improve access to quality care for Ohioans who need it most,” said Ken Johnson, OU VP of Health Affairs and senior strategist for health partnerships, in a statement.

With administration by the Ohio Department of Health, the rural health program will be used to “build on existing state investments to expand access to care in rural communities, strengthen the rural health workforce, modernize rural facilities and technology, and support innovative models that bring high-quality dependable care closer to home,” governor’s office stated.

The office said more contracts would be announced in the over the next few months.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Flight-tracking data cited by the newsletter shows a Bombardier Global 5500 departed John Glenn Columbus International Airport at about 10:20 p.m. Saturday and landed at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport — a hub for private aviation on the northern edge of the city — at 11:16 a.m. local time Sunday, a flight of roughly 6 hours and 56 minutes.

The transatlantic leg burned an estimated 3,511 gallons of jet fuel at an estimated fuel cost of about $21,065 and produced an estimated 34 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the flight-tracking data. The Rooster put the combined cost of the trip — including a short repositioning flight the day before, from the Ohio State University Airport to John Glenn Columbus International — at roughly $21,700, with about 35 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The Rooster has connected the Bombardier Global 5500 to Ramaswamy through an aviation source it granted anonymity and through flight records it says match his publicly known appearances. The newsletter has previously reported that the jet, operated by MDO Capital, flies out of the Ohio State University Airport. TiffinOhio.net has not independently confirmed the identity of the aircraft’s passengers.

The Paris flight is the latest in a series of trips the newsletter has documented this year. In June, The Rooster published flight records for the Bombardier jet, reporting that it had flown 54 times in 2026 at an estimated $200,000 in costs, including trips to Portugal, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos and Puerto Rico. The newsletter described the Paris flight as Ramaswamy’s fifth international trip of the year.

In March, TiffinOhio.net reported that Ramaswamy’s campaign paid nearly $12,000 to an exclusive Puerto Rico resort, an expenditure listed as travel in filings with the Ohio Secretary of State.

The trip coincided with extreme heat on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of Ohio was under an Excessive Heat Warning through the evening of Friday, July 3, as a heat dome pushed heat-index values into the triple digits, according to the National Weather Service and state forecasters; highs on July 4 eased slightly into the upper 80s and low 90s. In France, Meteo-France recorded the country’s hottest day on record on June 24 during a heat wave that the country’s public health agency linked to roughly 1,000 excess deaths over three days at its late-June peak, an estimate the agency said was likely to rise. France 24 later reported 2,025 excess deaths in France for the month. The Rooster juxtaposed the flight’s carbon emissions with the heat waves.

Ramaswamy has previously defended his private air travel. His campaign told Heartland Signal that he covers the costs with his own money rather than donor funds, and that flying allows him to reach voters across Ohio’s 88 counties. Those statements concerned campaign travel within the United States; the Paris flight appears to be personal. Ramaswamy and his campaign have also disputed some of The Rooster’s past reporting and criticized its author.

Energy and climate policy are central to the governor’s race. Ramaswamy has campaigned on expanding Ohio’s fossil-fuel and nuclear energy production and on accelerating data center development across the state.

Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-area businessman, won the Republican nomination for governor in May and faces Democrat Amy Acton in the Nov. 3 general election. His running mate is state Senate President Rob McColley; Acton’s is former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Click, a Vickery Republican serving his third term in the Ohio House, published the roughly 12-minute video to his official Facebook page early Saturday, July 4. In it, an AI-rendered figure resembling Click appears among the Founding Fathers in a candlelit colonial chamber; a companion frame shows a modern, blazer-clad likeness of Click holding up a smartphone to take a selfie with several bewigged figures. On-screen text during the clip reads “ABUSES AND USURPATIONS.”

“Have you ever dreamed of visiting the Founding Fathers during the most notable times of American history? I have. Now, thanks to AI, I’ve done it,” Click wrote in the caption. He described the piece as a decade-and-a-half-old audio dramatization to which he added “video enhanced by my imagination,” and urged followers to “take time to learn about the founding of our great nation.”

The post drew a mix of reactions. As of Sunday it showed 31 likes and other positive reactions alongside 28 comments and nine shares. Several commenters were sharply critical.

“Does your arrogance and ego ever stop? For you to insert your likeness into such a noble event is more than I can take. So inappropriate. So distasteful,” one commenter wrote.

Another objected to the historical framing, noting that Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration contained a passage condemning slavery that the Continental Congress struck. “If we are going to tell our story, honestly, we should do so with the truth and not what makes us feel comfortable,” the commenter wrote, adding that the United States still needs to “strive for the ‘more perfect’ part.”

A third comment was blunter: “I’m glad that the beloved pet pig of George Washington finally got to be represented in this biopic. Oh my bad, it’s just Gary.”

A lawmaker aligned with the AI buildout

The Fourth of July video is a lighthearted turn for a legislator whose recent policy work has placed him squarely on the side of the industry that AI depends on. Generative AI tools like the one Click used run on data centers — the large, power- and water-hungry computing facilities spreading across Ohio.

Click is a joint sponsor, with Rep. Kellie Deeter (R-Norwalk), of House Bill 646, legislation he introduced in January to respond to that expansion. As the bill passed the House, it would have created a Data Center Study Commission charged with examining data centers’ effects on the environment, the electrical grid, water supplies, farmland and the local economy — and, in a clause with no parallel elsewhere in the bill, “reports of foreign propaganda intended to create opposition to data centers.”

That wording appears verbatim in the Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s official analysis of the bill, which lists Click and Deeter as primary sponsors. The commission’s mandatory study topics also include data centers’ “value to national security and artificial intelligence development.”

The provision would place community opposition to data centers on the same footing as environmental or infrastructure concerns while framing it as a potential foreign-influence problem rather than ordinary civic dissent. The libertarian Reason Foundation submitted testimony recommending the language be deleted, cautioning that the commission’s work should avoid the appearance of bias.

The issue is not abstract in Click’s district, which covers all of Sandusky and Seneca counties. Kara Hetrick, who lives outside Gibsonburg near a proposed data center site, told lawmakers at a hearing she objected to the state spending money to study the question at all. “Now we’re going to have more wasteful tax dollars to study a so-called foreign propaganda,” she said, “when really all it is, (is) we the people voicing our concerns with opposition.”

Click has defended the measure as a response to those same constituents. “We have heard the concerns of our communities and taken time to speak with those in the industry,” he said when the bill was introduced. “We feel that this is the best approach to ensure that every voice is heard.”

Where the bill stands

HB 646 passed the Ohio House unanimously, 97-0, on March 19, 2026. In the Senate, lawmakers scrapped the study-commission framework and rewrote the measure into a broader regulatory package addressing data-center electricity rates, water use, tax breaks and public-records access to nondisclosure agreements. That substitute version — which no longer contains the study commission or its “foreign propaganda” clause — remains in the Senate Energy Committee, with lawmakers signaling further action when the General Assembly returns to Columbus in November.

The Fourth of July post is not Click’s first brush with AI-generated content. TiffinOhio.net reported in February that Click drew criticism from fellow Republicans after weighing into a dispute over an AI-generated video during his primary campaign.

Click narrowly won the May 5 Republican primary over challenger Eric Watson, of Tiffin. He faces Democrat Aaron Jones, a U.S. Army veteran and Tiffin City Councilman, in the November general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lewis Hurst, 60, of Republic, pleaded guilty to one count of theft as a first-degree misdemeanor, reduced from the fifth-degree felony originally filed, according to Sandusky Municipal Court records.

The court sentenced Hurst to 30 days in jail and suspended the entire term. It imposed a $500 fine, suspended $250 of it, and assessed $140 in court costs. Hurst was also ordered to pay $857.99 in restitution; court records show a check for that amount was issued to Best Buy. The remaining balance is due within 60 days under the terms of the disposition.

Hurst posted a $5,000 bond after his arrest. Court records show a portion of that bond was applied to his fines, costs and restitution, with the remainder refunded.

The charge stemmed from a January 24 incident. According to a Perkins Township Police Department investigation report obtained by TiffinOhio.net, a store manager reported inventory discrepancies on a specific computer model, and the store identified a credit card transaction tied to Hurst. Perkins Township Police Officer Michael Todhunter wrote that surveillance footage showed a man placing a price sticker from a $499 computer onto the box of a $1,299 HP Omen R5 8500F computer before buying it at the lower price. Investigators used license-plate camera data and a Bureau of Motor Vehicles photo to identify Hurst, the report states.

A warrant was issued February 9, and the Erie County Sheriff’s Office served Hurst on March 19, when he posted bond. Attorney Dean Henry entered an appearance and filed a not-guilty plea on Hurst’s behalf in March. The case was continued several times before the July 2 hearing, at which Hurst changed his plea.

The Seneca County Board of Developmental Disabilities placed Hurst on paid administrative leave following a special meeting Saturday, March 28. The board described the action as a “private personnel issue” that is “not otherwise related to Mr. Hurst’s leadership,” according to a statement reported by the Advertiser-Tribune, and named Natasha Nichols, its director of service and support administration, interim superintendent. In late April, the board confirmed to WTOL 11 that Hurst remained on paid leave.

Hurst continued to appear publicly as superintendent after the case was filed. On March 10 — more than a month after the warrant issued — he told the Seneca County Commissioners the district was in “good financial shape,” according to the Advertiser-Tribune.

The Seneca County Opportunity Center, which operates under the county Board of Developmental Disabilities, provides services and supports for people with developmental disabilities and is funded in part by local taxpayers.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Job gains were also revised down from 172,000 to 129,000 for May, and from 179,000 to 148,000 for April. 

The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2% — the lowest since June 2025, when it was 4.1%. 

The jobs increases were especially weak considering that the men’s World Cup soccer tournament likely added 40,000 jobs in June, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in a statement. Gould said the unemployment rate drop was “for the wrong reasons” as 720,000 people left the labor market.

The industries adding the most jobs in June were business and professional services (36,000 jobs), social assistance (up 25,000 jobs) and healthcare (22,000 jobs). 

There was a drop of 61,000 jobs in leisure and hospitality jobs, reflecting weaker-than-usual seasonal hiring for the summer, the BLS said. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The incident was reported around 9:59 a.m. July 2 near 265 N. Washington St. Dispatch notes said a truck at Pit Stop doing an inspection could hear gas hissing, and Columbia Gas was contacted shortly after crews arrived.

Tiffin Fire/Rescue, police, the city street department and Columbia Gas responded to the area. Crews began setting up barricades near North Sandusky Street, Apple Street, Second Avenue, West Davis Street and other nearby streets as officials worked to secure the area.

By about 10:15 a.m., dispatch notes indicated crews were “closing this whole area,” including access near Circle K. The street department later placed road-closed signs and cones at West Davis and Short streets, while officers stood by near North Sandusky Street and Apple Street until additional barricades were in place.

Dollar General was evacuated around 10:54 a.m., according to the media summary. Officials also contacted ODOT for truck-route signs, and the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office was advised of the closure.

The city’s CERT team was called to assist with traffic control near Hudson and North Sandusky streets and was on scene by about 12:38 p.m.

Dispatch notes listed several barricade locations, including Sandusky Street at First, Second, Apple and Hudson; Davis Street at Minerva and Jackson; and other points around the affected area. A truck detour was later routed from Second Avenue to Wall Street to Miami Street and back to Sandusky Street.

The leak was contained by about 2:19 p.m., though fire officials and Columbia Gas remained on scene. Around 2:29 p.m., fire officials advised that crews could begin reopening State Route 53, and the street department was contacted to collect the barriers.

By 4 p.m., city officials announced that crews had secured the gas line and the road was reopened.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The progressive advocacy group ranked Ohio 13th among states for added household costs, estimating the average Ohio household has paid $2,175 more through June 30 and could pay $3,300 more by the end of 2026.

For a family of four buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, the report estimates the added cost in Ohio rises to $3,688 through June and $6,325 by year’s end.

The report attributes the increases to four policy areas: tariffs, higher residential electricity costs, higher gasoline prices tied to the war in Iran, and the expiration of enhanced ACA premium tax credits for families buying marketplace coverage.

CAP Action’s analysis is not a government estimate. It is an advocacy-group analysis that assigns costs to members of Congress based on recorded votes the group describes as “cost-up” votes — votes that, in its methodology, raised or sustained one of the four added-cost categories.

That matters because the report does not simply measure price increases. It also ties those costs to congressional votes on tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ACA premium tax credits and war-powers resolutions related to Iran.

How the report says Ohio was affected

Ohio’s $2,175 average-household figure includes gas, utility and tariff costs. The higher $3,688 figure applies to a family of four purchasing ACA marketplace coverage because it adds the estimated premium increase after the enhanced tax credits expired.

Nationally, CAP Action estimates that the average household has paid $2,072 more through June 30 for gas, utilities and tariff-affected goods. For a family buying ACA marketplace coverage, the report puts the added cost at $3,569 through June and projects it could reach $6,162 by the end of 2026.

The group’s methodology treats tariffs as a national cost spread evenly across households. Gas, utility and ACA marketplace costs are calculated with state-level inputs, including Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, U.S. Energy Information Administration electricity data, Yale Budget Lab tariff estimates, Keep Americans Covered state impact analyses and federal marketplace enrollment data.

Ohio’s delegation in the report

CAP Action’s searchable table lists members of Congress, their “cost-up” vote counts and the household costs the group attributes to those votes in each state. Searching the table for “Ohio” or “OH-” shows the state’s delegation.

Among the Ohio House members shown in the report’s table, Republican Reps. David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Bob Latta, Michael Rulli, Mike Turner and Troy Balderson each recorded 12 “cost-up” votes out of 12 tracked House votes. Rep. Dave Joyce and Rep. Mike Carey were listed at 11 of 12, Rep. Max Miller at 10 of 12 and Rep. Warren Davidson at 9 of 11.

The same table lists Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman at 1 of 12 and Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty at 0 of 12. The full interactive table should be searched directly for the rest of Ohio’s delegation, including additional House members and senators.

Under CAP Action’s scoring system, a member is charged with the full cost of a category if they cast at least one “cost-up” vote in that category. The report says one opposing vote within the same category does not reduce that attribution.

Energy costs connect to Ohio’s data-center debate

The utility-cost portion of the report lands as Ohio is already debating how much new electricity demand should be paid by data centers and how much risk should fall on ratepayers.

In February, AEP Ohio said its new data-center tariff had reduced projected demand from 30,000 megawatts to 5,700 megawatts, but manufacturers and other critics continued warning that ratepayers could face higher costs if utilities overbuild for speculative projects.

Ohio lawmakers have also been weighing new data-center legislation touching on tax breaks, utility billing, water use and local government impacts. The state has already committed at least $2.3 billion in sales-tax exemptions for data centers, according to reporting by Signal Statewide republished by TiffinOhio.net.

Those debates overlap with CAP Action’s argument that energy policy choices can show up directly in household utility bills. They also connect with Rep. Landsman’s No Harm Data Center Act, which would require data-center operators to pay for the grid infrastructure needed to serve them.

Tariffs and household affordability

CAP Action’s report estimates tariffs have added $1,574 in costs for the average U.S. household through June 30, using a national estimate rather than a state-by-state tariff figure.

That finding fits into a broader affordability debate in Ohio. A Cleveland Fed model previously showed elevated recession risks as tariffs, debt, weak hiring and falling consumer sentiment weighed on the economic outlook. TiffinOhio.net has also reported on analyses finding that the affordability crisis is getting worse for households in Ohio and across the country.

Tariffs are paid by importers at the border, but economists have long warned that much of the cost can be passed through to consumers through higher prices. CAP Action’s methodology uses a 70 percent consumer pass-through assumption, citing the Congressional Budget Office.

Health care and other federal cost shifts

The report’s largest additional cost for marketplace families comes from health care. CAP Action estimates an Ohio family of four buying ACA marketplace coverage would face $3,688 in added costs through June and $6,325 through 2026 once the premium increase is included.

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025. The report says the health care estimate applies only to households buying ACA marketplace coverage, not every Ohio household.

The finding adds to other federal-policy cost shifts affecting Ohio families. In May, TiffinOhio.net reported that a Trump administration child care rule could cost some Ohio families up to $15,000 more annually after rescinding a Biden-era cost cap.

Ohio among the 20 highest-cost states

CAP Action ranked Ohio 13th among the 20 states with the highest total added household costs. The only neighboring states ranked higher were Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

How CAP Action calculated the costs

CAP Action’s methodology separates the costs into two totals. The “average household” figure includes gas, utilities and tariffs. The “marketplace family of four” figure adds the ACA premium increase for a family buying marketplace health insurance.

The report says gas costs are based on Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker. Utility costs are based on U.S. Energy Information Administration residential electricity data. Tariff costs are based on CAP Action and Yale Budget Lab estimates. Health care costs are based on Keep Americans Covered state fact sheets and federal marketplace enrollment data.

The report’s vote scoring is broader than a simple roll-call summary. It includes final-passage votes, disapproval resolutions, war-powers resolutions and procedural votes that determined whether measures could reach the floor. CAP Action says it did not include messaging votes with no bearing on whether a cost took effect.

Because of that methodology, the report should be read as CAP Action’s attribution of policy responsibility, not as a direct household bill or official government accounting. But the Ohio numbers place the state clearly in the upper tier of the group’s national cost estimates.

For Ohioans already facing rising utility bills, health care premiums, tariffs and other cost pressures, the report adds another data point to the 2026 affordability fight: according to CAP Action, the price tag is already more than $2,000 for the average Ohio household, and still rising.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

On June 25, the Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from 350,000 migrants from Haiti and over 6,000 from Syria.

TPS is a legal status given to migrants from countries the U.S. government agrees are too dangerous to return to. Haiti and Syria certainly fit the description. The State Department warns Americans against traveling to Syria and Haiti “for any reason” due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, hostage taking, and armed conflict.

Yet the court’s conservative majority ruled that courts are prohibited from reviewing whether the administration followed the law in revoking TPS. The “decision that country conditions in Syria and Haiti justified termination of their TPS designations” is exempt from any form of judicial review, the justices claimed.

Interestingly, the Supreme Court did not rule that the administration followed the law, or that conditions in these countries were safe. It simply ruled that these decisions couldn’t be challenged.

The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that terminating TPS for Haitians was racially motivated. For the court’s conservatives, none of President Trump’s past remarks — which include the lie Haitians are “eating the dogs,” “probably have AIDS,” and that Haiti is a “s—hole country” — were “overtly racial.”

Effectively, the Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration the power to unilaterally end TPS for any group at any time for any reason, no matter how prejudiced or flawed.

While this immediately impacts Haitians and Syrians, it puts the lives of everyone with TPS at risk. This includes people from active warzones like Ukraine, Sudan, and Lebanon.

The only hope for these people is that Congress will intervene on their behalf.

Fortunately, even some Republicans understand the gravity of this situation. Governor Mike DeWine has called the ruling a “mistake.” DeWine warned, “If [Haitians] lose temporary protected status and they no longer can work and the companies can’t employ them, that’s a blow to the economy, that’s a blow to the state.” Ohio is home to a large Haitian migrant population. 

Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) claimed that the decision will “create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing, and in the I/DD [intellectual and developmental disabilities] community” where roughly one-third of Haitian TPS holders work. He called on the Senate to pass his bipartisan bill to extend TPS for Haitians “to address these issues.” That bill passed the House earlier this year.

For all of Trump’s bigotry, migrants remain an indispensable part of the U.S. economy. But beyond these economic considerations, the U.S. has a moral duty to these people — because the dire conditions in many of these countries are the direct result of America’s foreign policy.

Decades of U.S. sanctions and military intervention in Syria helped foment the political and economic instability in the region. Haiti endured years of U.S. colonial occupation and continues to face repeated attempts by our government to undermine their elections and democracy.

TPS is not simply humanitarian aid. It is a form of reparations for those who’ve suffered the consequences of U.S. foreign policy.

Deliberately sending vulnerable, law-abiding people — many of whom have spent decades here — to countries this administration knows are unsafe is nothing less than issuing their death sentences. These people should not be made to suffer and die to satisfy this administration’s xenophobia and racism.

The sheer indifference towards life displayed by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration betray every principle upon which this nation was founded. While there is still time, Congress must enact extensions to protect TPS recipients.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A summer cooling outlook from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association projects the typical Ohio household will spend about $745 on electricity from June through September, up from $691 a year ago — an increase of 7.8 percent. Nationally, the group projects summer electric bills will rise 10.5 percent to roughly $792, and it estimates that summer cooling costs have climbed nearly 40 percent since 2020.

Tiffin is served by AEP Ohio, the utility whose distribution rates and data-center policies have been reshaped by a series of decisions at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio over the past year. Other parts of Seneca County are served by different providers, including North Central Electric Cooperative and, in some areas, FirstEnergy utilities.

On Wednesday, April 1, the PUCO approved a settlement in AEP Ohio’s distribution rate case. The commission and the utility described the outcome as a net reduction: base distribution revenue would rise by $11 million — far below the $97 million AEP originally sought — while about $105 million in federal tax savings is returned to customers over 18 months, producing an overall revenue decrease of $58.7 million. AEP Ohio said the change would lower a typical residential bill by roughly $1 a month, and PUCO staff had earlier recommended a small decrease.

“The settlement we’re approving today focuses on utility affordability and ensuring that new data centers are responsible for the costs they impose on the grid, while providing the utility with the tools it needs to focus on system reliability,” PUCO Chair Jenifer French said.

Consumer and environmental groups that intervened in the case say the reduction is temporary. The Ohio Environmental Council, Columbus Stand Up, Save Ohio Parks and the Buckeye Environmental Network argue that once the tax credit expires, and if AEP moves to collect the full amount the settlement allows, residential rates would rise — by as much as $4.38 a month by the end of 2026 and toward $10.28 a month by 2028.

“While AEP Ohio is going to claim this rate change could result in a bill decrease for customers, that reduction is temporary,” said Columbus City Councilmember Christopher Wyche, who chairs the council’s Public Utilities and Sustainability Committee. “Number games may work for talking points, but they won’t do much for consumers who are balancing their budgets at the kitchen table.”

Maureen Willis, who heads the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, said consumers “deserve a direct answer” to whether their bills are going up, adding that “every approved dollar comes directly from consumers’ pockets.”

The case was resolved through a settlement, and AEP Ohio has not been accused of wrongdoing; the dispute centers on how the settlement’s temporary credits and future spending caps will net out on customer bills. PUCO staff, for their part, disputed the framing of an affordability crisis, calling the Consumers’ Counsel’s arguments on that point “misleading” because household costs are rising across many categories of spending.

A separate driver sits on a different line of the bill. On March 18, two weeks before the distribution order, the PUCO approved AEP Ohio’s Basic Transmission Cost Rider, the charge that covers the high-voltage lines moving bulk power across the state. AEP Ohio said the update would raise the transmission portion of a typical 1,000-kWh residential bill by about $7.90 a month, but that the increase would be largely offset by a roughly $7.16 decrease in generation costs and a $0.52 decrease in distribution — a net increase of about $0.22 a month for the average customer on its standard service offer.

That offset applies to customers on AEP Ohio’s standard service offer. Customers who buy generation through a competitive retail electric supplier or governmental aggregation may not see the same generation-cost offset, meaning their net bill impact could differ. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association Energy Group has challenged AEP’s underlying load forecasts, arguing in filings that the utility overstated future demand, including an increase of more than 3 gigawatts in what it reported to the regional grid operator.

Much of that projected demand traces to data centers. In July 2025, the PUCO ordered AEP Ohio to create a tariff specific to large data centers, requiring new or expanded facilities of 25 megawatts or more to pay for at least 85 percent of the capacity they reserve — even if they use less — for up to 12 years. The commission said the structure is meant to keep the cost of new infrastructure from shifting onto residential and small-business customers. The same order lifted a moratorium AEP had placed on new data-center connections in central Ohio. In its summer outlook, NEADA listed data-center demand among the factors pushing retail electricity prices up faster than inflation.

Ohio customers are also paying to keep older plants running. On April 29, the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously upheld charges AEP Ohio bills to customers for its share of the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation, which operates two 1950s-era coal plants, rejecting a challenge that consumers had overpaid $74.5 million for the plants’ money-losing years in 2018 and 2019.

The rising costs arrive as Ohio offers comparatively limited summer relief. According to NEADA, the state has no broad summer shut-off protection, even as it maintains protections against winter disconnections. Ohio does operate a Home Energy Assistance Summer Crisis Program for eligible households, but the program is income-limited and does not amount to a statewide summer moratorium on disconnections. Heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States, the NEADA report notes, citing federal data.

Ohioans can compare generation suppliers through the PUCO’s Energy Choice tool, though the delivery charges driven by the rate and transmission decisions above do not change when a customer switches supplier.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A year later, with that section of the “big, beautiful” law set to expire July 4, GOP lawmakers are trying to find a way to keep the nationwide prohibition in place, though they won’t be able to accomplish that before the deadline. 

That means states will now determine whether people enrolled in the program for lower-income individuals can, once again, get routine healthcare services from the Planned Parenthood clinics that remain open.  

Nora Walsh-DeVries, vice president of political and legislative affairs at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the law forced the organization to close nearly 30 of its healthcare centers.

“The impact is really horrible for us and some of it is unfortunately irreversible,” she said. “And it’s tough to try to deal with what’s happened in this past year, kind of also knowing that there is an intention from Republicans to permanently defund us.”

Some Planned Parenthood clinics, she said, tried to find ways to keep treating Medicaid enrollees, but ultimately that was “unsustainable” and not something every affiliate could manage. 

The result meant “tens of thousands of patients have been denied access to basic care services like cancer screenings, which I think we can all agree is something we should want people to get when they need it, where they need it, how they need it,” Walsh-DeVries said. 

The impact was ultimately less widespread than Planned Parenthood originally predicted, when its president said in a statement just days before the law took effect that “nearly 200 Planned Parenthood health centers in 24 states across the country are at risk of closure.”

The expiration won’t have an impact on abortion access for Medicaid enrollees, since a decades-old rider on government spending bills, which blocks taxpayer dollars from going to abortion with limited exceptions, remains in place. 

Republicans view the closures as a victory and are trying to renew the provision in an attempt to shutter more Planned Parenthood clinics. They believe any healthcare organization that provides abortions, even if those largely aren’t covered by taxpayer dollars, shouldn’t be included in any federal health programs. 

Pressure from conservatives

The House Freedom Caucus, a collection of far-right Republicans, wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson in late June, pressing him to include a similar prohibition in another party-line bill. 

“The American people rightfully expect a Republican-led Congress to deliver real results, not excuses or half-measures,” they wrote. “After years of broken promises, voters have entrusted us with majorities in both the House and Senate. This is our last and best chance to prove they were right to send us here to fight for them.”

They added that another reconciliation bill must prohibit “federal funding for abortion providers to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not being used to subsidize the radical abortion industry.”

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion organizations are lobbying Republicans to again block Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood.

“Defunding Big Abortion is now the default expectation of the pro-life movement,” Dannenfelser wrote in a statement. “When they return to D.C., Republicans must do all they can through reconciliation to once again block taxpayer dollars from Planned Parenthood and abortion businesses.”

Republicans used the complex budget reconciliation process to enact their “big, beautiful” law and the $70 billion package to fund immigration enforcement. The special process allowed GOP leaders to get around procedural votes in the Senate that would otherwise require bipartisanship as long as each provision has an impact on federal revenues or spending that is not deemed “merely incidental” by that chamber’s parliamentarian.

Strained system

Subasri Narasimhan, research director at the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy at UCLA Law School, said there often aren’t other health centers to cover the gaps left when a Planned Parenthood closes or is no longer reimbursed for treating a Medicaid enrollee. 

“We have a pretty strained healthcare system in so many different respects, but we’re looking at an extremely strained system when it comes to reproductive healthcare,” Narasimhan said. 

Some state governments, she said, tried to cover the budget holes created during the last year, though ultimately weren’t able to fully replace the loss of federal funding. 

Republicans reinstituting the same prohibition on Medicaid payments for non-abortion healthcare services, she said, would likely lead more people on the program to delay or skip preventative care altogether. 

“We’re looking at folks who are quite vulnerable and often use Planned Parenthood as their primary source of care,” she said. “And so there’s no option to look for another health center.”

Kathleen Adams, professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, said that if a program can vary state to state, it will, and this was no exception. 

“What I’m seeing is the states are finding emergency funds, other ways to channel funds to Planned Parenthood to sort of keep that part of their system active,” she said. 

There are also other programs and clinics, like federally qualified health centers and safety-net providers, that Adams said could play a part in filling some of the gaps.

“I don’t lose heart so much as we might otherwise about these provisions to Planned Parenthood because states are aware of these issues,” she said. “And if they don’t provide access to contraceptives, they’re more likely to get unintended pregnancies, or pregnancies amongst uninsured women.”

State action

Laurie Sobel, associate director for Women’s Health Policy at KFF, wrote in a post that after the nationwide moratorium expires, a Supreme Court ruling from late June 2025 will allow state governments to block certain healthcare providers, like Planned Parenthood, from participating in their Medicaid programs. 

“This ruling marked a significant departure from longstanding interpretations of the Medicaid ‘free choice of provider’ provision, which guarantees enrollees the right to obtain care from any qualified and willing Medicaid provider,” Sobel wrote.

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have either blocked or tried to block Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood, according to Sobel’s analysis.

Other states, she wrote, “may follow suit” once the nationwide Medicaid prohibition expires July 4.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The National Weather Service has issued an extreme heat warning for parts of about 20 states, including for the entirety of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. In a warning issued early Wednesday, the weather service advised that temperatures will be in the upper 90s through the weekend, with many locations reaching highs of well over 100 degrees. 

It estimated that the peak heat index will reach up to 115 degrees in some areas across the Mississippi Valley and Northeast. 

The weather service warned that these temperatures, and the lack of relief even at night, will pose a serious risk of heat-related illness. Those with pre-existing conditions or who do not have immediate access to air conditioning will be especially vulnerable.

According to Jessica Lee, services coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, more than 200 million people live in an area that is currently under an extreme heat warning, an extreme heat watch or a heat advisory. 

“For many areas, this heat wave brings the hottest temperatures so far this season, which can be particularly dangerous because people have not yet acclimated to this intense heat,” Lee said in a statement to States Newsroom. 

Lee added that the extreme heat will begin to decrease later this weekend and early next week, with temperatures expected to return to more seasonable levels.

States issue warnings

Many states have issued their own warnings to residents, including locations of cooling centers and other resources to help residents avoid heat-related illness. 

This week’s extreme temperatures are only adding to other serious weather conditions. 

In Kentucky, the heat wave is complicating repair and recovery efforts after the state was rocked by serious floods over the weekend. 

Gov. Andy Beshear has declared a state of emergency, and warned residents on Tuesday to take precautions, including finding cooling centers, hydrating and wearing light clothing. 

A sweltering 250th birthday

The heat wave comes amid some of the largest outdoor celebrations of the year. 

Large-scale festivities are planned to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, including a multi-week state fair in Washington, D.C. and scores of fireworks displays across the country. Also bringing out crowds is the World Cup, which is hosting matches in 11 U.S. cities.  

Amanda Reinhart, a meteorologist in NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center, said that the heat wave’s threat is amplified with many travelers from across the country and world who are not acclimated to the current levels of heat

Joel Myers, the founder and executive chair of the forecasting service AccuWeather, released a public statement Wednesday, warning that the risks of exposure to prolonged extreme heat can be deadly. It is especially worrisome for those without air conditioning or other ways to cool down, he said.

“The real danger we are concerned about is what occurs when you string together several days in a row of extreme heat,” Myers said in the statement. “The more days the heat wave goes on, between the high temperatures and extremely warm nights, the more harmful it is to the body. It puts more stress on the body.”

How to stay safe

While the high heat this week poses a public health risk, officials shared steps to take to stay safe. 

Reinhart said in a statement Wednesday that though everyone can be impacted by heat, the most at-risk groups include young children, adults 65 and older, pregnant women, people with disabilities and individuals with chronic health conditions. 

To stay safe, Reinhart recommended drinking plenty of fluids throughout the day, and not to wait until you feel thirsty. She said to avoid alcohol, caffeine and sugary drinks, which accelerate dehydration.  

She also said to wear lightweight, loose-fitting and light-colored clothing, and to use hats and sunscreen to protect your skin. 

To cool down, she recommended using misting fans, ice towels or cool damp cloths on the neck, underarms and forehead, which can help lower core body temperature. 

Finally, Reinhart advised those outdoors to avoid sitting directly on metal or plastic seats for extended periods, find shade whenever possible and to monitor yourself and those around you for signs of heat stroke. 

“While extreme heat is dangerous, heat-related illnesses are preventable,” she said in the statement.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The chairman, Josh Rubin, is also CEO of CJR Group, which counts American Electric Power among its clients. In his role with JobsOhio, the complaint says, he could be in a position to steer millions in what used to be public dollars to the massive utility.

“This calls into question whether Mr. Rubin has used his position as the board director of JobsOhio to create a fund for the benefit of his firm’s lobbying client, AEP,” the complaint filed last week by Democratic Ohio attorney general candidate John Kulewicz says. “This is a serious apparent conflict of interest.”

He was referring to a $100 million fund that would aid the creation of small-modular nuclear reactors. AEP is already exploring construction of such plants in Indiana and Virginia.

JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said that his agency had not yet signed any agreements to disburse the funds. 

Rubin didn’t respond to a call requesting comment.

A spokeswoman for AEP said that its regulated business is prohibited by state law from owning generation assets, but a bill in the legislature would change that, allowing it to build nuclear generation and charge customers for for the cost.

JobsOhio has stirred controversy since former Ohio Gov. John Kasich helped lead its creation in 2011. AEP has stirred it more recently.

JobsOhio describes itself as a “a private nonprofit corporation wholly funded by an independent private source.”

However, it was created by the legislature and was given the sole opportunity to lease the state liquor franchise for much less than it was worth. It has since provided more than $1 billion in what at least used to be public money as incentives to businesses, but it has struggled to show that it’s produced significant results.

Even so, Gov. Mike DeWine last year extended JobsOhio’s lease of the liquor franchise to 2053, without making it return any more money to taxpayers.

And almost since its beginning, the agency has been accused of conflicts of interest and other cozy arrangements.

In 2014, the Ohio Ethics Commission notified two Marathon Petroleum Corp. executives who also sat on the JobsOhio board that they had potential conflicts because Marathon was receiving benefits from JobsOhio.

Other board members’ ties to corporations enjoying JobsOhio largesse have included Sherwin-Williams, Bob Evans, Procter & Gamble, and Manta Media.

Then in 2024 came news that JobsOhio granted more than $2 million in economic incentives to a company run by a man who also heads up a regional entity created by JobsOhio. 

Most recently, the public learned in March that JobsOhio gave $60,000 to a woman with whom then-Ohio State President Ted Carter had an “inappropriate relationship.”

She was paid to produce four podcasts, but only one was made.

Exempt from open-records law, JobsOhio refused to say whether it had underwritten any podcasts other than one by a special friend of the president of Ohio’s flagship university. Carter resigned over the relationship.

Kulewicz, the Democratic AG candidate, told Ohio Inspector General Randall Meyer that Rubin’s dual status as chairman of the JobsOhio board and lobbyist for AEP might raise the appearance of a conflict.

“In effect, JobsOhio, using Ohio liquor profits, is paying AEP to develop mini-nuclear reactors that will have little to no local oversight and be owned by the utility company itself,” Kulewicz said in a written statement. “And the CEO of the firm that lobbies for AEP is the chairman of the state agency that is granting the $100 million to develop the technology.”

Englehart, the JobsOhio press secretary, said no money for reactors has been released. He added that his agency has rules to avoid ethical conflicts.

“JobsOhio and its board of directors conduct themselves to the highest ethical standards,” Englehart said in an email. “We don’t discuss the companies we are in conversations with. Any board member with an actual or possible conflict of interest on specific grant or loan proposals for a company must disclose it and it and will recuse themselves from discussions and voting on such proposal.”

Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, the Republican candidate for attorney general, said that JobsOhio should be more transparent. 

“I’ve been a consistent proponent of sunshine in government throughout my career,” Faber said in an email. “I’ve called for more transparency at JobsOhio specifically, but that must be tempered by its structure and purpose. The General Assembly created JobsOhio as a public/private partnership, and that comes with limitations.”

And while AEP said that state law doesn’t allow its regulated business from owning generating capacity, President and CEO Bill Fehrman in May told shareholders it was interested in doing so in some capacity.

“… we continue to evaluate nuclear solutions, aiming to position AEP at the forefront of next generation baseload technologies,” he said. “As we have previously mentioned, we are actively reviewing several potential sites and interconnection locations as we assess how nuclear can play a meaningful role in the future to support load growth.”

With a bill in the legislature to change ownership rules and with JobsOhio creating a $100 million fund to subsidize the business, AEP might be interested in getting some of that money.

Asked if Rubin has a conflict in his roles as chairman of the JobsOhio board and CEO of a lobbying firm that works for American Electric Power, AEP spokeswoman Tammy Ridout said Rubin didn’t work directly on her company’s account.

“Two members of CJR Group, not Josh Rubin, work with that regulated side of the business,” Ridout said in an email.

As CEO and founder of CJR Group, Rubin is likely to share in any profits the firm receives from its business with AEP.

The utility has stirred controversy of its own.

It paid more than $900,000 through a 501(c)(4) dark-money group to support a ratepayer-financed bailout that has been called one of the the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio history. AEP wasn’t accused of criminality, but it received well over $200 million from the bailout.

In addition, the politician at the center of the scandal, former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for his involvement.

Just after the bailout passed in 2019, AEP funneled another $500,000 through the same dark-money group to fund a plan that could have kept Householder in the speaker’s chair well into the 2030s, witnesses testified at his trial.

Earlier this year, with Ohioans’ electricity bills spiking, AEP generated more controversy when the Energy and Policy Institute reported that CEO Fehrman will receive $37 million this year — making him by far the highest-paid utility executive in the United States.

Ridout said her company objects to the notion that AEP might put the interests of its executives and shareholders ahead of those of its customers.

“Any suggestion that we would pursue actions contrary to the best interests of our customers is categorically false,” she said. “Putting our customers first and operating with integrity are our top priorities, and we take issue with any implication to the contrary.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Two groups challenged a fee, established by H.B. 6 and tacked onto Ohioans’ utility bills, to bailout two coal plants.

That rider allowed the plants’ owners — AEP Ohio, Duke Energy, and Dayton Power and Light — to earn a profit despite operating at a loss.

After the bribery scheme that advanced H.B. 6 came to light, the challengers insisted it would be improper to allow the companies to charge ratepayers for prop up the coal plants.

In the intervening years, state lawmakers came around to that idea. In 2025, they repealed the bailout as part of a major utilities overhaul, Ohio House Bill 15.

The Ohio Supreme Court acknowledged the change in circumstances but kept its focus on the 2021 audit.

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Megan Shanahan said the PUCO’s determinations were justified.

Even where she acknowledges state regulators gave too much credence to the utilities, Shanahan determined the “the record does not support a finding of reversible error.”

The H.B. 6 rider and the audit

Ohio House Bill 6 set up the Legacy Generation Rider to keep the Ohio Valley Economic Cooperative coal plants running.

But following a legally mandated audit in 2021, several groups challenged the utilities’ use of that rider, claiming the companies were collecting more than they should.

If you incur expenses at work, you usually have to turn in receipts and file an expense report to get reimbursed. Utility cost recovery is similar, just on a much larger scale.

Utilities can only recover costs if their expenses are “reasonable and prudent.”

An audit of the Legacy Generation Rider indicated the OVEC plants spent much of 2020 running in the red.

The review also found the plants had inked long-term supply contracts at above-market rates and kept more coal on hand than necessary.

“At this time,” the audit for AEP Ohio states, “the OVEC plants cost customers more than the cost of energy and capacity that could be bought on the PJM wholesale markets.”

But the auditor noted lawmakers may have had other considerations when they approved the rider, like maintaining jobs or fuel diversity, “that outweigh the impact on ratepayers.”

In a 2023 filing with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, attorney Kim Bojko from the Ohio Manufacturers Association criticized the audit for turning a blind eye to the largest bribery case in state history.

She noted the utilities themselves and one of the companies supplying that above-market coal had a hand in the H.B. 6 scandal.

“These companies now directly benefit from the customer-funded bailout legislatively enacted by H.B. 6,” she wrote.

“None of the audit reports even mention the bribery issues, or the fact that they may be indicative of a conflict of interest between customers on one side, and subsidized OVEC plants and coal companies on the other.”

But in 2024, the PUCO signed off on the audit — blessing the companies’ charges for the 2020 calendar year.

The Ohio Manufacturer’s Association and the Ohio Environmental Commission challenged that decision all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court.

The Ohio Supreme Court decision

To the Ohio Manufacturers Association and the Ohio Environmental Coalition it clearly wasn’t reasonable or prudent to allow utilities to recoup expenses for running unprofitable plants.

They raised several arguments — the PUCO didn’t consider important evidence, the utilities didn’t meet the burden of proof to justify expenses, and regulators got the standard for reasonable and prudent wrong.

The court brushed aside each argument in turn.

At several points Justice Shanahan determined the challengers had not met their own burden of proof, while finding the PUCO had provided enough in the record to justify their decisions.

In one example, the Ohio Manufacturer’s Association pointed to a report from the regional grid operator PJM indicating one plant might retire early.

That would make the utilities’ claims for advance debt payments imprudent, OMA claimed, but the PUCO excluded the report.

The court, however, rejected the argument because OMA didn’t include a specific citation, and although the report was “proffered” during PUCO proceedings it was never entered into the record.

“In short,” Shanahan wrote, “(OMA) has failed to create a record sufficient for this court to decide whether the commission erred.”

In another example, the Ohio Environmental Council argued the PUCO’s own test of ‘reasonableness’ includes a question of whether a utility’s actions benefit ratepayers and the public interest.

The court rejected that point, determining that the test applied to a different kind of case and has no foundation in state law anyway.

As for operating the plants at a loss, the PUCO accepted the companies’ explanation that they need to keep running even in unfavorable market conditions because “there are significant costs associated with starting up and shutting down.”

Plant operators eventually shifting their strategy as energy prices fell during the COVID-19 pandemic was taken as evidence that the utilities were responding prudently to a changing market.

That was good enough for the Supreme Court, too.

“The commission did not sidestep the analysis,” Shanahan wrote. “Rather, the commission reviewed the combined commitment strategies that OVEC employed during the audit period on behalf of the companies, found that OVEC’s decisions were prudent when they were made, and determined that no costs related to the commitment strategies should be disallowed.”

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.