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.

Ohio Senate Bill 461 would give academic centers the “rights and privileges of an independent college of the university,” according to the bill’s language. 

Ohio state Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, introduced the bill which would give the centers’ directors the sole authority to hire faculty and staff, as well as determine their rank, salary, and tenure. 

Cirino was the lawmaker behind S.B. 1 which bans diversity efforts, regulates classroom discussion, prohibits faculty strikes, creates post-tenure reviews, puts diversity scholarships at risk, and creates a retrenchment provision that blocks unions from negotiating on tenure.

Cirino’s latest proposal would give the new centers “unlimited authority” on their curriculum, he said.

“It clarifies that the center directors have the sole exclusive and unlimited authority to oversee, develop, and approve the center’s curriculum,” Cirino said. 

The centers would also receive all tuition and revenue from the courses it offers. 

Ohio State University and the University of Toledo’s civic centers would become schools and their directors would become deans of the school starting Jan. 1, 2027, according to the bill. 

Miami University, Cleveland State University, and Wright State University also have civic centers. The bill would require a student at a university with a center to take a course through their center. 

“I think over time we will likely see that the other three centers will also qualify as they build up their student body and their curriculum, but it’s important that we recognize and put in law the complete independence of these centers, lest in the future there be some question about what authorities they do have,” Cirino said.

Ohio’s five civic centers were created through the state’s two-year budget in 2023 for $24 million. 

The civics centers have hired more than 60 faculty members, and have either developed or secured approval for more than 60 new courses, Cirino said. 

“They are not conservative centers,” he claimed, “they are centers to foster open debate and inquiry on major topics.”

Miami anticipates 3,000 students will enroll in their civic center courses, Ohio State expects more than 800 students, Toledo anticipates 250, and Wright State expects 600 students, Cirino said. 

Cleveland State’s center is projected to grow from 28 students to 1,400 students, he said. 

Toledo’s center has taught 15 courses since Fall 2024, university spokesperson Nicki Gorny said. 

Ohio State’s center will offer 10 courses for the fall semester including American Creeds and Conflicts, Law and Economics, and How Politics Breaks Your Brain, said Executive Director Lee Strang. 

Strang is a conservative scholar who had worked with Republican lawmakers on drafting the bill creating the centers.

Ohio State’s center had 18 faculty members and 159 students enrolled last academic year, Strang said. 

Cleveland State’s center will offer two general education courses next school year — The American Republic and Great American Debates, said university spokesperson Kristin Broka. 

Cleveland State’s center has hired seven faculty members and 28 students enrolled last academic year, Broka said. 

Miami’s center will have 11 faculty members next academic year and 350 students took courses through the center last academic year, said university spokesperson Seth Bauguess. 

Wright State’s civic center helps supports the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the center will offer a 90-credit-hour bachelor’s program for base personnel starting in Fall 2027, university spokesperson Deena John said.

Wright State’s center will also oversee up to 20 class sections of the U.S. Civic Literacy course this upcoming academic year, she said.

The Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors opposes S.B. 461. 

“SB 461 requires Ohio’s universities to fund the five new civic centers before anything else — even if they aren’t offering courses that help students graduate or don’t have students enrolled in their programs or courses,” OCAAUP Executive Director Jennifer Tisone Price said in a statement. 

“This absolutely drives up tuition costs for every other student at that university.”

Ohio lawmakers are on break and will come back 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. 

Senate Bill 1

The Ohio Senate Bill 1 higher education overhaul became law a little over a year ago. 

Cirino said the bill was to counter what he viewed as left-wing ideology on college campuses.

“I think the left wokeness had taken over for a long time in our universities and community colleges, and a lot of it was just out of control,” Cirino said.

Ohio colleges and universities are also required to cut any undergraduate degree programs that produce on average less than five degrees annually over a three-year period. 

“I think we’ve eliminated close to over 530 programs today so far, and more of those are coming, and what that’s going to do is free up assets, the deployment of assets and resources for programs that really matter to us here,” Cirino said.  

The Ohio Capital Journal did a story earlier this year about nearly 90 degree programs that had been cut since Senate Bill 1. 

“These were very low in demand majors and, quite frankly, if you’re supporting three students in a program, it doesn’t pass the smell test,” Cirino said. 

“We can take that tenured professor position that we’re maintaining for that low number of students and put it over someplace else … that’s in more demand.”

Dylan Repertorio transferred from Cleveland State University to University at Albany in New York after S.B. 1 was signed into law. 

“I’ve gotten to take coursework that does include diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it’s actually opened up my eyes,” he said. “Moving away gave me a more open academic environment.” 

Repertorio, who is originally from New York, said he has felt affirmed in moving back to his home state. 

“I should just be (in college) to focus on my degree … I don’t really want to have to worry about these more bureaucratic things,” he said. 

Cirino said he has not yet talked to Ohio Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy about higher education. 

Earlier this year, Ramaswamy said he wants to consolidate Ohio colleges and universities. 

“I don’t know how much he knows about how higher ed works in the state of Ohio,” Cirino said when asked about Ramaswamy’s comments. 

“I would look forward to that discussion with him.” 

Ohio House Bill 698 would tie a portion of college and university funding to S.B. 1 compliance.

Ohio state Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., introduced the bill earlier this year, but Cirino said the bill “was not necessary and premature.” 

“I don’t think it would be a good thing right now to double-down on punitive actions for non-compliance,” Cirino said. 

“Let’s see how the compliance goes. … I’m not against holding people to compliance, but I think it would be too early.” 

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.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s right-wing majority essentially sanctioned the immediate deportation of the 350,000 Haitian immigrants Pipoly represented in Miot v. Trump.

The 43-year-old lawyer, who grew up in a suburb of Toledo, has litigated on behalf of foreign nationals from Haiti since the first Trump administration.

These were people “with a ton of courage and a ton of resilience” who fled for their lives from a violent, imploding country and found humanitarian protection in America.

Some Haitian families have been in the country for a decade or more.

Under Temporary Protected Status, they were legally allowed to live and work and contribute economically to many American communities, including Springfield, Ohio, while Haiti spiraled out of control and return was unthinkable.

Haitians in the United States have received multiple extensions on their temporary protected status to stay alive.

Conditions in the small Caribbean nation, convulsing in a state of de facto anarchy, are even worse today.

The U.S. State Department issued its highest Do Not Travel advisory for Haiti due to rampant gang violence, kidnapping, civil unrest, limited healthcare.

But the Supreme Court just green-lit the Trump regime’s merciless immigration policy to end TPS for Haitian families and deport them home to widespread famine, cholera outbreaks, closed medical facilities and schools, and roving armed gangs who use child soldiers, sexual violence, and bloody massacres to terrorize the population.

Pipoly said the inevitable outcome of the court’s decision is brutal.

“Thousands of people are now going to die violent deaths,” he predicted.

The dejected attorney from Sylvania, Ohio — who had spent years fighting to retain the temporary protection status of powerless people whose lives depended on it—was crushed.

The court gave the Trump regime free reign to ignore statutory mandates (created by Congress) to impose racially motivated deportations of people the president doesn’t like.

Lawless inhumanity given an indefensible pass. 

“It didn’t have to happen,” Pipoly lamented. “It was preventable. It is a choice that we as a society made. That reality is going to weigh on me for a long time.”

His core arguments were waived off by six Republican-appointed justices.

Pipoly asserted that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security skipped the required process to adequately assess country conditions before TPS designations could be given, extended, or taken away.

“Congress was very clear about the circumstances under which a TPS designation could be terminated, and it is after a fact-based assessment that the foreign country is safe to return. There was no such finding made here,” he said.

Moreover, Pipoly added, the court was alerted that new documents revealed even more proof that “these political appointees were coming at the very last minute and doing exactly what the president wanted them to do — which was find a reason for ending TPS.” 

Even if expert analysis of current Haiti, drawn from facts on the ground and other sources reports compiled by government agencies, recommended otherwise.

“Haiti was designated [for TPS] based on violence, based on housing insecurity, based on food insecurity, based on poverty, etc,” said Pipoly.

Those crises have exploded.

The real reason for termination of humanitarian protections for Haitians was not the one set forth in the official government notice, he argued.

“The real reason is because the president doesn’t like Haitians and it is unlawful to terminate on that basis.”

DHS’s rush to cancel TPS for singled out Haitians was driven, in part, by Trump’s racial animus of Black immigrants, in Pipoly’s view, and that violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The lead counsel in the Haitian TPS lawsuit noted how the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric “gets much stronger and more aggressive and more derogatory the darker one’s skin gets.”

According to Trump’s own statements, the attorney recounted, “Somalis are ‘garbage’ and low IQ. Haitians are ‘eating the dogs and cats’ and ‘all have AIDS’ but white people from Denmark and Norway are ‘nice.’”

In a blistering dissent to the majority opinion that Trump’s cited remarks were not “overtly racial,” Justice Elena Kagan put those remarks on the record and said, “they fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

Pipoly contended the DHS termination of TPS for Haiti was preordained and pretextual.

“The preordained nature is the statutory violation,” he said.

“That’s kind of the what. That’s the failure to follow obligatory procedure. That’s what happened. The racial animus or bare dislike for Haitians is the why it happened. Just the what was in and of itself enough to set aside the TPS termination and start over,” explained Pipoly.

“The why it happened was a constitutional violation.”

A group of lawful immigrants, at the mercy of the U.S. government, was targeted for who they are, said the attorney.

Trump’s ugly disparagement of Haitians, in particular, “reflect a TPS policy outcome that was unconstitutionally discriminatory.”  

Recently the DHS chief told panicked Haitians in Springfield, Miami, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere he would buy them a ticket out of the country and throw in some spending cash for good measure.

The cruel indifference to the fate hundreds of thousands who sought legal refuge in America left their lawyer broken.

“These folks didn’t do anything wrong. They don’t deserve this.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Firefighters, police officers and emergency medical workers routinely witness fatal crashes, violent crimes and other traumatic events that can leave lasting psychological scars. 

“When you are in the fire service, or any first responder industry, or especially in the military, stuff builds up over time, and what happens is you see so many things that the crazy stuff starts to at least seem normal,” said Jason Cerrano, a retired firefighter and paramedic with more than 20 years of experience in Missouri. Cerrano is now the director of commercial research and development at IDEX Fire & Safety.

In Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine earlier this month signed into law a measure that will create a Post-Traumatic Stress Injury Commission to review applications from eligible first responders for assistance to help cover treatment costs. 

Maryland took a different approach this year, enacting a law that protects firefighters, emergency medical technicians, paramedics and other rescue workers from employment discrimination over the lawful off-duty use of medical marijuana. 

The new law, which goes into effect in October, applies to registered medical cannabis patients who test positive for cannabis metabolites but are not impaired while on duty.

Several other states are exploring emerging therapies. 

A new Connecticut law expands a pilot program at Yale University studying psilocybin-assisted therapy by allowing any state resident age 18 or older to participate, provided they meet the clinical eligibility criteria established by Yale University’s institutional review board. The pilot program was previously limited to veterans, retired first responders and frontline health care workers.

Missouri lawmakers advanced a bill allowing veterans and first responders in approved research studies to receive the psychedelics psilocybin and ibogaine under medical supervision for PTSD and other mental health conditions. The legislature adjourned in May before lawmakers could send the bill to the governor.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The order, signed by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, allows PJM Interconnection to tap into diesel back-up generators, battery arrays and more as a “last resort” to prevent power shut-offs as temperatures climb to dangerous heights in the latter half of the week.

“Currently, there are tens of gigawatts of readily available backup generation that have remained largely untapped,” Wright wrote in his order. “Deployment of backup generation resources … can prevent avoidable blackouts, thereby saving lives and reducing costs to the American people.”

Wright’s emergency order will last through July 3. It does not apply to certain facilities serving a critical need, including hospitals, 911 call centers, water treatment plants, air traffic control towers and defense facilities.

But it does include AI data centers, which have wreaked havoc on PJM’s markets because of their immense energy demands.

PJM also received approval from the U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday to require power generating facilities to operate to fuel the grid — even if they would surpass pollution limits by doing so.

“Because the additional generation may result in conflict with environmental standards and requirements, I am authorizing only the necessary additional generation on the conditions contained in this Order,” Wright wrote.

It is up to PJM to call upon the power plants to operate and set the parameters, and it must notify the Department of Energy when additional power generation resources are tapped to go beyond its pollution allowances.

Power generators are to comply with environmental regulations, including recordkeeping requirements, to the “maximum extent practicable” during the emergency. According to PJM officials, the order could result in exceedances of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia and wastewater releases. The order expires at 11:59 p.m. on July 3.

PJM is predicting high demand through the weekend, peaking on Thursday, when demand is projected to set a new record for the grid at 166,304 megawatts, surpassing the previous record of 165,563 megawatts, set in 2006.

Throughout Central Maryland, the National Weather Service is predicting high temperatures just below 100 on Wednesday, followed by high temperatures between 102 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit from Thursday through Saturday. 

PJM is operating under a hot weather alert through July 3. For July 1, the grid operator has also issued a “maximum generation alert,” which calls on transmission and generation owners to defer any possible equipment maintenance or testing activities until the heatwave passes

The grid operator has also issued a “load management alert,” advance warning that it could use demand response programs on July 1, programs that pay customers who sign up to allow for energy reduction during emergencies.

In anticipation of the heat wave, Maryland utilities have been offering customers tips to conserve power whenever possible in order to lower their bills. 

The lists include setting thermostats at higher temperatures such as 78 degrees, using appliances later in the day, cooking outdoors when possible and using fans for cooling, but turning them off when no one is present in a room.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But one analysis of his plan to eliminate Ohio’s income tax reaches a stark conclusion for homeowners: replacing the lost school funding locally could require property taxes to rise by about 20% statewide.

The finding comes from Innovation Ohio, a progressive policy group that analyzed Ramaswamy’s proposal to eliminate the state income tax. The group argues the plan would create a roughly $10 billion annual budget gap and shift pressure onto public schools, Medicaid, local governments and taxpayers.

Ramaswamy is not campaigning on raising property taxes. He is campaigning on the opposite. His campaign platform says he would “slash property taxes immediately” and “phase out the state income tax — starting with eliminating capital gains taxes.” A separate property-tax plan says he would roll back property taxes to where they were before the end of the COVID pandemic, which his campaign calls “the largest property tax rollback in Ohio history.”

The conflict is not over whether lower taxes are politically popular. It is over whether the math works.

Ohio’s personal income tax is one of the state’s largest revenue sources. The nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission estimated that the tax is expected to raise nearly $10.34 billion in fiscal year 2027, the first full year Ohio’s new 2.75% flat tax on nonbusiness income will be in effect.

That money helps fund the General Revenue Fund, which pays for core state services including K-12 education, Medicaid, public universities, prisons and other state programs.

K-12 education alone represents one of the largest claims on the state budget. The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says state funding for primary and secondary education is estimated at $14.09 billion in fiscal year 2027, including $11.65 billion from the General Revenue Fund.

Ohio’s school-funding system is built as a state-local partnership. Public school districts rely on a mix of state aid, local property taxes, some school district income taxes and federal funds. If state aid falls, districts typically face three choices: cut services, ask voters for new local levies or find another way to raise revenue.

Innovation Ohio’s analysis says that if the lost income-tax revenue led to proportional cuts in K-12 education, schools would face a multibillion-dollar hit. To replace that money through local property taxes alone, the group says property taxes would need to rise by about 20% statewide.

That does not mean every homeowner’s bill would automatically increase by exactly 20%. Ohio property taxes are local, vary by school district and are often tied to voter-approved levies. But the estimate captures the pressure that could move from the state budget to local tax bills if the income tax is eliminated without an equivalent replacement.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported that Innovation Ohio estimated Ramaswamy’s income-tax repeal would create a $9.8 billion annual budget shortfall, threatening public school funding, Medicaid and local government services. The same report said replacing the lost revenue through property taxes would require an increase of approximately 20% statewide.

A tax cut with an unanswered funding question

Ramaswamy has argued that eliminating the income tax would make Ohio more competitive, attract residents and investment, and allow Ohioans to keep more of what they earn.

“We need to bring down the income tax eventually down to zero, because you deserve to keep what you earn,” Ramaswamy said at his campaign launch, according to the Statehouse News Bureau. “It is your money, not the government’s. We need to bring down property taxes in this state immediately, eventually down to zero.”

The Statehouse News Bureau reported in February that both Ramaswamy and Democratic candidate Amy Acton were talking about tax cuts but had offered few details on how they would pay for them. The bureau noted that Ramaswamy had been more direct than Acton in saying he wanted to bring income taxes down to zero.

Ramaswamy’s current campaign materials say local governments would continue operating “with greater discipline” under his property-tax rollback plan. The campaign says new construction would not be affected and existing debt obligations would be honored.

But his published plans do not identify a dollar-for-dollar replacement for the income-tax revenue he wants to phase out.

That omission is central because Ohio’s income tax is not a marginal revenue source. Eliminating it would require either historic economic growth, deep cuts, replacement taxes or some combination of all three.

TiffinOhio.net previously examined Ramaswamy’s broader tax agenda, including the combined effect of eliminating the income tax, repealing taxes on capital gains and rolling back property taxes. The pattern in outside analyses was consistent: the benefits would flow most heavily to wealthy Ohioans and corporations, while the cost of replacing revenue would fall more heavily on working and low-income families.

Why schools are at the center of the debate

For most Ohio communities, schools are the largest local public expense and property taxes are the primary local funding tool.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce says school funding is distributed through a formula that considers student needs, district costs, assessed property values and income. The formula is designed to equalize funding by sending more state money to districts with less capacity to raise revenue locally.

That structure means state cuts do not land evenly.

Wealthier districts may be able to ask local voters for more money, though even there higher property-tax bills can strain homeowners. Poorer and rural districts may have less property wealth to tax in the first place, making state aid more important.

If state funding falls and districts try to replace it locally, the result can be repeated levy campaigns, higher bills for homeowners, or cuts to staff, transportation, special education support, career programs, arts, music and other services.

Innovation Ohio’s analysis warns that schools would not be able to absorb cuts of that size without visible consequences. The group said districts could face larger class sizes, fewer teachers and support staff, fewer bus routes, reduced meal programs and less support for students with disabilities.

The Ramaswamy campaign has framed the issue differently, arguing that taxpayers are paying more while schools are not delivering better results. His property-tax plan says property taxes on homes and farmland have jumped nearly 45% since 2020, while local governments and schools received federal pandemic aid and academic outcomes declined.

That message is likely to resonate with homeowners who have seen sharp increases in tax bills after property reappraisals. But the policy question remains: if the state cuts income taxes and local property taxes at the same time, what fills the gap?

Property-tax relief, or property-tax pressure?

Ramaswamy’s tax pitch rests on two promises that are difficult to reconcile: cut the state income tax to zero and also cut property taxes.

If economic growth is large enough, the campaign’s argument is that Ohio can grow its way out of the revenue loss. If spending cuts are large enough, the state can reduce the need for replacement revenue. If neither happens at the scale required, the pressure moves elsewhere.

One option would be the sales tax. Innovation Ohio has argued that replacing the full income-tax loss through sales taxes would require a major increase, a shift that would generally hit lower-income households harder because they spend a larger share of their income on taxable goods.

Another option would be deeper cuts to state services. That could affect schools, Medicaid, higher education, prisons, local government support and services for seniors, veterans and people with disabilities.

A third option would be local property taxes. That is the path behind the 20% figure.

The Legislative Service Commission’s revenue estimate shows the scale of the income tax in the state budget. The state education department’s funding overview shows how deeply schools depend on state aid and local property taxes. Innovation Ohio’s analysis connects those two facts and argues that eliminating the income tax would eventually push costs onto local taxpayers.

Ramaswamy’s campaign would likely reject that conclusion, arguing that it assumes government spending should stay on its current path and does not account for future growth, efficiency or budget cuts.

But unless the campaign identifies specific cuts or replacement revenue, voters are left with competing claims: Ramaswamy’s promise that Ohio can eliminate income taxes and cut property taxes, and analysts’ warning that the plan could force schools and local governments to make up the difference.

The bottom line for Ohio homeowners

The 20% figure is not a property-tax increase Ramaswamy has endorsed. It is an estimate of what could be required if local taxpayers had to replace school funding lost under his income-tax repeal plan.

That distinction matters. So does the underlying budget math.

Ramaswamy is promising one of the most aggressive tax-cut agendas Ohio has seen in decades. His campaign says the plan would make the state more affordable and more competitive. Critics say it would hollow out the state budget, threaten schools and Medicaid, and shift costs onto homeowners and consumers.

For Ohio voters, the question is not whether lower taxes sound appealing. It is whether Ramaswamy can eliminate a tax that raises about $10 billion a year, reduce property taxes at the same time, and avoid forcing schools or local governments to come back to taxpayers for the money.

So far, his campaign has not shown how that equation balances.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Speaking in a June 25 interview on “The Guy Benson Show,” Husted said he shared the goal of shoring up Social Security but rejected the mechanism Moreno laid out with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

“We need to secure Social Security, need to protect it, we need to make it stronger,” Husted said, adding that any fix “will require a bipartisan solution.”

He drew the line at the tax change at the heart of the proposal. “But I’m not on board with the approach that they’ve outlined in terms of the process that they’re outlining with the tax increase, the targeted tax increase that they have,” Husted said. He called Moreno a friend and colleague, then added: “This rifle approach with the giant tax increases, not the way that I would, not the way I’d go about it.”

Moreno and Warren outlined their plan in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, June 23. The two say they are drafting legislation to remove the cap on wages subject to the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax. For 2026, that tax applies only to the first $184,500 of a worker’s earnings; income above that threshold is not taxed for Social Security. Workers and employers each pay 6.2%, while self-employed workers pay the full 12.4%.

“Instead of cutting benefits for the retirees who count on Social Security, we need to take bipartisan action to protect those benefits, reward work and restore fairness,” the senators wrote. “That starts with a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.” They argued the current structure is unfair, asking why a middle-class nurse should pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer. TiffinOhio.net has previously reported on the proposal.

The debate carries direct stakes for Ohio. Federal trustees this month projected the trust fund that pays retirement benefits will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, at which point scheduled benefits would drop to about 78% without congressional action. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that would cost the average Ohio beneficiary about $487 a month.

Independent analysts have said lifting the cap would meaningfully improve solvency but would not close the gap on its own. Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the Moreno-Warren idea a reasonable one that could erase roughly half the shortfall and delay insolvency by about 22 years, while cautioning it is not a complete fix. The conservative Tax Foundation, meanwhile, has argued that removing the cap would amount to one of the largest tax increases in decades and warned it would carry economic costs.

Husted’s opposition puts him at odds with Moreno at a moment when Social Security has become a flashpoint in Ohio politics. It also follows Husted’s own push, late last year, for a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget — a proposal that budget analysts warned could force deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as TiffinOhio.net previously reported.

Husted is running in the November 3 special election to keep the Senate seat he was appointed to after JD Vance became vice president. His opponent, former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, has made protecting Social Security a centerpiece of his campaign; Brown sponsored the 2024 Social Security Fairness Act, which restored full benefits for many public retirees. Moreno defeated Brown in the 2024 Senate race.

Moreno and Warren say their legislation is still being written and that details have not been released. Any change to Social Security would require approval by Congress.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Spencer Linke, 30, of the 100 block of West Madison Street, entered the pleas to 10 second-degree felonies before Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge Jon M. Ickes on Wednesday, June 24, according to court records. The court accepted the pleas, entered a finding of guilt and continued Linke’s bond.

The counts to which Linke pleaded guilty include charges of pandering obscenity involving a minor or impaired person and pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor or impaired person. He pleaded guilty to the 10 counts in exchange for the dismissal of 15 additional felony charges, according to court records.

Ickes scheduled sentencing for Monday, Aug. 17, at 1:30 p.m.

A Sandusky County grand jury indicted Linke on March 20 on 25 second-degree felonies — 14 counts of pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor or impaired person and 11 counts of pandering obscenity involving a minor or impaired person, court records show. The indictment alleged that between December 2024 and April 2025, Linke possessed or downloaded multiple videos depicting minors engaged in sexual activity, as TiffinOhio.net reported in April.

Linke pleaded not guilty on March 27 and was released on a $75,000 surety bond with no 10 percent option, posted through a bail bond company. A jury trial had been scheduled for June 30 before he changed his plea. He is represented by attorney Samuel Gold of Northwood.

Each second-degree felony count carries a maximum of 12 years in prison, according to court records. Under Ohio’s indefinite sentencing law, a judge selects a minimum term from a range of two to eight years, with a maximum equal to the minimum plus 50 percent; an eight-year minimum yields the 12-year maximum. When a defendant is sentenced on more than one felony, the counts may run concurrently or consecutively at the judge’s discretion.

A conviction under either statute also classifies Linke as a Tier II sex offender, requiring him to verify his home and work addresses every six months for 25 years, court records state.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That earlier funding, he said, is intended to help the agency keep track of fraud throughout the federal government and to oversee a substantial increase to the annual defense budget should Congress agree to provide the $1.5 trillion requested. 

“That would be one of those portfolios that we feel like we have nowhere near the number of (full-time employees) to be able to provide accountability for,” Vought said of the proposed defense budget. “And we are trying to invest in tools that would allow us to use technology to do OMB’s work better.”

The Office of Management and Budget, the agency’s official title, would then use the increase in its annual funding level to update a computer system, provide security and pay rent in two locations while it moves office space.

OMB asked Congress to approve $146.1 million in its annual spending bill, which is supposed to become law before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1. That would represent a 13.3% increase compared to its current funding level if both chambers agree to match the request. 

The $100 million that Republicans provided OMB in their “big, beautiful” law last year is in addition to the agency’s annual budget. 

Vought testified during a hearing before the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee the agency hopes to increase the number of full-time employees from about 500 to 675.

Whether other agencies will be able to bolster their funding levels and staffing will be up to their directors, Vought said. 

Proposed cuts across departments

The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request asked Congress to cut domestic spending by 10% and increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion, a $445 billion increase.

The proposal envisions cuts to spending across several departments, including Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor and State. 

Lawmakers from both political parties pressed Vought about staff reductions and funding cuts throughout the federal government, some of which were carried out by the U.S. Doge Service. 

New York Republican Rep. Nick LaLota asked why OMB allowed staffing at the World Trade Center Health Program to drop from 93 to 84 employees, despite it being approved for 120 people. 

“There were delays reported in claims of processing, treatment authorizations and enrollment appeals,” LaLota said. “For a program serving 9/11 first responders and survivors, what should have OMB’s early warning indications have been that those staffing levels were dropping to dangerously low levels that would impede their ability to deliver on this important mission?”

Vought testified OMB was unaware of the issues at the program. 

“OMB does not have this all-encompassing view of what is happening across the entire federal government,” he said. “We are a nerve center, I would agree with that, but we do not have the ability to know everything that is happening in the agencies.”

Screwworm and foreign aid

Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop asked Vought a series of questions about whether cuts to staff at the USDA had an impact on the New World screwworm, which had resurfaced in the United States after six decades without a case.  

“We don’t believe that this issue is under-resourced,” Vought said. “We believe that USDA has everything it needs to both create a long-term capability here and also find as many shots on goal to be able to deal with this in real time for farmers.”

Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan pressed Vought repeatedly during a tense exchange about whether cuts to foreign aid programs, including those at the U.S. Agency for International Development, led to deaths.

Vought said “there is nothing about those studies that has caused us to think differently about” the Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid spending.  

Pocan asked Vought whether he believes it’s morally or ethically wrong “to facilitate the death of children.”

Vought responded he doesn’t believe the Trump administration’s actions have led to that and that the United States provides “adequate foreign aid.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But on Tuesday, just days before the nation’s 250th anniversary, one thing was, for the most part, notably absent. The crowds. 

Early in the afternoon, few of the exhibits representing every state had lines to enter. Most were small rooms with a few tables showcasing artwork or cultural items, with a trickle of guests politely making their way through. Concessions areas were plenty and unfilled. 

Some attendees said the heat might have hurt attendance. The Washington, D.C. area saw temperatures in the high 80s to low 90s most of the day Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. 

It’s only going to get hotter. Temperatures through the rest of the week are expected to reach highs of up to 105 degrees, with a heat index of more than 110 degrees. 

‘Every state has something to contribute’

Pamela Lathrop, 56, of Florida, said more people will likely attend as it gets closer to the Fourth of July. 

“It’s getting busier as the day lets on, and so I hope everybody comes today, because I hear tomorrow’s gonna be really hot,” she said. “But I don’t really pay attention to crowd size. I’m just here enjoying myself, and I’m glad that D.C. put this on, and I think it’s a good thing to celebrate our 250 years.” 

Lathrop, who traveled from The Sunshine State for the 250th, added that she’s staying through the weekend to attend Independence Day celebrations and President Donald Trump’s speech on Saturday. What’s billed as an extraordinary fireworks display is scheduled to finish out the Fourth in the nation’s capital.

Despite the rising temperatures, more guests continued to arrive throughout the day, and the state exhibits started to fill up. 

Doug Woody, 66, of Fairfax, said the event felt different from a classic state fair, but that it was well put together. 

“I think this is really more to promote the U.S.A. and give the individual states a chance to show what they bring to the table,” he said. “Every state has something to contribute, you know? Maybe some states have put a little bit more time and energy into it than others, but overall, I mean, they’re here, so they’re representing, so that’s good.” 

Trump’s Freedom250

The Great American State Fair is part of Freedom250, the Trump administration’s marquee celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial. It is separate from America 250, the nonpartisan commission created by Congress tasked with organizing its own celebration of the anniversary. 

Not all states are staffing booths at the fair. A spokesperson for Washington state’s lieutenant governor’s office told States Newsroom the administration declined to join because of “the costs to the state associated with participating.”

According to news reports, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont did not contribute exhibits, though many are still represented by flags outside the individual booths. 

Pennsylvania did not initially take part but on June 27, Pennsylvania’s two U.S. senators, Dave McCormick and John Fetterman, announced that a coalition of Pennsylvania organizations would represent the state in its booth. 

Oregon resident Michael Lowe Mackenzie said he was surprised there weren’t more people in attendance Tuesday. He added that the celebration should not be partisan toward any one side or political figure, but rather “disconnected from all of that.” 

“I want to celebrate our nation’s history, warts and all, unobfuscated,” he said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nearly 13,000 of those acres are in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in Belmont and Guernsey counties. The commission is required to pick the “highest and best bid” per Ohio law. 

There was no discussion for most of the bids or nominations. Commission Chair Theresa White did not take questions from the media after the meeting. 

These bids in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area were approved for fracking during Monday’s meeting: 

• Oklahoma-based Gulfport Appalachia, LLC had the winning bid for 4,360 acres for $76,306,755 ($17,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Oklahoma-based Ascent Resources – Utica, LLC had the winning bid for 366.495 acres for $4,583,752.97 ($12,507/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 5.5% of production. 

• Texas-based Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 3846.934 acres for $61,577,872.54 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 2792.67745 acres for $44,702,387.94 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 849.881 acres for $13,604,045.17 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Grenadier Energy III, LLC had the winning bid for 746.85 acres for $11,954,827.95 ($16,007/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production.

Fracking is the process of injecting liquid into the ground at a high pressure to extract oil or gas.

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

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

Bids for about 1,840 acres in Jockey Hollow Wildlife Area in Harrison County were approved for fracking during Monday’s meeting: 

• Gulfport Appalachia, LLC had the winning bid for 382.810 acres for $6,699,175 ($17,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

• Ascent Resources had the winning bid for 1,460.559 acres for  $18,267,211.41 ($12,507/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 5.5% of production.

West Virginia-based Infinity Natural Resources was awarded the bid to frack 513 acres in Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County for $3,848,325 ($7,500/acre). There is an additional financial incentive of 7.5% of production. 

Texas-based EOG Resources Incorporated was awarded the bid to frack 6.8 acres at Noble Correctional Institution in Noble County. 

Gulfport Appalachia, LLC was approved to frack four bids, EOG Resources was approved to frack seven bids, Ascent Resources was approved to frack four bids, and Grenadier Energy III was approved to frack four bids. 

Each lease agreement includes a 12.5% royalty paid to the state based on production of oil and gas at that site, per state law, with an additional financial incentive paid by the winning bidder to the state, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. 

The lease bonuses for this round of nominations totals more than $241.2 million, according to ODNR. 

All but one bid was approved during Monday’s meeting. About six acres in Tuscarawas County along State Route 800 was the only bid that was not approved because the nominator withdrew the bid, so no valid bids were submitted, according to ODNR. 

The bidders now go through the regulatory and permitting process through the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, as required by law. 

Four different bid selections totaling more than 8,360 acres of land in Egypt Valley were denied to be frack — 5,439 acres, 1,285 acres, 777 acres, and 863 acres. 

“Those nominations included parcels that have already been bid out,” said ODNR spokesperson Andy Chow.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law last week that would speed up the process to frack Ohio state parks and public lands. 

Ohio Senate Bill 219 was introduced by Ohio state Sen. Al Landis, R-Dover and it will give the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission 90 days to decide on a nomination to frack public land — half the amount of time they previously had.  

It will also require the commission to pick the “highest and best bid” within 60 days; currently there is no deadline. 

Advocates for protecting Ohio’s public lands from fracking booed and shouted their disapproval during the meeting: 

“No fracking our parks.” 

“Sounds like a rubber-stamping broken record to me.” 

“Hands off our land.” 

About a dozen people gathered outside the Ohio Department of Public Safety building before Monday’s meeting to protest fracking Ohio’s land. 

“Wake up, commissioners. We cannot give any more of our land to gas and oil,” said Judy Smucker, with Third Act Ohio.

“We care for the future of our children, and we will not give up. We have to follow the science, and unless someone like you, all of us cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” 

Randi Pokladnik lives about 20 minutes from Jockey Hollow and had a well pad less than a mile from her home during the fracking phase. 

“It was like living on an airport runway,” she said. “We couldn’t even talk to ourselves. My husband and I had to yell in the driveway when we were outside.” 

Terri Sabo lives outside the Salt Fork State Park. 

“Our lands are being destroyed by the oil and gas industry,” she said. “Our parks are being sold off to out-of-state companies from Texas, Oklahoma or West Virginia for the ‘best and highest bid,’ even if there is only one bid.” 

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.

Until Thursday, Temporary Protected Status gave about 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians nationwide  a shield from deportation and access to work permits.

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

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

The TPS program was created in 1990 to help people fleeing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other conditions that make it too dangerous to return to their home countries, with regular reviews meant to ensure those conditions still exist.

Haitians had been covered by the program since 2011 after the earthquake there, and Syrians had been since 2012.

But in a 6-3 ruling last week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that federal courts can not judge whether the Department of Homeland Security followed the correct legal process to end a country’s TPS designation, unless it violated the Constitution. It also allowed TPS terminations to take effect for Haiti and Syria.

Gov. Mike DeWine said in a statement following the ruling that changing Haitians’ immigration status “is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio.”

Haitian TPS holders in Ohio contribute $160 million to the economy and $39 million in taxes every year.

Community leaders and immigration lawyers also warn that rampant violence makes returning to Haiti extremely dangerous.

Armed gangs control an estimated 90% of Haiti’s capital city and drive violence, displacement, and hunger across the country, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization.

“All they’re trying to do is build a better life for their family and their children,” said Marc Fequière, founder of the Columbus-based Haitian Community Network.

“If you take these people, that many thousands, and you send them back, it’s a suicide mission.”

Work authorization and Ohio driver’s licenses for TPS holders are set to expire Wednesday, July 1.

Immigration lawyers who work with companies advise employers to address the ruling, including finding potential employment-based pathways to legal status, before workers lose their permits.

Here is what immigrant advocates in central Ohio advise for TPS holders and concerned community members after the ruling:

For TPS holders: Find reliable legal aid, prepare an exit plan, and know your rights

Attorneys who are licensed to practice law and regularly practice immigration law can help TPS holders explore other paths to legal status, said Stephanie Corcoran, the managing attorney for Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio’s immigration team, in a statement.

She emphasized that TPS holders should avoid people who simply fill out immigration paperwork.

TPS holders in Ohio can consult low-cost legal aid organizations like LASCO, nonprofit law firms like northwest Ohio-based Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, or community organizations like Columbus-based Community Refugee and Immigration Services for legal aid.

Community Refugee and Immigration Services does not provide legal assistance for court cases, but it can refer people to trusted immigration attorneys, staff attorney Jesse Vogel said.

TPS holders can also find licensed immigration lawyers in their area through the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s website.

Even when consulting a licensed immigration attorney, Vogel added that TPS holders should ask questions to clearly understand their options.

“I just encourage folks to understand the terms of the service so that they don’t get into something that is not what they’re after,” he said.

Fequière said TPS holders should create an exit plan in case they need to leave the country.

TPS holders should identify trusted community members who can manage any property they hold in the U.S., he said.

People who are deported in violation of immigration law do not automatically lose their property in the U.S., Fequière added.

Haitian Community Network is connecting TPS holders to financial advisers to help them manage their property, he said.

TPS holders should also plan for their children’s future if they cannot leave with them, he said.

Fifty thousand U.S. citizen children have at least one parent who is a Haitian TPS holder; many of them have never been to Haiti and do not speak Haitian Creole, Fequière said.

Advocates nationwide also urge people to know their rights during encounters with immigration enforcement officers, regardless of immigration status.

The American Civil Liberties Union provides printable “Know Your Rights” cards in English, French, Creole, Arabic, and several other languages.

For community members: Support local aid organizations and other political avenues for restoring TPS

Fequière advised TPS holders to take every precaution necessary to avoid breaking any laws.

When their driver’s licenses and work permits expire, that effort will become significantly more difficult, he said.

That’s why Fequière and other central Ohio organizations are preparing to help migrants with their daily errands, whether that’s driving to childcare or the grocery store.

He is also coordinating with community organizations to deliver basic necessities such as food and baby products.

Central Ohio organizations that serve the local Haitian community include religious groups like the African & Haitian Ministry of the Diocese of Columbus and Jewish Family Services, as well as housing advocacy groups like Rentful 614. Springfield-area organizations include Haitian Support Center, Haitian Community Alliance, and G92.

A bill that would extend Haiti’s TPS designation through 2029 passed the U.S. House and now sits in the U.S. Senate. The White House said President Donald Trump would veto the bill, though, meaning that it would likely need support from two-thirds of the House and Senate to pass.

Fequière encourages people to call their representatives and senators in support of the bill. The help from people around Ohio and across the country gives him hope, he added.

“Even in the harshest situations, we always find a way to come out of it … and we know that the community is not alone,” he said.

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

Pou li nouvèl sa a an kreyòl Ayisyen klike la a.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Urban Institute released data from the 2024-2025 Reproductive Health Experiences and Access survey, a study looking to determine the impact of the overturning of nationwide abortion legalization on reproductive healthcare.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade with the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning the decision of abortion legality to individual states.

“Understanding whether and how people are facing challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare in the context of these changes will be key to mitigating health inequities and ensuring people get the care they want and need,” researchers Dulce Gonzalez and Emily M. Johnson wrote.

In 2023, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion and other reproductive care with 57% approval.

Researchers found that, despite the constitutional amendment, 30% of Ohio residents participating in the survey “reported needing but not getting one or more types of care” between 2024 and 2025.

Reproductive healthcare noted in the study were services like pelvic exams, cervical cancer screenings, care for irregular or painful periods, birth control, fertility assistance, gender-affirming care, and menopause care.

“Factors like cost, insurance barriers, and difficulty securing an appointment can prevent people from accessing the care they want and need,” according to the institute analysis.

Of those Ohioans reporting a lack of needed care, 16% said they didn’t receive “preventive gynecologic care,” and 11% did not receive care for irregular or painful periods.

Another of the issues survey participants said they had trouble with was access to birth control, with 6% telling researchers they “delayed or had trouble getting the birth control method they wanted in the past year.”

The data from Ohio aligned with the Urban Institute’s national data, showing 16% of participants across the country lacking needed preventive gynecologic care, and 10% reporting a lack of menstrual period care.

Nationwide, 7% of survey-takers reported delays or struggles with access to birth control.

“Barriers to reproductive healthcare were not spread evenly across the population,” Gonzalez and Johnson wrote. “Young people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+ were more likely to report challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare.”

Individuals age 18 to 24 represented the biggest Ohio group to have delays or struggle obtaining birth control between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 9% of all Ohioans reporting access issues.

Members of the LGBTQIA+ community made up 12% of those having trouble getting birth control, according to researchers.

U.S. Census data showed that as of 2023, 2.4 million women were “of reproductive age” in Ohio.

Of those, 13.1% were low income, 27.2% were in minority groups, and 7.6% were uninsured, researchers noted.

While the study acknowledged Medicaid expansions in Ohio that provided health coverage to adults up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and pregnant women up to 205% of the level, it also pointed out a lack of expansion in state Medicaid coverage for family planning services.

Medicaid funding in Ohio can’t be used for abortion care.

Also mentioned as part of the research were ongoing court cases related to reproductive rights in Ohio.

Open cases in Ohio challenge the 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, telehealth regulations on medication abortion, and transfer agreements between hospitals and clinics who provide abortions.

Courts have put temporary blocks on enforcement of the 24-hour waiting period and telehealth abortion bans as lawsuits continue.

Ohio lawmakers are also trying to enact a second measure with a 24-hour waiting period for abortion in the current General Assembly.

With the legislature on break until after the November election, it’s unclear whether the measure will make it out before the term ends in December.

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 short term, that means electricity is more expensive, and those costs eventually show up on residential power bills, it shows.

Perhaps more important, though, the report says, policies that keep aging plants running blunt the economic signals meant to drive investment toward newer, more efficient power plants.

“Without change,” Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Bullock said, “we are operating the market with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake. Consumers should not be forced to subsidize inefficiency.”

Downward spiral

The report complicates coal’s reputation as a as a reliable backstop when energy demand is high. Instead, it depicts coal as power source from an earlier era caught in a vicious cycle.

As old plants age out, there’s less demand for coal. With that demand declining, mining operations lose the economies of scale that allowed them to produce and deliver coal cheaply. Remaining coal plants face higher input costs, and the cost of maintenance increases as they get older as well.

Meanwhile, the grid has modernized, and favors power sources that can respond rapidly to changing conditions. The report states, “decades-old coal units, which were designed for steady, inflexible operation, are poorly suited to these conditions.” Repeated cycling to meet that demand only “accelerates mechanical wear, raises maintenance costs, and reduces efficiency.”

Ohio has seven coal power plants, according to the utility tracker Cleanview. The youngest began operation in 1990. The oldest started running 1955.

The report points to three cost recovery tools that keep “uneconomic” plants running when there might be cheaper alternatives.

The first is controlled at the state level, providing financial support through fees and riders on customers’ bills.

This was the arrangement under Ohio House Bill 6 that subsidized the Ohio Valley Electric Cooperative coal plants. Lawmakers eliminated those riders with Ohio House Bill 15 last year.

The other tools are controlled by the 13-state grid operator PJM Interconnection. The first, known as an uplift payment, covers the gap if the current market price is less than what it costs to run a power plant. The second, is a reliability must run contract, which keeps a plant headed for retirement running until other power sources can come online to replace it.

Why it matters

While the report stressed there are legitimate reasons to use any one of those tools in the short term, over time, they distort the market.

Paying power plants to run when they otherwise wouldn’t be profitable keeps the market price for energy artificially low. But because those payments eventually land with consumers, it’s not like they’re seeing a benefit from that lower price point.

Instead, the report argues, they could be missing out on the longer-term benefit of the actual, higher price point attracting power plant operators to invest in new facilities.

Bullock drew an allusion to the steroid era in major league baseball.

“The old players are being allowed to juice their performance. And what that does is it displaces the younger players that might come in on the roster and rejuvenate the team,” he said.

Bullock said Ohio “got its affairs in order” by eliminating OVEC subsidies through H.B. 15, “but it belongs to a league with 12 other teams, and the commissioner of the league, in this case is PJM.”

Reactions and recommendations

For its part, PJM defended its use of uplift payments and reliability must run contracts. In a statement, spokesman Jeffrey Sheilds stressed “PJM needs to operate the fleet of resources that is currently available.”

“At times,” he went on, “that means that uplift occurs when resources are needed for reliability; we work to minimize the amount of uplift while accounting for the uncertainties we must manage to maintain reliability. “

Shields added that reliability must run agreements “are necessary to preserve system reliability for those local consumers until transmission can be built to safely retire those resources,” and that federal regulators have oversight on those agreements.

The grid operator isn’t favoring or disfavoring any source of power, Shields said, “when we need every megawatt of power generated to manage our supply/demand imbalance being driven by data center growth.”

The Citizens Utility Board report made several recommendations. There should be greater transparency about cost recovery, they said, including the amount paid, the reasons it was necessary, and the beneficiaries.

The group called for “clearer cost allocation principles” to determine who pays when economic support is needed, as well as greater scrutiny for prolonged use of those tools “to distinguish more clearly between temporary reliability interventions and sustained support for aging, under-performing assets.”

The group also reiterated a longstanding complaint about how long it takes to get new power plants up and running.

“Improving the speed and predictability of these processes would reduce the perceived need for short-term reliability support and enable more cost-effective solutions to emerge,” the report stated.

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.

Independence Day is more than a celebration, it is a way to remember what was declared in Philadelphia in 1776: that our government should not rest on the will of a king, a faction, or a distant power, but on the consent of the governed.

That idea was revolutionary then. It remains our responsibility now.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth reflecting not only on what the Founders rejected, but on what they tried to build.

They objected to arbitrary power, to laws imposed without meaningful representation, and to courts dependent on political authority rather than justice.

In the Declaration, they accused King George III of undermining colonial legislatures and making judges dependent on his will alone.

Those grievances were not historical footnotes. They were warnings.

The Founders understood that liberty requires more than inspiring words. It requires institutions, laws, checks and balances, and citizens willing to defend them.

Building all of those into our constitution is what the Founders did to protect our future against the past abuses they soundly rejected. 

Our system has never been perfect. The promise of equality and self-government announced in 1776 was denied to many Americans for far too long.

But the genius of the American experiment is that each generation has been called upon to make the country more faithful to its founding principles. In large measure, we as a nation have heeded those calls. 

That work continues today.

Here in Ohio, the institutions of self-government are not abstractions. They are made up of people in our own communities: local officials who administer elections, judges who apply the law, clerks who maintain public records, lawyers who help resolve disputes, jurors who weigh evidence, and citizens who participate in civic life.

From county boards of elections to local courthouses, from jurors to public servants, these institutions may not always make headlines, but they are the backbone of our republic.

Our republic depends on trust — not blind trust, but earned trust.

Citizens have every right to ask questions, demand transparency, challenge decisions through lawful means, and expect accountability from those who serve the public. But our republic cannot endure if every institution is presumed illegitimate simply because it produces an outcome we dislike.

As a former federal judge who served on both the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, I have seen this up close.

During my years on the bench, I saw firsthand how much our constitutional system depends on the steady, often quiet work of people who serve their communities.

Our republic is sustained not only by founding ideals or public speeches, but by citizens and public servants who take their responsibilities seriously: following the law, respecting established procedures, weighing evidence, correcting mistakes when they occur, and accepting lawful outcomes even when they are disappointing or politically inconvenient.

The rule of law is what separates self-government from raw power.

Courts do not exist to favor one party, one candidate, or one public official. Judges do not serve a political cause.

Election administrators do not serve a political cause. Public servants, judges, and local officials swear oaths not to personalities, but to constitutions, laws, and the people they serve.

They and the work they do deserve thanks and respect, not derision. 

This is especially important in moments of political tension. When our preferred candidate wins, it is easy to praise the system.

The real test comes when our side loses. Peaceful transitions of power, respect for lawful outcomes, and reliance on evidence rather than rumor are not partisan values. They are American values.

This is also why civic education matters and why I am a member of Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition.

The Coalition brings together a bipartisan group of retired federal district and circuit court judges appointed by presidents from both parties.

This bipartisan coalition is committed to the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the importance of an independent judiciary.

Through this work, Keep Our Republic helps citizens better understand the systems that protect self-government: how courts review evidence, how disputes are resolved, how elections are administered, and how constitutional safeguards preserve peaceful transitions of power.

It is our civic duty to help citizens understand how the process works, who runs it, and where lawful remedies exist when disputes arise.

In a healthy republic, disagreement is expected. But disagreement must be channeled through evidence, law, courts, elections, and constitutional order — not threats, rumors, or contempt for every institution that stands in the way of our preferred result.

On our nation’s 250th Independence Day, let us recommit ourselves to that work — here in Ohio, in our communities, and across the republic we have inherited and must keep.

Judge Kathleen M. O’Malley is formerly of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She is a member of Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lawmakers in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia passed laws between January and May of this year restricting access to voting, according to an analysis of publicly available data by the Brennan Center and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Champions of such laws say they protect election integrity and ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in elections.

“Safeguarding the electoral process to improve oversight and prevent unlawful influence has been a top priority for my administration since my first days in office,” said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis  in an April statement announcing his signature on a sweeping new elections bill.

“This legislation strengthens the security, transparency and reliability of Florida’s election system.”

But the new laws have alarmed voting rights advocates, who say they will disenfranchise eligible voters and add extra burdens for older people, people with disabilities and those, such as married women, whose last names don’t match their birth certificates due to a name change.

“In Mississippi, rural voters may have to drive hours roundtrip to reach the office where they can obtain official records,” said Sonya Williams Barnes, Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a March statement condemning a new state law  that beefs up citizen verification requirements for voters.

“For people living on fixed incomes, cost matters.”

Even some Republicans have noted that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. A yearlong review of Utah’s voter rolls completed in May found just 27 confirmed noncitizens out of more than 2 million registered voters.

“This demonstrates that there is not a widespread problem (with noncitizens voting), and that states and our county clerks, for the most part, do a very good job of making sure that our voter rolls are clean, and that only eligible voters are registering,” Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said at a news conference in May announcing the results, as reported by the Utah News Dispatch.

The new raft of laws only applies to state and local elections; voters who don’t provide proof of citizenship as outlined in the state laws are still able to vote in federal races. Federal law doesn’t require proof of citizenship to vote, though only U.S. citizens can legally cast a ballot.

Many of the new laws focus on the identification documents required to be able to vote. Florida, Mississippi,  South Dakota and Utah now require proof of citizenship before a person can register to vote in state and local elections. Some, such as Florida, New Hampshire and Utah, have narrowed the types of identifying documents that will be accepted.

Florida’s sweeping new elections law has been dubbed the Florida SAVE Act. It won’t go into effect until next year, but it’s similar to the federal SAVE Act backed by President Donald Trump. He’s currently trying to push Congress to approve it by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

Florida’s new law requires proof of U.S. citizenship for anyone registering to vote, and requires the state to cross-check registration applications against government databases. Much like the proposed federal SAVE America Act, Florida’s version stipulates that if someone’s name on their citizenship document is different from the name on their current ID, they must provide proof of a legal name change. Experts believe this will particularly burden married women and others who have changed their surnames.

Other states have granted federal authorities the right to check voter lists for people they  believe aren’t citizens.

Kentucky’s omnibus elections law, passed in April, includes a provision granting federal authorities the right to check voter lists for people they believe aren’t citizens. Mississippi’s law requires the state to check prospective voters against a federal citizenship database.

And some new laws that aren’t explicitly about election integrity have the potential to impact who votes in the midterms.

In Kansas, a new law that requires Kansans to use the bathroom of their biological sex at birth in government buildings also says Kansans must use the gender of their biological sex at birth on their driver’s licenses. This could invalidate one major type of accepted identification that Kansas voters must show to be able to cast a vote in person. It particularly affects transgender voters because it invalidates documents such as  birth certificates and drivers licenses that were previously issued to them.

Many of the states that have passed new voting laws, such as Kentucky and Utah, are being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for not providing voter registration data to the feds.

Republican officials in these states have resisted sharing state voter rolls, which include personal information like birth dates and Social Security numbers, without court order.

“Neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding American citizens,” Henderson, the Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, said in a post on X in February.

Many state Democratic leaders also have criticized the laws.

“We already have a system in place to verify people’s citizenship and it is working,” South Dakota Democratic Party Chair Shane Merrill said in a statement after the state’s new proof of citizenship law passed in March. “There have been no instances of noncitizens voting in our elections. Instead, this law creates a two-tiered system in our state, telling some South Dakotans that they aren’t good enough to vote.”

Some state voting laws are now facing legal challenges. In Florida, voting rights advocates filed a lawsuit in federal court against the state’s SAVE Act, hoping to block it before it goes into effect in 2027. The plaintiffs claim the new law throws up barriers to voting and will disenfranchise people who are otherwise eligible to vote.

In New Hampshire, a federal judge struck down a 2024 Republican-backed law that required hard proof of citizenship to register to vote; the state has just appealed the ruling with a few months to go before the September state primary.

Some states are still considering new voting restrictions. Next week, the North Carolina House is expected to vote on an election bill that passed from committee without unanimous Republican support. The legislation would require voter identification from military and overseas voters, among other restrictions.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

At issue is a “medically frail” designation that the states say is too narrow and will make it too difficult for ill and disabled people to remain on Medicaid.

They’re challenging the administration’s guidance on who can be exempt from the work requirements included in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed a year ago.

Medicaid is the publicly-funded health insurance for people with low incomes. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility to more adults under the Affordable Care Act — 40 states plus the District of Columbia — must require those adults to prove they’re working, going to school or serving their communities for at least 80 hours a month to receive Medicaid. Georgia, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, which have used federal waivers to expand their Medicaid programs, are also subject to the new work rules.

The new lawsuit specifically targets new federal guidance that narrows the definition of who can qualify as “medically frail,” a key exemption used to excuse Medicaid recipients from work requirements if they have serious disabilities or illnesses. The guidance came in the form of an interim final rule published this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The Democratic attorneys general and governors who are plaintiffs in the suit claim the feds surprised them with this new rule months after they’d already been working with CMS on how to implement the work requirements.

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, in a statement.

“Further, this Administration is once again attempting to sidestep Congress by unlawfully reinterpreting the law, and coercing the states to rush to implement their last-minute changes or face penalties,” he said.

To qualify as “medically frail” and therefore exempt from work requirements, the new guidance says, a Medicaid recipient must have a significant health condition and be significantly impaired in their ability to work. It’s a distinction the states say Congress did not make in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The states also claim the new guidance violates federal law by ignoring evidence that work requirements cause people to lose coverage due to red tape.

For example, Arkansas tried instituting work requirements for Medicaid recipients in 2018, during Trump’s first term. A federal judge halted the policy less than a year later, after 18,000 adults had lost coverage. Studies later found that Arkansas’ work requirements didn’t increase employment. A recent analysis from the Urban Institute projects that 3-7 million people could lose coverage because of the new work requirements.

Supporters of the new work rules say they are sufficiently flexible and that the category of who qualifies as “medically frail” remains broad.

“This rule helps Americans build skills and independence through work, education, job training, or community service, creating new opportunities for themselves and their families,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, director for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in a statement earlier this month announcing the new guidance.

The lawsuit says states have already invested significant resources into implementing the new work requirements based on the original law’s language and prior federal guidance. They’re staring down an August 31, 2026, deadline for notifying Medicaid recipients about changes to the “medically frail” designation, a timeline the states say is not workable. They face financial penalties for not meeting the deadline.

States are expected to put the new work requirements into place by January 1, 2027, though the feds could choose to grant them temporary extensions through 2028.

The lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Cases like that of Pacheco, who has applied for legal status through three U.S. citizen children, are what the Supreme Court has to consider when it rules next year on the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. 

Justices are expected to hear the case as soon as October after the U.S. solicitor general requested the court to resolve conflicting rulings on the matter from appeals courts. 

The Trump administration’s policy requires detention without bond for anyone who crossed a border illegally, and has been used to pressure immigrants into voluntary departure to escape sometimes squalid conditions.

For now, plenty of U.S. district judges are questioning the idea that immigrants should be incarcerated indefinitely at the whim of the executive branch. 

Stateline reviewed every immigrant habeas petition case decided in a single day — June 16 — across the country, in order to sample judicial opinion. A habeas case is a request from an immigration prisoner for a judge to review the legality of his imprisonment and order a bond hearing or release. 

Of the cases that were decided that day, judges released detainees immediately or ordered bond hearings 142 times, and denied them only 36 times. Many of the judges, even Republican appointees, argued that unlimited detention was unconstitutional.

One of those judges was U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison, who heard Pacheco’s case.

After being picked up in California, Pacheco was held in Houston, and filed a habeas case in Texas.  Ellison ruled that it was a violation of Pacheco’s civil rights to detain him for months. He ordered Pacheco to be freed immediately.

“Given the severity of this ongoing unconstitutional deprivation of liberty, the Court concludes that immediate release from custody is required,” Ellison wrote. 

He wrote that he recognized that the Trump policy applied to Pacheco, and that it was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs Texas, but said that he was releasing the man anyway. 

“The Due Process clause does not permit the government to ‘detain any noncitizen, no matter how long they have actually lived in the United States, for any length of time, without any individualized justification [merely because] that person initially entered the country without lawful admission,’” Ellison wrote, partially quoting a 2003 Supreme Court ruling. 

Ellison is a Democratic appointee from the Bill Clinton administration, but judges from both parties, including Trump nominees, ordered bond hearings for immigrants and found the Trump policy unconstitutional. They included judges in states where appeals courts had already upheld the policy. 

Many judges are going beyond bond hearings and ordering release directly, as Ellison did. In some situations the judges are holding the legal cases open to make sure releases are made or bond hearings are fair. 

Few immigrants get bond hearings because of the policy, making court challenges their only recourse, said Xin Tian, an attorney representing an immigrant who was released June 16 in a California case. His client’s case was among those reviewed by Stateline.

“The individual’s only recourse for release is to seek a writ of habeas corpus,” Tian wrote in an email to Stateline. “Fortunately, federal judges uphold the Constitution and will grant such a writ, leading to direct release. Aside from this, there are virtually no other ways to obtain release.”

A Trump appointee in Texas, U.S. District Judge Jason K. Pulliam, ordered five releases in one day, calling the detentions “unlawful” and ordering immediate release during court proceedings. In each case, he wrote that the detainee “has no known criminal history, had been complying with the terms of a prior release, and there is no indication of flight risk or danger to the community.”  

He acknowledged in court papers that he made the rulings despite the fact that an appeals court ruling for the Fifth Circuit — affecting Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — had concluded mandatory detention was legal in those cases.

A President Joe Biden appointee in Utah, U.S. District Judge Ann Marie McIff Allen, was one of the rare judges to agree with the Trump administration’s policy, according to Stateline’s review. 

McIff Allen denied a petition for a bond hearing by a man from Venezuela who had arrived in Texas in 2024 to seek asylum. He had scheduled an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through an official mobile app, then settled in Florida. 

His immigration case was still pending when the Trump administration revoked his parole and arrested him in May. The man was “not entitled to immediate release or a bond hearing,” McIff Allen ruled, acknowledging that “some district courts have determined the issue differently.” 

The detention was legal under a Trump administration policy that interprets immigration law to mean all immigrants who arrived illegally can be treated as if they’re at the border “seeking admission” to the country. 

Stateline found only seven cases where judges favorably cited the administration’s policy of mandatory detention when denying a habeas case. Besides the ruling from a Biden appointee in Utah, there were six involving Trump judicial appointees: four in New York and one each in Puerto Rico and Texas. 

U.S. District Judge Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, a Trump appointee, denied release to Marcelo Jerez, a Dominican Republic native living in Puerto Rico with a U.S. citizen wife and sick 1-year-old child who required his help with monitoring and care.  

“The crux of this case has been the subject of myriad lawsuits throughout the nation and dutiful judges have reached divergent answers,” Arias-Marxuach wrote. 

But relatively few judges in the Stateline review considered the mandatory detention policy valid: Four of the other six cases for the day that did so, other than the Utah case, were denied by a single judge, Trump appointee Judge John L. Sinatra in New York’s Western District court.

Sinatra wrote in one of the cases, for a Venezuelan man who had been allowed into the country in 2024 on parole, that such people should be treated as if they were still at the border “seeking admission,” and face mandatory detention, and should not get the constitutional rights of someone already in the United States with legal status.

“How could it be otherwise? If he were not seeking admission he would have given up and departed already,” Sinatra wrote in his decision. 

David Wilson, a Minnesota immigration attorney who serves on an immigration court committee for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that criminal records among immigration detainees are a bone of contention among judges. There’s widespread disagreement over whether they should be detained indefinitely without bond, he said, even if a U.S. citizen in the same circumstance would be freed on bond in a criminal court. 

“This kind of lingering question is, how long is too long for people with criminal records? Some circuits have come along and said, ‘There is not too long because your criminal activity is what it is, you’re just stuck, if you want to end this stop fighting your case,’” Wilson 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.

HUD is currently finalizing a rule that would allow public housing authorities and property owners who participate in federal housing voucher programs to impose work requirements and time limits on work-ready adults, or working-age adults (younger than 62) who are not disabled.

The federal agency says members of the coalition support the idea of giving housing authorities and providers discretion to require work of up to 40 hours per week for nonelderly, nondisabled adults, supplementing those rules with job training and other supportive services.

HUD argues that current housing policies discourage work and self-sufficiency, and extend the amount of time that people remain on housing assistance. In a social media post, Public and Indian Housing Assistant Secretary Ben Hobbs said the new requirements could generate over $500 million in new resident income.

In 2023, 31% of the people receiving federal housing assistance were nonelderly, nondisabled adults. Of that group, 44% were working and 56% were not, according to a 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service.

More than a hundred public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined the Work & Dignity Coalition, according to HUD. The National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for more low-income housing, produced a list of 58 entities, including the public housing authorities in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Tampa.

Less than 1% of public housing authorities, known as Moving-to-Work agencies, are currently allowed to impose time limits or work requirements on people receiving housing assistance. HUD cites Champaign County, Illinois — which requires each able-bodied adult to work or be in school for at least 15 hours per week, and each household to generate 30 hours of work income at the minimum wage.

“I think that the important thing to note is that this is all about self-sufficiency, even if there might be some fear over what is required and how that would affect their housing,” said Peyton Pannell-Johnson, a spokesperson for the Housing Authority of Champaign County. “There is a team that needs to connect people to work, and then a team that follows up with each client.”

But housing advocates argue that the proposed requirements will make it more difficult for people to keep their housing assistance. The Congressional Research Service also warned in its 2025 report that imposing work requirements on federal aid recipients often trips up people who are working already.

“Work requirements can increase the burden for working recipients to prove that they remain eligible for benefits by requiring that they produce additional or more frequent information about their wages and hours,” the research agency stated. “There is an inherent tension between helping families meet their basic needs and promoting work in low-income assistance programs.”

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court is a win for Nevada and for the sovereign right of states to conduct their elections in the manner they see fit,” said Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford in a statement Monday after the court ruled against the Trump administration’s effort to disqualify ballots arriving after Election Day.

The decision rounds out a trio of wins in the past week for Democratic states and voting rights advocates. However, with much at stake in the upcoming midterm elections, voting rights advocates say they remain vigilant against any additional attempts by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to restrict access to the ballot box.

“While this ruling preserves our state’s election processes for now, we remain prepared to do everything we can alongside our partner organizations to ensure our election system in Nevada isn’t undermined because of Washington politicians,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah.

Trump on social media called the high court’s ruling “a tremendous loss” and pushed for the SAVE America Act, which targets the extremely rare phenomenon of noncitizen voting by requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The legislation has passed the House but remains stalled in the Senate where a handful of Republicans and all Democrats are opposed.

Mail ballots under attack

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrived within five business days. The court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that “nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day.”

In Nevada, ballots postmarked by Election Day must be counted if they are received by election officials within four business days. (If the postmark is missing or unclear, the ballot can be accepted up to three days after Election Day.) A dozen other states have broad grace periods similar to Mississippi’s and Nevada’s. Thirty states accept military and overseas ballots delivered after Election Day.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar praised the SCOTUS ruling and emphasized that mail ballots have been widely embraced.

“Rural voters, military and overseas voters and working voters of every political party rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard in a way that works for them,” said Aguilar in a statement. “In the June Primary election, 60% of voters used mail ballots – with our most rural counties using them at the highest rates.”

In Douglas County, 3 out of 4 people–77%–used a mail ballot for this year’s primary election. Statewide, nearly 86% of voters have used a mail ballot at least once since 2022.

The overwhelming majority of mail ballots in Nevada are received on or before Election Day, data shows. In 2024, less than 2% of ballots – almost 12,000 – in Clark and Washoe counties were received after Election Day.

Added Aguilar, “Nevada is a battleground state and every single eligible vote counts – those votes can make an impact in the closest of races.”

Local voting advocates praised the SCOTUS decision.

“A ballot postmarked by Election Day is a vote cast by Election Day, period,” said Shelbie Swartz, executive director for Institute for a Progressive Nevada. “Voting is a right, not a race against the postal service. Americans who do everything required of them to cast a ballot should not lose their voice because of delays they cannot control.”

“Mail delays are not hypothetical,” said Barbara Hartzell, executive director of Indigenous Voices of Nevada, in a similar statement. “They happen every day. That reality is especially familiar in rural and Tribal communities, where mail service often takes longer and voters may have few alternatives beyond driving long distances to an in-person polling location.”

In the lead up to the June 9 primary, the Nevada SOS office recommended voters use a ballot dropbox after June 2 in order to ensure the ballot arrived on time. An earlier arrival also provides additional time for curing time, should there be a problem with the ballot that the voter needs to address.

Trump executive order shot down

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling comes the week after two U.S. District Court judges ruled againstTrump executive orders that sought to restrict how states operate their elections.

Trump, through an executive order issued earlier this year, sought to create a nationalized list of eligible voters and direct the U.S. Postal Service to only send mail ballots to those on the list. States and elected officials that did not comply would be at risk of losing federal funds or criminal prosecution.

A judge ruled those provisions of the executive order unconstitutional and beyond the president’s authority.

Trump also, through an executive order issued in March 2025, sought to require proof of citizenship for voter registration and restrict mail ballot counting. That executive order had previously been put under a preliminary injunction that was made permanent last week.

Next battle: Overseas voters?

The Republican National Committee and Jim Marchant, the Republican challenging Aguilar for SOS, sued the State of Nevada on Friday over a state law addressing what they’ve dubbed “never-resident voters” — a no doubt minuscule number of U.S. citizens born abroad and who vote based on their parent or legal guardian’s last residence in the U.S.

According to Democracy Docket, which reported the Nevada suit, similar legal challenges have been filed in Nebraska, Colorado, Virginia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Michigan. The Michigan case was rejected by a court there in April.

Marchant is an ardent election denier who continues to peddle unfounded conspiracy theories. He believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

In 2022, Marchant ran for secretary of state against Aguilar and lost. While on the campaign trail that year, Marchant said that “the people of Nevada have not elected anybody since 2006. They’ve been installed by the deep state cabal.”

In May, ahead of the competitive Republican SOS primary, Marchant told News4 in Reno he believes 20,000 votes were “manufactured” to secure an Aguilar victory in 2022. When asked for proof of that claim, Marchant directed the reporter to “ask Tulsi Gabbard,” at the time the director of national intelligence, and President Trump.

Marchant did not respond to the Current’s request for comment Monday.

This story was originally produced by Nevada Current, 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.

Police said the crash was reported around 8:30 p.m. June 30 after a motorcycle traveling eastbound on Greely Street at a high rate of speed lost control and left the south side of the roadway.

According to police, the motorcycle struck a utility pole and guide wire, continued eastbound and then overturned, ejecting the rider.

Officers and Tiffin Fire/Rescue responded to the scene and found the rider with serious injuries. Police identified the rider as Reuben J. Guilkey II of Tiffin.

Guilkey was taken to Mercy Health — Tiffin Hospital before being flown by Life Flight to Mercy Health — St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo. Police said Wednesday that he remains hospitalized at St. Vincent Medical Center.

Investigators said there is no evidence suggesting any other vehicles were involved.

Anyone who witnessed the crash is asked to call the Tiffin Police Department at 419-447-2323.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The account comes from a single source — an anonymous Columbus operative the outlet says works exclusively with it, granted anonymity over fear of professional retaliation — and was published by The Rooster, a subscription Substack that covers state politics. TiffinOhio.net has not independently corroborated the operational claims, and the Ramaswamy campaign has not publicly responded. What follows is the source’s account as relayed by the outlet.

According to the report, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley and his staff have been shut out across four fronts. McColley’s senior aides have been barred from the campaign’s weekly strategy and scheduling calls, the source says, with spending decisions made by Ramaswamy’s inner circle. The source also alleges McColley has no role in messaging: policy initiatives and media rollouts are dictated from the top, the report says, leaving his staff to defend abrupt rhetorical shifts they were given no warning about.

On the campaign trail, the report claims, McColley and his aides are routinely left off the guest lists for major rallies and high-dollar donor dinners, sometimes learning of Ramaswamy’s stops through public press releases. The source characterizes McColley as too passive to force the issue and says he often stays home rather than appear independently.

The most concrete allegation concerns the campaign’s own branding. Months into the cycle, the report says, the operation still has not added McColley’s name to its yard signs or its official media kit — and McColley has pushed repeatedly behind the scenes to be included, to no effect. That claim is checkable against the campaign’s public materials; the others rest on the source’s word alone.

Ramaswamy, the controversial biotech entrepreneur and failed 2024 presidential candidate, won the Republican gubernatorial primary in May and is the party’s nominee to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine. He named McColley — the Senate President, who represents the 1st District covering Napoleon and surrounding northwest Ohio counties — as his running mate in early January, and DeWine endorsed the pairing that same week. On Nov. 3, the ticket faces Democrats Amy Acton, the former state health director, and David Pepper, a former Ohio Democratic Party chair.

One thread in the report lines up with earlier mainstream coverage. The source frames Ramaswamy’s outreach to Christian and evangelical voters — a high-turnout bloc in Ohio’s rural and suburban counties — as a glaring weakness. Independently, NBC News reported in January that Ramaswamy’s religion was a live issue at the McColley rollout in Cleveland, where speakers stressed McColley’s Christianity. NBC reported that Center for Christian Virtue president Aaron Baer told the crowd Ramaswamy had committed to picking a strong Christian as his No. 2; Ramaswamy, who would be the first Hindu governor in the United States, confirmed the conversations but described his commitment as something short of a promise.

The Rooster also says it broke the news of McColley’s selection in January, before the official announcement — a claim NBC News corroborated in crediting the outlet. The report adds that the pick came together only after Ramaswamy abandoned a near-final plan to choose former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, going so far, the outlet says, as to commission a Ramaswamy-Mandel logo before calling McColley less than a day before the rollout. NBC confirmed that Mandel emerged as a late contender; the logo and timeline details come from The Rooster.

Stripped of the unverified specifics, the report’s core assertion — a nominee who has boxed out his own running mate — would point to friction at the top of a Republican ticket that polling has shown to be competitive against Acton in a state Democrats have not won at the top of the ballot in 20 years.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump and his allies had spent several days in June savaging California over its slow vote counting and baselessly alleging its contests were fraudulent. But now the president divulged that his actions went beyond just public criticism.

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Trump recounted. 

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has focused the power of federal law enforcement — and even a top U.S. intelligence official  — on elections and discredited grievances over the president’s 2020 loss. 

In January, the FBI raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. FBI agents are probing the 2020 election in Milwaukee and subpoenas have gone out to officials in Arizona. The Department of Justice demanded to see Detroit-area ballots and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it took voting machines from Puerto Rico. The FBI searched the offices of an Ohio voting rights group in June.

Democrats, election experts, former federal prosecutors and others say the administration’s actions raise deep concerns about whether the White House will use groundless investigations to disrupt the November midterm elections. They say Trump’s recent acknowledgment that he personally directed a federal prosecutor to examine voting in California only underscores their fears.

“The notion that a president or anybody in the White House calls up the U.S. attorney’s office, certainly on our end, would have been considered, I think, completely inappropriate,” said Stephen McAllister, who served as the U.S. attorney in Kansas during the first Trump administration.

Shattering a norm

After Watergate, the Department of Justice built a reputation for independence from the White House. While presidents nominated DOJ leaders and set broad priorities for the department, they were expected to steer clear of specific investigations. The norm was tested during the first Trump term but didn’t entirely break. 

By contrast, the second term has shattered it, creating a clear path for the president to act on his false claims of stolen elections, according to individuals who have worked in the Justice Department and critics of the Trump administration. Growing evidence, they say, points to Trump personally intervening in federal law enforcement action on elections — or top officials getting the message and acting accordingly.

“I think the focus and the direction is whatever the president wants, and I think this is wrong,” McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Kansas, said of the current Justice Department. 

“The DOJ, especially post-Watergate, there were a lot of things done to try to strengthen it as an institution that could stand up and protect, defend the rule of law,” he said. “And this administration has torn so much of it down.”

The California election shows how quickly the Justice Department can take action after Trump makes his views known.

California’s primary election was Tuesday, June 2, but election officials are allowed to take roughly a month to complete vote counting. The lengthy process is a product of the state’s large population, as well as its reliance on voting by mail. 

While politicians, including Democrats, have called on the state to speed up its count, the sometimes plodding process isn’t evidence of fraud.

Late the night after the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.

It isn’t clear which U.S. attorney received the call from Trump or when exactly he placed the call or if it actually occurred. California is divided into multiple federal judicial districts, each with their own top federal prosecutor. 

Asked about the call, the White House referred States Newsroom to Trump’s comments and the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to questions.

By the Friday morning after the election, First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway with the FBI. He also dispatched a prosecutor to observe vote counting.

In the days that followed, Essayli gave several interviews with conservative media, including an appearance on commentator Glenn Beck’s show where he predicted criminal cases. “I expect people will be charged,” he said.

After Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who frequently clashes with Trump, posted on social media that Trump had “just admitted it.”

“The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election,” the post said.

DOJ pursuing 30 lawsuits on voter rolls

Ahead of the midterms, Trump and other administration officials have shown a high level of interest in how elections are administered. 

Last week, the president refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement a nationwide requirement that voters show documents proving their citizenship. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict voting by mail, which a federal judge blocked last week.

The Justice Department has filed 30 lawsuits against states that have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers. 

The Department of Homeland Security also overhauled a powerful computer program into a system that can search voter rolls for possible noncitizen voters (a judge recently halted use of the reconfigured system).

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement when asked about Trump’s approach to election-related investigations.

Jackson named several federal laws — including the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act — that she said give the Justice Department “full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

“This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” Jackson said, noting Trump’s support of the SAVE America Act.

Within the Justice Department, criminal investigations involving elections have traditionally been treated with particular sensitivity, McAllister said. 

Anything touching on elections needed to be coordinated with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., he said, adding that there was a lot of centralized control to prevent U.S. attorneys “from just poking around where they shouldn’t be.”

The Justice Department has previously published a manual on prosecuting election crimes on its website, but at some point it was removed without explanation. In June, a group of Democratic senators voiced concern its disappearance could presage attempts to interfere in the midterms. They noted that during Trump’s first term the manual was accompanied by a memo outlining the DOJ’s election non-interference policy.

Robert Weiner, who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, said the government used to enjoy what the legal community calls the presumption of regularity — the belief among judges that it was acting lawfully. He said courts should not extend that presumption now.

Trump may be trying to impair the ability of local election officials to conduct fair elections and “generally create chaos” that could serve as an excuse to seize voting machines and not accept legitimate election results, Weiner said.

“I am very worried,” said Weiner, who is now the director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. “I think we have to act on the assumption that bad things are going to happen. That’s not saying that they will. We have to be prepared and able to counter.”

US Senate Dems form task force

Some Democratic states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut and others — have passed new limits on federal election interference. At the federal level, Senate Democrats have formed an election protection task force and announced plans to train their staff members as election observers.

“The president of the United States is clearly laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the midterms and try to undermine confidence in any election results that he is not happy about,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told reporters.

Voting rights advocates fear the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County election facility in January offered a window into what it might look like for federal law enforcement to seize ballots after the November election.

While Trump has long promoted false allegations about voter fraud in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the raid shocked election experts in part because the FBI obtained a search warrant, meaning a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of federal crimes would be found at the election facility.

Fulton County officials vocally condemned the raid and successfully sued to unseal the affidavit used to support the warrant. The 19-page document included previously investigated claims about the 2020 elections and revealed the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who Trump last fall made a special government employee to look into the 2020 election. 

Trump appears to have taken a personal interest in the Fulton County raid. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was photographed at the scene and later told Congress she was present at Trump’s request. The New York Times reported that she put the president on the phone with FBI agents the next day.

Gabbard left her role in June, but Trump has indicated he wants the new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to also look into elections. The director of intelligence, a Cabinet-level position established in the wake of 9/11, is supposed to help lead the U.S. intelligence community and has no formal role in elections.

Pulte, who has no previous intelligence experience and previously led the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is known for antagonizing the president’s perceived opponents, including the former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James.

“He may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters in early June.

Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager at All Voting is Local Georgia, praised Fulton County officials for aggressively pushing back against the raid. 

She said that while she is concerned the search could create a chilling effect among voters and election workers, she has been heartened that it had also motivated some people to sign up to work the polls.

While no one has a crystal ball, Pyle said, she expressed hope that Fulton County’s rejection of federal interference will minimize future attempts.

“I think that’s optimistic,” Pyle said. “I think we prepare as best as we can and we just have to be ready to defend the results.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

DeWine explained that a case from Mississippi, pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, weighed heavily on that decision. If the court held that it’s illegal to accept valid ballots after Election Day, he worried, it could wreak havoc on Ohio’s 2026 election.

Instead, a 5-4 court determined Monday that Mississippi’s grace period — and by extension, other state’s grace periods — are perfectly valid.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, state law dictates when they must be received.”

Ohio impacts

The U.S. Supreme Court’s vindication of a state’s role in setting election deadlines will protect grace periods around the country.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states and four territories currently allow absentee ballots to arrive after Election Day.

And that figure was even higher just a year ago. In 2025, Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah all changed their laws to require absentee ballots arrive by Election Day.

Ohio did, too. Before the change by Ohio Republican lawmakers, the state used to allow absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day the four-day grace period to arrive.

But because Ohio lawmakers acted preemptively, voters in the Buckeye State will still have to get their ballots in by Election Day this November.

League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller voiced frustration following the court decision.

“Shame on the Ohio legislature for complying in advance with a ruling that didn’t even go their way,” she said in a statement.

This November will be the first general election without an absentee ballot grace period in Ohio. The change will likely impact several thousand voters.

According to an Ohio Capital Journal review, nearly 7,800 absentee ballots arrived after Election Day during the 2024 election.

The bill eliminating Ohio’s grace period, Ohio Senate Bill 293, got fast tracked through the legislature late last year.

The bill was introduced Oct. 14 and passed both chambers of the General Assembly just over a month later on Nov. 19. In December, it landed on DeWine’s desk.

That prompted an uncomfortable decision. DeWine had previously stated he considered the election integrity matter “settled,” when he signed a photo voter ID law in January 2023.

DeWine went on to say he did not expect “to see any further statutory changes to Ohio voting procedures while I am governor.”

But last December, on the final day he could act, DeWine signed S.B. 293.

In an email, DeWine’s spokesman, Dan Tierney defended the decision, given the information available at the time.

“Governor DeWine was required to act on S.B. 293 in December 2025.” Tierney said. “He could not wait to see what future decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States would be before determining whether to sign the bill. Ultimately, the chaos and voter disenfranchisement that could have occurred if today’s decision went another way were too much of a risk not to have clear standards.”

To Miller, though, the consequences of Ohio Republicans forcing the issue are impossible to ignore.

“For many seniors, voters with disabilities, rural Ohioans, and college students, voting by mail is a necessity — not a convenience,” Miller added.

“We congratulate voters in other states who can benefit from this (U.S. Supreme Court) ruling, while we continue helping Ohio voters overcome unnecessary barriers created by state lawmakers.”

The decision and the dissent

The Republican National Committee and Mississippi Republican Party asserted existing federal statutes set not just the deadline for casting ballots, but also the deadline for receiving them.

They claimed Mississippi’s five-day grace period violates federal law because the term “election” — set for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — encompasses both actions.

The plaintiffs point to advent of absentee voting during the U.S. Civil War. At that time, no state counted soldiers’ ballots if they arrived after Election Day.

The only explanation, they claimed, is that federal law didn’t allow for late ballots.

But Barrett batted that argument away.

There are several potential reasons for an Election Day deadline, she wrote. Perhaps states, like the plaintiffs, believed late ballots would fuel claims of fraud, or it may have simply been more efficient.

“Frankly,” Barrett added, “in this first experiment with absentee voting, extending the deadline might not have even occurred to them.”

And she noted states changed practice when absentee voting became popular again during World War I.

If plaintiffs’ arguments rely on drawing inference from states’ behavior, shouldn’t that example carry similar weight?

Barrett’s reasoning relied heavily on the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which establishes procedures for soldiers and expats to cast ballots in U.S. elections while abroad.

That statute makes repeated references to state deadlines set by state law for the receipt of ballots.

“If the election-day statutes established a nationwide ballot-receipt deadline,” Barrett wrote, “these references to state ballot-receipt deadlines would make little sense.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the ballots cast in a given election are like a single document expressing the will of the voters.

“What the election-day statutes demand is that this authoritative choice be made on election day,” Alito wrote.

Although he insisted he has no objection to absentee voting or early voting as a practice, Alito wrote, “Election Day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days. The election-day statutes require that federal elections occur on that date.”

Examples of states allowing late arriving ballots from soldiers abroad were simply “departure from this norm,” he wrote, and the majority opinion is blithely brushes aside “two centuries of American election practice.”

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.

She and her husband had planned the pregnancy, and excitedly told their family at 12 weeks, a landmark in pregnancy when she felt Charlotte was safely on her way.

At about the same time, Hanline had an anatomy scan, due to a backup in scheduling for ultrasounds.

Two hours after the anatomy scan, she was told by doctors that Charlotte had very little kidney tissue, and a 3% chance of survival.

“If she were to live, she would have to go on dialysis for her whole life, and then also have kidney transplants every 10 years or so,” Hanline was told.

Several more tests confirmed the issue, and also identified a severe heart defect. Hanline listened to kids and parents laughing at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital as she was told her daughter would never come.

“We sat in a room full of 15 specialists and they all told us that our daughter had a 0% chance of life, that she would either be stillborn or live seconds and then die,” she told the Capital Journal.

Despite having an inviable pregnancy confirmed by a host of tests and doctors, Hanline still couldn’t have the procedure to end the pregnancy right away. She was told she would need to wait another two weeks before labor could be induced.

“And then I would have to wait those two weeks, knowing my daughter was non-viable,” Hanline said. “I was feeling her every once in a while, and it was an awful, awful reminder that I was never going to meet her.”

Doctors said they feared being arrested and/or losing their licenses if they provided any other option. Confusion reigned, as a six-week abortion ban was not being enforced, but still sitting in court awaiting a final decision.

It was 2023, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case had ended nationwide legalized abortion the year before.

The issue had been sent back to individual states. Ohio voters had put the right to abortion care in the state constitution just one month earlier.

The Post-Dobbs landscape

When doctors told Hanline they wanted to wait to induce labor, she was 21 weeks and four days along. Because of the new amendment, abortions were legal until viability, generally considered to be 22 weeks gestation.

She and her husband called surrounding states after finding full clinics in Ohio, and found all other states were at capacity.

Luckily, she said, one of her physicians was able to find her a spot in the Cincinnati area, 45 minutes away, when Hanline was at 21 weeks and six days.

“In those 45 minutes, I saw no less than three billboards telling me I was going to hell, showing me pictures of babies, like, ‘why don’t you want to keep me,’” Hanline said.

“It was pretty awful, because I did want to keep my daughter so badly, and I would have given anything to not be having to say goodbye to her.”

It was also difficult when she went to D.C., and felt like she wasn’t heard by members of Congress.

Last year, she visited the office of Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. A staffer listened to her story, she said, then reiterated Husted’s publicly pro-life stance.

“It was really hard to understand how we differed on that, when I was just telling (the staffer) how badly I wanted to meet my daughter,” Hanline said.

Last week, she went along with the organization Free & Just to press for abortion care support.

Alongside Hanline was Ashley Ammerman, a Blacklick resident who was also happy to find out she was pregnant with her first child in 2015.

Genetic testing at 10 weeks showed the fetus was positive for Trisomy 18, a condition the vast majority of fetuses don’t survive.

“(The doctor) comes in the room with just the worst look on her face that I’ve ever seen,” Ammerman said of her appointment following the genetic testing. “She said there’s just no chance of viability at all.”

Specialists did other tests, not only confirming the diagnosis, but finding other issues as well.

“It was luck of the draw, is what they told me,” she said. “These are all completely standalone abnormalities that could happen.”

In order to terminate the pregnancy in Ohio at that time, Ammerman was given two options.

She could go to the hospital and have two doctors sign a document saying the procedure was necessary, which was required because the mother’s life was “not necessarily at risk,” or she could go to a women’s health clinic.

“If the two doctors were to sign off, it would be about $10,000, a night or two in the hospital, a lot of trauma,” Ammerman said.

“They said ‘Planned Parenthood’s about $800, they’re wonderful, you can go in and have the procedure.’”

She went with the latter. Similar to Hanline, with the help of one of her physicians, she was able to get in, and over the course of three days, received treatment and had the abortion.

Before all three of the appointments needed to get the abortion, protesters yelled at her and family members who came with her, she said.

“It was absolutely devastating, a wanted pregnancy, not something I ever thought I’d go through,” Ammerman said. “I was absolutely comfortable with my decision, but that doesn’t make it easier.”

Hanline, Ammerman, and individuals from other states, said they spoke with staffers for Ohio Republican U.S. Rep Warren Davidson, and Democratic U.S. Reps. Joyce Beatty and Emilia Sykes during their time in D.C.

They weren’t surprised by the responses from all involved, with Beatty and Sykes’ support for abortion care clear, and Davidson’s opposition just as plain.

Sykes is chair of a reproductive justice task force within the congressional Reproductive Freedom Caucus, and has sponsored and supported legislation for overall reproductive care, women’s health protection, contraception, IVF,  and fertility treatments.

“I will keep fighting to protect those rights and ensure every woman can make her own health decisions without politicians getting in the way,” Sykes said in a statement to the Capital Journal.

Beatty is a fellow member of the Reproductive Freedom Caucus. On June 24, the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Beatty stated on X that “abortion is healthcare, and everyone deserves the right to choose.”

Davidson also made a statement about the Dobbs anniversary on his official X page, saying the decision “correctly returned abortion policy to the states and the American people’s elected representatives.”

“The Constitution never created a right to abortion,” Davidson’s post continued. “Every life is a gift from God and deserves protection.”

Ohio’s protection

Immediately after Dobbs was released, then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost requested that a federal court reinstate the six-week abortion ban that had been tied up in court since 2019.

A primary problem for physicians at the time of the six-week ban, called the “Heartbeat Act” by supporters,” was the need for an “affirmative defense,” according to Dr. David Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Cleveland.

Hackney has since written a forthcoming book about the medical landscape for high-risk obstetrics after Dobbs.

In an affirmative defense, the physician must prove that an abortion was needed to preserve the health and life of the mother, rather than the burden of proof falling on the state.

“When a physician is considering abortion in high-risk circumstances, placing them under an affirmative defense causes confusion and hesitancy, which can in turn yield dangerous delays,” Hackney told the Capital Journal.

Abortion rights supporters represented by the ACLU sent the ban back to court after about 80 days.

The year after Roe v. Wade was struck down, 57% of Ohio voters approved the constitutional amendment that put reproductive rights like abortion until viability and miscarriage treatment into the state’s founding document.

To legal experts, it was exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court asked states to do under the decision.

“Dobbs was all about giving the power to the states, and what our state chose to do was pass this amendment,” said Jessie Hill, director of the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve University, who worked with the ACLU of Ohio in multiple reproductive rights cases.

With the constitutional amendment now in play, a Hamilton County Common Pleas Court permanently blocked the ban, citing the new development.

While the state appealed the decision for other reasons, Yost said he would not fight the six-week ban decision.

“(The amendment) changed everything from a legal standpoint,” Hill said.

Cases are still ongoing regarding a 24-hour waiting period (even as lawmakers consider another bill to create the same waiting period), the use of telehealth for medication abortions, and transfer agreements for local hospitals and abortion clinics.

While Ohio has made the law clear through its constitution, Hill said things could become tricky if the federal government passes any policy against abortion rights.

Federal law preempts state law as a general rule, something state and federal lawmakers have brought up with so-called “fetal personhood” bills.

The measures aim to give embryos and fetuses constitutional rights.

Such potential laws are seen as unpopular, but the threat still remains.

Under the Trump administration, the FDA has been directed to reconsider approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, a drug that was approved more than two decades ago.

Ohio’s Husted has been a part of congressional hearings on the “dangers” of mifepristone.

Cuts to Medicaid funding slashed resources for and caused closures of Planned Parenthood, even though clinics can’t use federal funds specifically for abortion care.

“Having a hostile government at the federal level means that our hands are kind of tied,” Hill said.

Hope on behalf of the future

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Hanline was in the early stages of pregnancy when she spoke with the staff at Husted’s office in 2025.

She’s now the mother of a four-month old son, and plans to continue the fight on his behalf, and on behalf of the rest of her family.

“If I can just make people stop and think and start to question their own beliefs because my experience challenges their preconceived ideas of what an abortion is, I need to just keep chipping away,” she said.

Ammerman now has a nine-year-old, and her daughter is one of the many reasons she will continue supporting reproductive healthcare.

They both believe legislators who are against abortion rights could stand to hear the stories of current and future mothers who wanted their pregnancies, but are still thankful abortion was possible.

“I got married, I wanted a kid, I had a house, I had the financial security, I was ready,” Ammerman said.

“So for them to hear a story like mine, I think unfortunately, it has more weight than a story where a teenager was irresponsible in their eyes, even though both stories are equally important and have the same outcome.”

The change that the two mothers hope for could come in part from the upcoming November election.

As Hill continues to track and litigate reproductive rights cases in Ohio, the final word on all of them could come from the Supreme Court of Ohio.

“Having justices who are going to be accountable to the will of the people who passed the amendment, and who said we want the government out of our healthcare decisions, is really important, as is having justices who are going to read the text and follow what it says,” Hill said.

This story has been edited to clarify Hanline’s pregnancy timeline, and Husted’s stance on abortion.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio and Massachusetts senators made an unlikely team when they co-authored an op-ed last Tuesday that proposed a fix to Social Security. 

An outside group praised the proposal as a vital first step, but called for additional action to be taken.

Warren D-Mass., is a leading progressive and one of the favorite targets of President Donald Trump’s racially tinged name calling. Moreno won office in 2024 partly on the power of Trump’s endorsement and his embrace of the MAGA movement.

But the two teamed up to advocate a solution to the looming insolvency of Social Security.

“We don’t agree on everything, but here’s one thing we do agree on: Congress must act now to save Social Security for generations of Americans to come,” the pair wrote in the New York Times. “Social Security is a core component of our nation’s promise — a covenant between the federal government and Americans who pay into it throughout their working years so they can retire with dignity.”

They explained that the retirement benefit for older Americans is again under threat.

“That promise is at risk of unraveling,” Moreno and Warren wrote. “For years, seniors in Ohio and Massachusetts have told us how concerned they are about the future of Social Security.”

They were referring to a report earlier this month by the Social Security Board of Trustees saying that Social Security will be insolvent by 2032 and Medicare — the health program for older Americans — will become so six months later.

If that happens, the average Ohio beneficiary will have to live on $487 less a month.

There are 2.2 million Social Security recipients in Ohio and their average benefit is just $1,900 a month, so insolvency would mean they would lose a quarter of an already-small income.

“That’s just six years away. Instead of cutting benefits for the retirees who count on Social Security, we need to take bipartisan action to protect those benefits, reward work and restore fairness,” Warren and Moreno wrote.

“That starts with a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.”

Social Security is funded by a 6.2% tax paid by employees that is matched by their employers. But it is only paid on the first $184,500 of payroll income.

That means the vast majority of workers pay Social Security tax on all of their incomes, but some wealthier Americans don’t — and the richest only pay on a tiny portion of their incomes.

Moreno and Warren said this is unfair.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” they asked. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

They added that removing the cap would make Social Security solvent for a generation.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said there’s a double hazard if elected leaders think only in terms of a single fix and a single generation. 

“Good for Sen. Warren and Sen. Moreno for saying we need to do something about this,” Goldwein said in an interview in which he called the senators’ proposal “a perfectly reasonable idea.”

“But saying that this is the whole solution, that’s wrong,” he said. “Politicians need to keep talking about this because time is running out.”

He called the Warren-Moreno proposal “raising the tax max” and called it “the most popular, most commonly discussed plan out there for raising revenue.”

And, Goldwein said, it would put a real dent in the solvency problem.

His group estimates that getting rid of the cap would close the solvency gap by 50% and delay insolvency by 22 years if benefit rules stay the same.

However, “it can’t be a full fix,” Goldwein said. “There’s not enough money there. As a starting point, I think it’s a given that any Social Security reform plan is going to need more revenue.”

Goldwein, who has worked on Social Security and related issues for the executive branch and for congressional committees, added, “Regardless of your ideological point of view, we’re out of time to do this on the benefits side alone. We have only six years to insolvency, and you just can’t get benefit savings fast enough.”

So he advocates coming up with a package of reforms that will make Social Security solvent for the next 50 to 75 years.

“We don’t want to have a kick-the-can thing that’s going to make us feel really good but bring us right back here in a couple decades,” Goldwein said. 

That approach is especially hazardous because when lawmakers face the next crisis, the most palatable options will be off the table, he said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has already proposed several reforms and Goldwein said many more are in the pipeline.

One would be to rein in spending by capping the amount a couple can collect from Social Security at $100,000 a year.

Another would reduce the rate of cost-of-living increases for the richest recipients so that their dollar-amounts match those of the next-lowest income group.

Goldwein proposes another reform that would replace Moreno and Warren’s “raising the tax max” proposal.

He would have employers pay tax on all compensation.

“This would raise a similar amount of money to the tax max, but it does it in a much more efficient way,” Goldwein said. It would be a tax on all wages above the $184,500 cap, “but it also includes all fringe benefits. Right now employers are getting tax breaks for paying people in the form of health care or stock options or transportation benefits.” 

When insolvency loomed in 1981, Congress appointed a commission that proposed a package of reforms, many of which were amended into the Social Security Act two years later.

Goldwein said a similar commission could be appointed now and work along a tighter timeline because many viable proposals are already out there. 

As for Medicare, Goldwein said Congress would be wise to approach that piecemeal.

“With Social Security, you really want to solve this all at once,” he said. “With Medicare, you can work on it incrementally because so much of Medicare is how do we get the payment structure right. How do we direct people to the best kind of care at the lowest cost. We can do that little by little as we learn more.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

We are mired in conspiracy theories, artificial intelligence, and the peddling of misinformation by some of this country’s top leaders.

As a result, obtaining and sharing clear, factual, and accessible information from trusted messengers has never been more important. 

This need for clarity from official sources is why the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office’s decision to post information that could easily mislead voters about what identification is needed to cast their ballots on Election Day is so concerning. 

The posters depicted large images of documents like a certificate of naturalization, birth certificate, and certificate of citizenship, as ‘acceptable proof of citizenship,’ which are only required at a polling place if a voter is challenged on the grounds that they are not a citizen and the voter wants to vote a regular ballot instead of a provisional ballot.

The poster placed the actual forms of identification which all voters must show when voting in the fine print at the bottom of the document — potentially confusing voters on whether they could or could not vote on election day.

It is bad enough that voters are forced to navigate increasingly muddied information online, but to be served information from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that could misinform and dissuade voters from participating in elections is deeply unsettling and disrespectful to Ohioans. 

These flyers are clearly confusing and seem designed to score points with the federal government.

The impacts are also clear — the inclusion of documents that many Ohioans don’t have easy access to could keep some voters from voting at all, especially voters of color, senior or youth voters, or naturalized citizens. 

Election officials across the state are already tasked with implementing legislative changes, with limited resources to educate voters.

Local election administrators have enough to do without having to fact-check the Secretary of State’s office’s materials.

To see the office use its power to require hanging this confusing flyer undermines the work of those officials as they try to ensure that elections are run lawfully and that their communities can exercise their constitutional freedom to vote — something that seems further and further away with every legislative session. 

The citizens of our state deserve clear and accurate information to weigh in on the policies and people who will make decisions that impact their daily lives.

We believe these posters belong in the recycling bin and should not be posted in the 2026 general elections.

Instead, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose should require signage that clearly displays the forms of identification that are accepted — an Ohio driver’s license or identification card, a United States passport or passport card, or a U.S. military ID card, U.S. military dependent ID card, Ohio National Guard ID card, or U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs ID card. 

In a world filled with misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies from so many of our leaders, we must require the utmost commitment to the truth from the Ohio Secretary of State and other trusted messengers whose voices must remain trusted, nonpartisan, and rooted in the values of democracy.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A list obtained by Stateline of canceled grants includes those awarded to universities, community organizations, city and state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates in states such as Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Texas and West Virginia. The grants were canceled two years before their expiration dates because the programs did not align with agency priorities, according to one of the grantees who received a termination notice.

The program is part of the agency’s Office of Population Affairs and is a “national, evidence-based grant program that funds diverse organizations working to prevent teen pregnancy across the United States,” according to the HHS website. The agency provides funding to programs that develop and evaluate innovative approaches to prevent teen pregnancy as well as to prevent sexually transmitted infections among adolescents, and to promote positive behaviors.

Ayana Bradshaw, president and CEO of AccessMatters in Philadelphia, told Stateline her organization received the termination notice of its $1.2 million grant on Friday, and it was effective the same day. Bradshaw said the letter cited a misalignment with agency priorities, specifically that the program “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

AccessMatters’ Adolescent Health Initiative is entirely funded by the federal grant and provides free sexual and reproductive health programs to more than 1,100 teens between the ages of 13 and 19. The program provides information, education and referrals for healthcare as needed.

“This is devastating for the youth that we serve,” Bradshaw said. “It also impacts us as an organization, our staff, and it impacts the partners that we had who supported us in implementing this program.”

During the first administration of President Donald Trump in 2017, HHS took the same action, ending grants for more than 80 recipients two years before they were set to expire. Legal advocacy organization Democracy Forward sued the administration on behalf of several grantees and won a permanent injunction after courts ruled the action violated agency regulations.

The Trump administration identified the teen pregnancy program as one to cut in its 2025 budget request, and it was included in the final 2026 appropriations bill. The language accompanying that bill said grants for sexual risk avoidance must use medically accurate information and teach youth about risky behaviors “without normalizing teen sexual activity.”  

Teen birth rates have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — about 72% since 2007. Experts attribute that decline to fewer teens deciding to have sex earlier, sex education and better access to contraception, especially for girls. 

The agency also released two new grant programs this week, one of which is titled “Replicating Effective Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs,” with $63.4 million available to be awarded. The other is “Rigorous Impact Evaluation of Programs to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and Achieve Optimal Health,” with $8.3 million available.

Both opportunities tell applicants that they must pass an alignment review process to ensure they meet agency priorities. That language mimics Trump administration language in the 2027 Notice of Funding Opportunity for Title X grants, which a national family planning organization filed a lawsuit over last week, arguing that it violates Congress’ intentions and administrative procedure.

Tara Mancini, director of public policy at reproductive health advocacy organization Power to Decide, said she expects the administration’s decision to cancel the grants to be challenged again in court.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Her husband had choked her, Robinson said. Shoved her. Forced unwanted touch. Controlled the finances.

The woman and the man married in the United States after being in a relationship for many years. Robinson’s client submitted the marriage certificate and letters from a long-time friend and the man’s daughter, vouching that the marriage had been in good faith, meaning they genuinely wanted to be together.

As a domestic violence survivor, she’d applied for legal status. But federal officials announced policy changes late last year.

Under the federal Violence Against Women Act, known as VAWA, abused foreign national spouses of United States citizens or green card holders, or abused foreign national parents, can file a self-petition for a lawful immigration status if they are experiencing abuse. The 1994 law, was sponsored by then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden and enacted during the Clinton administration. It has been renewed several times, most recently in 2022 during Biden’s presidency.

But the Trump administration announced new narrowed guidelines in December, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been increasingly scrutinizing domestic violence survivors’ applications for legal status, making more stringent asks of attorneys and their clients, such as more concrete proof of cohabitation during a “good faith” marriage.

Despite photos and declarations, including four single-spaced pages of testimony from a witness who had known Robinson’s client and the alleged abuser for three decades, the woman’s application to live in the United States with legal documentation was denied. Immigration officials said the evidence wasn’t enough to prove the marriage was in “good faith,” said Robinson, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, a legal resource center for immigrants. 

The agency says the new requirements aim to prevent fraud, saying that misuse of the system can cause significant delays in processing self-petition requests.

But the changes, which include narrowing the definitions of “battery” and “cruelty” and requiring that petitioners prove they resided with their abusers, are adding barriers for survivors who often are in tenuous situations, advocates say. Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, many immigrants experiencing abuse may be in fear of filing paperwork, especially if perpetrators use deportation as a means of threatening their victims.

“VAWA was designed to create protections for survivors of intimate partner violence and domestic violence,” Robinson said. “These protections are essentially falling apart.”

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says the revisions aim to prevent fraud, saying that misuse of the system can cause significant delays in processing self-petition requests. There have been recent cases of attorneys whose clients have accused them of filing fraudulent claims.

The immigration agency also cited a significant increase in filings by men and parents between 2020 and 2024. Over the years, Congress broadened the language of the law to explicitly allow protection for male victims such as those in same-sex couples.

“By clarifying the policies and requirements for aliens filing VAWA self-petitions, we are better equipped to protect program integrity, combat fraud, and manage the VAWA program as intended by Congress,” the agency wrote in its December announcement, calling the increases in male and parental applications “alarming.”

Cristina Velez, legal and policy director at ASISTA, which provides consultation and training for immigration attorneys across the country, said preserving the integrity of the program to make sure it helps legitimate survivors is critical. But she said an increase in male applications doesn’t necessarily indicate fraud. She had male clients in her private practice who had been abused by U.S. citizen sponsors, including same-sex spouses, she said.

“The government has the capability of identifying fraud through means other than narrowing the definition of battery and extreme cruelty,” she said. “I would encourage them to take those other kinds of steps.”

Velez added that any change in application patterns should prompt the government to learn more by asking questions such as, “What is this change based on? Is it that more people are learning about this avenue of relief, or is it something else?”

Officials should focus their accountability on lawyers and abusers who take advantage of immigrants, said Cecelia Friedman Levin, director of the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors.

“Many of these cases are now adjudicated with a fraud-focused lens, which to my mind can create a chilling effect of survivors coming forward to access these protections,” she said. “A few bad actors are not an excuse to punish survivors for whom the program was designed to rely on.”

The updates to the Violence Against Women Act’s policy manual requires that those seeking self-petitions prove that they resided with the abuser — who has to be a U.S. citizen or a permanent legal resident — while they were married, and that the abuse occurred during that period. This means if a person experienced abuse before marriage, and fled during marriage if their spouse showed signs of abusing them again, the prior abuse wouldn’t qualify under the policy update. They also should provide proof of their abuser’s citizenship or permanent legal status. USCIS says it will “attempt” to verify that status or, if it can’t, may consider  information offered by petitioners. 

In addition, they must provide proof that an abuser’s prior marriage had been legally terminated.

“The intent behind it is to prove the validity of the marriage. But that should not be a burden on the applicant to prove that the person terminated their marriages before they married them,” said Malou Chávez, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

Chavez said while it may not be common, there have been situations where a survivor believed the person she married had gotten a divorce, and actually hadn’t.

“Our clients have had to leave in the middle of the night, barefoot with three things that they were able to grab, as a result of the abuse,” said Laura dePaz Cabrera, an immigration lawyer in Gainesville, Florida.

It can take domestic violence victims several attempts to leave the relationship, and abusers may be controlling a person’s finances or have bills only under their own name, making proof of residence harder. Research shows victims are at their most vulnerable to violence when trying to leave.

“Survivors of abuse, they don’t typically have a spouse who’s going to join them on a credit card or add them to their cell phone bill or take a lot of pictures or have traditional evidence,” said Cabrera. “It puts this specific population at an almost insurmountable disadvantage, in many cases, of having to prove cohabitation within documents that are completely unable to exist — and that maybe intentionally don’t exist due to the abuse.”

In the case of Robinson’s client, “Her spouse never put her name on the lease. Almost nothing was in her name,” he said.

The guidelines also narrow the definition of “battery or extreme cruelty,” bypassing the legal definition of battery, which refers to non-consensual touch. Instead, it adheres to a dictionary definition: “to strike with repeated blows of an instrument or weapon, or with frequent missiles; to beat continuously and violently so as to bruise or shatter.” 

Its definition of “extreme cruelty” is clarified to denote an act “to the utmost possible degree” that “endangers the life or health of the other.”

“To say that in order to qualify for this immigration benefit, the abuse needs to have been unusual in some way — it really flies in the face of what is known about domestic violence, and what VAWA was meant to address,” Velez said.

Evidence guidelines are also more stringent under the changes. For example, for photographs of physical abuse, the self-petitioner now needs to identify who took the photographs, when and where. 

Last month, a U.S. court ruled in favor of a class action lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind existing protections against deportation for survivors of abuse and sex and labor trafficking.

“So many of my clients have been told, by their abusive partners, ‘If you call the police, you’ll be deported, and the children will stay with me,’” said Jane Stoever, director of the University of California, Irvine School of Law’s Domestic Violence Clinic.

Stoever said she’d been able to get a deportation case dismissed for one survivor client, but the client still has to meet with deportation officers every six months. She had been stabbed and had broken bones at the hands of her child’s father. She still fears deportation, as it was a tactic he would use to threaten her.

This month, members of Congress in the Democratic Women’s Caucus wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, saying the policy manual’s changes have “weakened longstanding protections” for immigrant survivors.

“Without protections in place for survivors to report violence coupled with stories about enforcement actions at courthouses and other sensitive locations,” the members wrote, “immigrant survivors are left with no safe avenues to report their abuse.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio is home to more than 200 data centers, making it about the fifth-highest state in the country by count. Virginia remains the national leader, with Northern Virginia widely described as the world’s largest data center market. But the gap that matters most is in what has not been built yet. A University of Virginia analysis projects Ohio will add 77 data centers by 2030 — roughly the span of the next governor’s four-year term. A single proposed campus near Piketon, in Pike County, has been pitched as a potentially historic project: the U.S. Department of Energy says SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, plans to build what it described as the world’s largest artificial intelligence data center on leased land at the Portsmouth Site, and WOUB reported the Pike County project could become one of the largest data center campuses in the nation.

What a governor actually controls

A governor does not personally approve data centers. But the office controls nearly every state body that decides where they go, what they cost, and how they are powered. As governor, Ramaswamy would appoint the nine-member board of JobsOhio, the state’s private development arm that hands developers their incentive packages; the Ohio Power Siting Board, which signs off on where large energy projects and their power sources are built; the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which sets the rules utilities operate under; and the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, which grants the industry’s tax exemptions. As one analysis of his portfolio and the agencies he would oversee put it, the boards that subsidize, site and regulate the industry would all report to him.

The siting process already tilts toward approval. Under House Bill 15, the energy law enacted in 2025, certain power-project permit applications are automatically approved after 60 days unless the Power Siting Board affirmatively denies them, according to Policy Matters Ohio. Since June 2025, the board has approved more than 2,000 megawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas generation — power plants built to serve a single large customer — including, in October 2025, a 73-megawatt fuel cell facility within 800 feet of a Franklin County neighborhood.

What Ramaswamy has promised

Ramaswamy has not been subtle about his intentions. “It takes two years to build an AI data center or Bitcoin mining firm or whatever — all of which I want in the state, by the way,” he told a Republican dinner in Wintersville in March 2025, according to The Times Leader. On his verified X account that same month, he wrote: “We’re seeing an AI data center boom (which is good), right at the time when we face supply constraints on baseload power generation,” adding, “I’ll unshackle energy production in Ohio, from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, without apology.” His campaign website promises to “streamline energy project permits and remove unnecessary regulations so projects get built on time and on budget.”

In May, Ramaswamy keynoted Utah’s Operation Gigawatt Summit, an industry event built around accelerating energy production, infrastructure and deployment. The summit website says it focused on energy production at scale, grid modernization, infrastructure for growing demands, and policy that enables building. After winning the May 5 primary, he pledged that Ohioans would “wake up to lower utility bills because the state is producing more energy” under his administration.

The bottleneck — and the bill

The promise of lower bills runs into a problem Ramaswamy has not resolved publicly: how new electricity generation would offset the enormous demand the facilities he wants would create. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel says a single hyperscale data center can draw as much electricity as 100,000 homes. New baseload generation, whether gas or nuclear, takes years to bring online.

The grid bottleneck is real, but the status has changed. AEP Ohio had paused new data center service commitments while regulators considered a data center-specific tariff. In July 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered AEP Ohio to file new tariffs and lift its moratorium on connecting new data centers. AEP later said data center customers had previously estimated needing more than 30,000 megawatts of electricity; after the tariff process began, 13,022.7 megawatts paid for formal studies and 5,642 megawatts signed binding contracts under the tariff, in addition to 12,219 megawatts of contracts signed before the tariff went into effect.

Meanwhile, the costs are landing on households and the state budget. Ohio’s data center industry collected an estimated $2.5 billion in state and local tax breaks between 2017 and 2024, and the state’s data center sales tax exemption alone cost about $1.6 billion in 2025 — roughly 11 times an earlier Department of Taxation estimate, according to figures reported by Signal Ohio. The Public Utilities Commission has since approved an AEP tariff requiring large new data centers to pay for at least 85 percent of the electricity capacity they reserve for 12 years, an effort AEP says is designed to keep infrastructure costs off other customers. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel notes that data centers create relatively few permanent jobs once they are built, and a Democratic congressman has introduced federal legislation aimed at making the facilities pay their own way.

Industry and business groups counter that the economic return is real. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation credits data centers with supporting about 95,217 jobs and contributing $11.8 billion to Ohio’s gross domestic product in 2024. At a recent legislative hearing on the industry, company representatives told lawmakers they would pay for the grid upgrades their operations require.

What could slow it down

The buildout is not guaranteed, and the resistance has come from a notable place: the rural, conservative parts of the state that make up much of Ramaswamy’s base. The Ohio Newsroom reported earlier this year that around 18 municipalities were considering or had already enacted moratoriums that pause construction and approval of data centers. Tiffin’s city council approved a 12-month moratorium of its own. An all-volunteer group organized as Ohio Residents for Responsible Development cleared the Ohio Ballot Board in April and gathered signatures for a constitutional amendment to ban data centers drawing more than 25 megawatts. The effort came up short of the signatures needed for this November’s ballot and is now targeting 2027.

Outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine has also used the office as a brake, vetoing a 2025 attempt to repeal the sales tax exemption and later pausing new exemptions after the cost overruns came to light. The Associated Press reported that DeWine’s office cited the rising cost of the tax break and the Legislature’s review of the industry in declaring a pause on granting the incentive to new applicants. Whoever succeeds him inherits that same veto pen.

The contrast on the ballot

Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, former state health director Amy Acton, has staked out the opposite approach. Her “ActOn Lowering Costs” agenda calls for lowering household costs, and the Statehouse News Bureau reported that Acton wants more guardrails for data centers, including requiring them to cover added utility and environmental costs, using union labor, and restoring energy-efficiency programs rolled back under House Bill 6.

Ramaswamy’s enthusiasm has also drawn scrutiny over his finances. A May 2026 report from the progressive group Innovation Ohio, titled Vivek Ramaswamy’s Data Center Portfolio: Divided Loyalties, concluded that his personal holdings span chip makers, cloud and data center operators, industrial real estate trusts, and cryptocurrency — every tier of the industry he would regulate. “Ramaswamy is far too entangled with this industry to make sure it does right by our communities,” Innovation Ohio President Michael McGovern said in releasing the report. Ramaswamy has framed the buildout as an economic opportunity for the state and rejected new limits in favor of producing more energy.

The general election is November 3, 2026.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a 5-4 decision, the court found that federal law does not prevent states from accepting late-arriving ballots. The ruling is a victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates, who had said setting a hard, Election Day deadline for ballot arrival would risk disenfranchising voters amid fears of deteriorating mail service.

The case, RNC vs. Watson, centered on whether federal law overrides a Mississippi law that requires mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days of the election. Thirteen states have similar laws, which extend a “grace period” to ballots that arrive through the mail after polls close.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said that federal law didn’t preempt the state law because elections represent when voters make a decision, which must be done on or before Election Day. Voters who cast their ballot by mail have made a decision by Election Day, Barrett reasoned.

“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote.

Barrett cautioned that the decision rested on the interpretation of federal law, not the U.S. Constitution. She noted that the court was not considering the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections — suggesting that if Congress passes a nationwide ballot arrival deadline that the justices might uphold such a law.

Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined part of the dissent.

“If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated,” Alito wrote.

States with grace periods

In addition to Mississippi, other states with some form of grace period include Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Some local election officials had warned that requiring all ballots to be received by the close of polls would burden their offices as they try to quickly warn voters about the change just months before the midterms. More ballot drop boxes that let voters keep their ballots out of the mail could help, they say, but also cost money.

“Ultimately, the voters may be harmed as well,” election officials in California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington wrote in a court brief, warning that some ballots may not be received in time, “despite best efforts by careful and proactive administrators and local governments.”

But some Republican secretaries of state had urged the justices to strike down “grace period” laws. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray wrote in a court brief that an Election Day deadline “provides the bright-line rule that effective election administration demands.”

At least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day 2024 and arrived within a legally accepted post-election window, The New York Times has reported, citing election officials in 14 of 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. 

Overall, about 30% of voters cast a mail ballot in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

RNC challenged law

The Republican National Committee challenged the Mississippi law, which was defended by Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson. The RNC argued a longstanding federal law that sets the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day for federal offices preempted state laws that allow ballots cast by Election Day, but received later, to count.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October 2024 that federal law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. President Donald Trump last year also unilaterally attempted to require mail ballots to be received by the end of Election Day in a sweeping executive order on elections. Much of that order was blocked in federal court.

The Supreme Court issued Monday’s decision against a backdrop of uncertainty surrounding mail ballots. Trump signed an executive order in March that would restrict voting by mail by requiring states to provide lists of possible mail ballot voters to the U.S. Postal Service in advance. A federal judge recently blocked major portions of the order, triggering a near-certain appeal.

Paul Clement, an attorney for the Republican National Committee, said during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in March the prospect that the outcome of an election could change because of ballots arriving after Election Day would be unacceptable to losing candidates. After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump demanded election officials not count ballots that came in after Election Day, but states kept counting ballots.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late-arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result. Full stop,” Clement told the justices.

Attorneys for Watson argued that both legal and historical precedent supported his position. States may decide that voters have made their final choices when ballots are submitted to state officials rather than when they’re received, according to Watson.

This is a developing report that will be updated.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Next250 demonstration, organized by a coalition of advocacy groups, featured a massive “Declaration of Interdependence” requiring more than a dozen people to hold it during a march past the northern barricaded perimeter of the White House, where President Donald Trump was present this weekend.

Event organizers scheduled the rally to counter the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 programming, which is taking place on the National Mall over several weeks.

The few hundred rallygoers convened for nearly four hours in McPherson Square before marching toward the White House via the former Black Lives Matter Plaza, a pedestrian-only zone created by the city in June 2020 during unrest after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

The plaza was repainted  in March 2025 under the order of Mayor Muriel Bowser after Trump took office and Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., introduced legislation in Congress saying it had to be redone or the district would lose federal funding. 

Causes represented ran the gamut: advocacy for stricter gun laws, a $25 federal minimum hourly wage, universal voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and leader of the Living Wage for All coalition, said lobbying for higher wages is “maybe the biggest” priority of the Next250 platform.

“For the last several years, we’ve been thinking ahead about wanting to use the 250th anniversary of the country as a moment to declare our unity as a people around a set of values and policies,” Jayaraman said.

“We’re often told we’re too polarized to get anything done, but the truth is that we actually know that we agree as a people across red, blue, and purple states that everybody who works deserves to earn enough to feed their families. Everybody who sends their children to school should be able to do that without them being shot up by assault weapons. Everybody wants a planet to live on, and a climate we can live in.”

Jayaraman praised Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., for introducing a bill on June 25 to raise the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. 

Murphy was joined in the legislation by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Andy Kim, D-N.J., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore. A companion bill in the House is sponsored by U.S. Reps. Delia Ramirez, and Jesús “Chuy” García, both Illinois Democrats, Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., and Lateefah Simon, D-Calif.

Clara, a 56-year-old Mexican immigrant from Queens, New York, who did not want to share her last name for fear of being targeted, said she’s worried about the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Trump ordered the end of birthright citizenship, a right granted in the Constitution, upon beginning his second term.

“As a mother of U.S. citizen children, that worries me about the future of the country. I have a U.S. citizen daughter, and I think that one of those federal changes could affect other immigrant families,” Clara said through an interpreter, Kimberly Vega, 27, of Staten Island, New York.

Both sat with Las Doñas, an advocacy group for women immigrants that has chapters throughout the U.S.

Reymane Sanders, 36, of New Haven, Connecticut, traveled to the rally with the organization Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People & Families Movement to advocate for restoring the right to vote across the U.S. for convicted felons. Sanders served 17 years in prison.

“Typically I definitely support (the cause) when it comes to filling out petitions, but this will be the first time that I actually put my body, my mind, everything all into the whole movement,” said Sanders. 

The Next250 demonstration was collectively organized by the separate organizations All of US, Next 250, Get Free and 50501.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The plea resolves an 18-count indictment against Bolton, who lives in Bethesda, Maryland. He has agreed to pay a $2.25 million penalty, the DOJ said. He could face up to five years in prison, according to the release.

During his stint as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, Bolton recorded “highly sensitive classified information” from his official duties in a personal diary. He shared the diary entries with two family members who were not cleared to have access to the information, which included top secret material, according to the indictment.

“John Bolton held a position of extraordinary public trust as the country’s top National Security Advisor, and he betrayed that trust, jeopardizing our nation’s security,” Hayden O’Byrne, the acting deputy assistant U.S. attorney general for the National Security Division, said in the statement. “Today’s resolution ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information.”

Bolton and Trump

Bolton’s attorney, Abbe David Lowell, said in a statement Friday that Bolton’s plea took responsibility for a mistake, which was “what real leaders do,” and contrasted that approach with Trump’s conduct while the Department of Justice secured similar federal charges against the then-former president in 2023.

“By contrast, President Trump thumbed his nose at the classified information laws, took actual classified documents to his Florida mansion, interfered with the investigation of that conduct, and has never accepted any accountability for his conduct,” Lowell wrote. “Ambassador Bolton, whose offense was only keeping a diary which contained classified information, kept a record to preserve history, but Donald Trump kept secrets to serve himself.”

Since leaving the White House, Bolton has been a consistent critic of Trump’s foreign policy. 

That has continued even after he was indicted last year. Bolton, who also held roles in President George W. Bush’s administration and is associated with the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party, has repeatedly slammed on social media Trump’s deal with Iran as recently as this week.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I knew and learned that disability rights and everything that I am able to do as an intervention specialist, or a special ed. teacher, was hard fought for and won, which also means it was under threat,” Thomas said.

She left her job to lead the Columbus Education Justice Coalition, but Thomas said she misses the classroom every day, and has held on to the belief that the job of an educator “may be one of the most politically charged careers in this day and age.”

“I do think that if you are called to do this work, it is worth it, but you should go in eyes open, and go in knowing public education is under attack, and if certain folks have their way, then other systems and education would be under attack, too,” Thomas said.

Educators and advocates like Thomas are worried that reduced public school funding and a lack of resources has taken its toll already, causing teacher shortages both in Ohio and nationwide. But there is hope that opportunities exist, if the state can get behind them.

National, pervasive, and ongoing

Anyone and everyone in the education field is looking for solutions to staff shortages in public schools. While advocates blame the problem on a lack of financial support from the state government, officials are pushing for more creative recruitment strategies.

“The teacher shortage issue, the teacher pipeline issue, whatever buzzword we’re using to identify it at the moment, is something that’s national, pervasive, and has been ongoing for quite some time now,” said Jason Wagner, Ohio’s interim superintendent of public instruction.

Wagner told a May meeting of the Ohio State Board of Education that across the country, more than 400,000 teaching positions were unfilled or filled by teachers without full certification in the 2024-2025 school year. That amounts to 1 in 8 teaching positions in the U.S.

The biggest shortages are in the areas of special education, science, and math, Wagner said, though deep shortages are also present in English/language arts, elementary education, and career technical education.

State data is a little more complicated, as the full picture of what the teacher shortage looks like needs work, according to educators and advocates. The Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers said anecdotal evidence from around the state certainly shows a struggle to attract and retain qualified teachers, but they’re awaiting new data on teacher “vacancies” from the state.

“It could be that we’re not seeing a whole lot of openings yet, but this anecdotal data of having less applicants apply means that looking down the road we could have a potential shortage bigger than what we have right now,” said Melissa Cropper, head of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

The most recent state operating budget included a provision directing the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to begin collecting data on teacher vacancies in the 2026-2027 school year. That data isn’t expected to be released until at least the end of 2027, according to Wagner.

The interim superintendent said the state’s annual education report cards show a “pretty steady, gradual decline” in the rate of properly certified teachers. He said it’s something the state “should take note of,” but that Ohio is faring better than other states when it comes to qualified teacher retention.

Ohio’s percentage of core academic courses taught by properly credentialed teachers stood just above 97.5% in 2024, a small rise from the previous year, though still lower than any year between 2015 and 2022. Wagner said pandemic-year credential flexibility caused a jump in 2020.

“So while, yes, we can observe trends here, it is worth noting that Ohio does rank very highly as far as … national averages compared to other states with actually having properly certified teachers in the classroom,” Wagner said.

He also noted that Ohio’s starting salaries are “comparable” with the U.S. average. According to state data, Ohio’s average starting salary for a teacher is $43,800, versus the U.S. average of $44,530.

Still, he said, the vacancy data is going to be “very helpful when we have it.”

Teachers need more

Math teacher Laura Fehskens said she came to her subject area because of the shortage of math teachers when she came out of school.

“I wanted to be a teacher, but I also wanted to have a job when I came out of school, so that was one of the tipping points in choosing secondary math, was that I knew there were jobs out there,” said Fehskens, who teaches at the Miami Valley Career Technical Center.

Though that was more than a decade ago, she has watched school administration battle with a fading pool of candidates for jobs.

“I spoke with both my direct supervisor and one of the other supervisors, and they stated that the pool of qualified candidates is maybe half as big as it was when he began as a supervisor 15 years ago, and it’s even worse for math,” Fehskens said.

Fehskens and Thomas agree on some of the main factors playing into the lack of interest in the field: lack of respect and support for teachers, a lack of commitment to consistent funding for public schools, and the increasing weight of documentation and standardized testing.

“I hear from a lot of my friends who are still in the classroom that they don’t have time to teach anymore because of the paperwork that goes with it,” Thomas said. “I had a lot of paperwork … but it’s triple now with the legislation that has come from the state, and a lot of the things that are mandated at the federal level.”

Education advocates decried the underfunding of public schools as EdChoice private school vouchers were made nearly universally available to all income levels. Opponents of the voucher system say its taking away from public school coffers and population.

Without the proper funding for wages and resources, educators say class sizes have increased, teachers are overburdened, and it’s a struggle to meet accommodations for the students that need it most.

Fehskens said Miami Valley has had to get “super creative” in finding ways to provide small group testing to those with special needs and individualized education plans that require them. Sometimes that means pulling a student out of an elective, or conducting two days of testing just to serve a student properly.

“If we had the staff that we needed, if we had the funding needed to provide for those staff, then those students would better receive those accommodations in real time and that’s, of course, going to be better for the student and the teachers in the long run,” Fehskens said.

Bringing in a new generation

While colleges and universities are working to find ways to bring in new teachers, a state-funded program to build up the workforce didn’t make it past the state operating budget.

The Grow Your Own Teacher scholarship that provided $7,500 per year for four years to students going into education is no longer accepting applications as the state works to “wind down” the program, according to Jana Fornario, of the Ohio Department of Higher Education.

The program allowed students to receive the scholarship if they agreed to teach for at least four years in their home district. If a spot was not available in their home district, the scholarship winners could serve at another “high-need” district.

The scholarships had recently been expanded to allow students at educational service centers, community schools, and career tech to be nominated for the scholarships. In the 2025-2026 school year, 856 students were nominated for the awards, 206 were awarded scholarships, and 168 accepted, according to state data. The amount was a significant bump from the year before, which Fornario said could be because of the expanded eligibility, but also because the program was more publicly known.

“I think the flexibility contributes, but I also want to say that we saw much more interest and awareness from districts,” Fornario told the state board of education.

For the 2026-2027 school year, the agency was able to award scholarships with remaining funds, taking students from previous waitlists of applicants. A scholarship was accepted by 143 students this year.

“I believe if we had been able to conduct a new round, I think we would have seen continued exponential growth, in all likelihood,” Fornario said.

Wagner told the State Board of Education that while financial incentives are important, growing the teacher workforce “has to be a comprehensive approach.”

“Reducing the turnover rate, engaging in efforts to increase our retention, not only benefits our students, but also benefits district and school administrators who are trying to fill these gaps in ways that are sustainable and not costly to the district or the school that they’re in,” Wagner said.

New bills currently active in the Ohio Statehouse would work to narrow grade bands for educator licenses, and could give student teachers compensation to incentivize them to stay. Ohio Senate Bill 144, which has bipartisan support but has been stuck in the Ohio House since November, would require the Ohio State Board of Education to specify whether a license is being issued to teach grades Pre-K through five, fourth through eighth grade, or grades seven through 12. Current law only requires licenses to specify pre-K through eighth or grades seven through 12.

“We really think that any kind of shortage or staffing issues at the middle level will be solved with not just a (preschool through eighth grade) license, but the P through 5, and then a four through eight comprehensive license would be able to solve those shortages just as easily,” Dr. Melissa Askren-Edgehouse, president of the Ohio Association of Private Colleges for Teacher Education, said during a meeting with the state board of education. Askren-Edgehouse is also the director of the school of education at the University of Mount Union.

Ohio House Bill 523 would allow a public school to pay a student teacher a stipend determined by the school, and allow public colleges and universities to establish a lower tuition rate for a student enrolled in a “teacher preparation program” while working as a student teacher. The bill also has bipartisan support, has passed the House, and is awaiting Senate consideration.

Associations and academics working in teacher education said higher education institutions need to bridge the gap to bring new teachers into the workforce, which is happening at some schools.

Universities like Bowling Green and Miami of Ohio already have partnerships with technical schools and career centers to help high-schoolers get a leg up in the education field, according Dr. Alicia Crowe, president of the Ohio Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Kent State University, where Crowe is an interim dean and professor, is also working with multiple local schools to create teaching pathways.

Private institutions are trying out similar programs to help reduce the cost for students hoping to go into education.

“Many of these programs are surrounding primary education or primary intervention specialists, but they can earn an associate’s degree (at a community college) and then only need four semesters at a university,” Askren-Edgehouse said.

The use of “teacher academies” is also proving useful for students exploring the idea of becoming an educator, giving students hands-on experience in schools and with teachers.

“The programs are doing great at the high school level, and we’ve been seeing some success with the students coming to us,” Askren-Edgehouse said. “So it’s great that they’re having that exposure very early on when they’re still in high school, so they can really say yes, this is definitely the profession for me.”

On top of giving teachers incentives to stay in the field, earnest appreciation goes a long way without the need for extra resources, according to Wagner.

“It is our obligation to spread the message that yes, it is tough, but it is worth it, that this is a noble profession, that we have educators who make a difference in people’s lives,” Wagner said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A mix of 116 school districts and independent schools have armed staff members, as of June 17. Many of the schools are rural, but there are some urban and suburban districts. 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law in 2022 that grants local boards of education authority to decide whether to allow their teachers and school workers to carry firearms.

It lowered the required training hours for armed personnel from 700 hours to at least 24, but school boards have the authority to mandate more hours. 

“It’s not a sufficient amount of training,” said Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper. 

“We’re talking about highly intense situations that require a lot of not only tactical training on how to use weapons. but how to deal with making split second decisions.” 

She testified against the bill when it was in the legislature in 2021. 

“I wish that (the lawmakers) would trust us with what we’re actually trained to do, which is to educate students,” Cropper said. “We are firm believers in local control around issues, but we still think it is bad policy for schools to allow teachers to carry guns.”

The law did grandfather in some school districts that had previous training, as long as the training met the requirements of the law. 

There have been more than 430 school shootings since Columbine in 1999, according to The Washington Post. 

Antwerp Local Schools in Paulding County has had a few armed staff members for years. The rural school district has about 700 students and about 100 staff members. 

Police response was the main factor in the decision to arm staff, said district superintendent Marty Miller.

Antwerp has a police department, but they also rely on the sheriff’s department about 10 miles away. 

“Our concern for us was if there was a situation that unfolded, what kind of law enforcement could we get here, and how fast,” Miller said. 

“What we could get here if we needed law enforcement obviously was not going to be sufficient. His party can be over for the bad guy in terms of accomplishing what he wants to accomplish.”

The district currently has four staff members who are armed and receive training each year, Miller said. The district also has a school resource officer. 

“We are confident that they will respond if needed, and that they are there just gives us a better feeling when something happens,” Miller said. 

The district decided not to arm any teachers, but rather staff members who are moving around during the day. 

The district wants people to know they have armed staff members. 

“If it can be a deterrent — and what may appear that there’s only one police officer in town, kind of thing, but there are armed staff — that might convince a bad person who has intentions, ‘maybe I won’t go near that place’ because of that,” Miller said. 

“It’s just letting the public know that your children are protected.”

Euclid City Schools Board of Education in Cuyahoga County decided to arm some of the district’s staff in 2022, said district spokesperson Dominick Ferlito. 

All of their armed employees are Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy trained.

“Our top priority is providing students and staff with a safe, welcoming environment where students are free to learn, create and reach their full potential,” Ferlito said in an email. 

**“**We continue to work closely with local law enforcement and safety partners to regularly review and strengthen our safety procedures and protocols.”

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.

With six months left before the 79-year-old walks off into the sunset, the impact of his belated call to action on capital punishment is negligible. He knows it.

Persuading right-wing supermajorities in the Ohio Statehouse to end the death penalty or, failing that, getting a statewide public vote on the issue anytime soon is a nonstarter.

Just months ago, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman declared he would vigorously oppose getting rid of state executions. Ohio Senate President Rob McColley said he could not imagine his Republican caucus repealing the death penalty law.

Ditto for the Republican candidate for governor McColley is running with, Vivek Ramaswamy.

Even the new attorney general DeWine appointed last month to finish former AG Dave Yost’s term swiftly rejected his benefactor’s argument. Andy Wilson did say he was grateful the governor had not commuted the sentences of the 113 inmates on death row in Ohio — which DeWine could still do to prevent their executions after he leaves office.

But surely the seasoned politician had no expectation that his party would be receptive to his latest directive when it broadly supports the death penalty as a tool for retributive justice.

So why tilt at windmills with a parting appeal to abolish it as a conscience-clearing move to no other end? 

And why did DeWine wait until he was almost out the door to take a public stand against capital punishment? He had eight years to do something.

Yes, DeWine has maintained an unofficial moratorium on state executions throughout his governorship.

It has been clear from Day One of his administration that the longtime proponent of the death penalty changed his mind about it.

Given his evident aversion to state-sanctioned killing, it seems dubious that DeWine had a sudden epiphany about the subject.

Well-established data on the death penalty has consistently shown that it had no proven deterrent effect on violent crime.

Extensive research across criminology, economics and law also concluded as much in study after study.

Yet DeWine wants us to believe that only now did he reach the same conclusion that  reams of empirical studies have underscored for ages; there is no credible evidence that the death penalty reduces homicide rates.

The governor suggested the analytics of capital punishment as a non-deterrent prompted his demand to scrap the death penalty as a prudent, if not moral, course.

DeWine explained his change of heart on the death penalty as a “cumulative” process that had only recently crystallized into certain opposition. (You will forgive me if I don’t quite buy DeWine’s ‘Road to Damascus’ story about his overnight metamorphosis on the death penalty).

Ohioans may agree or disagree with the governor’s position, but few expect anything to come of it. GOP lawmakers have no intention of fulfilling the governor’s legacy bucket list.

DeWine’s eleventh-hour pitch for abolishing the death penalty was a performance for publicity. Another all-show-no-go passion project that draws attention but goes nowhere.

Daytonians are nodding. They gave up waiting for DeWine to “do something!” on commonsense gun control after the 2019 mass shooting in their city.

He gave impassioned assurances to spearhead sweeping gun reform measures through the General Assembly which went nowhere. But DeWine did sign every gun rights absolutist bill that loosened gun regulations drafted to protect the public. 

Ohioans love their state parks and thought their governor did, too. He never missed an opportunity to grandstand on park enhancements.

But when it came to safeguarding Ohio’s treasured natural resources, DeWine sided with fossil fuel polluters itching to drill in state parks and wildlife preserves in 2023.

Ohio Senate Bill 219, which awaits his signature in 2026, is an even worse giveaway to outside gas producers that cuts corners to drill inside state parks, weakens environmental regulations, cuts local leverage and more.

DeWine could give another gift to the oil and gas industry at the expense of public lands even as he showcased Ohio’s 76 state parks as the best in the nation. 

The governor also signaled that he’s done signing voting restrictions that Republican lawmakers regularly send to his desk.

But he could cave to Trumpian right-wingers on another deeply flawed mail-in voting bill (Ohio House Bill 472) rushed through the legislature at the last minute that would make it harder for many eligible voters, especially seniors, the disabled, students, and Ohioans in rural areas to vote by mail?

DeWine could veto egregious voter suppression or in-park drilling—or quietly sign off his acquiescence in a Friday night news dump to avoid publicity.

But he wanted to generate attention with his staged press conference about the death penalty. And the national media noticed.

A red state governor calling for an end to state executions doesn’t happen every day.

DeWine banked on glowing coverage that portrayed him (wrongly) as a moderate Republican.

His record of enacting extreme legislation — from abortion bans and fracking in state parks, to permitless conceal carry, relentless voting barriers, and the most corrupt energy bill ever — belies his constructed image as a measured Midwest conservative willing to go the mat for what he believes.

I guess the lame duck governor might yet surprise with a warranted veto or sustained commitment to repeal Ohio’s death penalty.

But if past is prologue, he won’t. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

With artificial intelligence, experts say, hours of footage can be analyzed in minutes, making it easier for police to track or target a participant long after the demonstration ends.

As law enforcement agencies increasingly embrace AI, some civil liberties advocates, legal scholars and policing experts warn that the technology could amplify surveillance, introduce hidden biases into investigations and make it harder to challenge evidence in court. They also worry about a future in which AI takes on a more active role in policing and criminal investigations.

“It’s especially concerning sort of the ways that these tools could supercharge that kind of surveillance and enforcement,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization at the New York University School of Law. Levinson-Waldman has written extensively about the risks of police surveillance and the unregulated use of AI in policing.

Artificial intelligence in policing is not new. For decades, law enforcement agencies have used data-driven and automated tools, including facial recognition systems, automated license plate readers, predictive policing models and video analytics that can flag objects or activity in recorded footage.

What is changing is the speed, scope and complexity of those tools. As police departments accumulate growing volumes of digital evidence — from body camera footage and surveillance video to jail calls, social media records and case files — AI is increasingly being used to help sort, search and analyze that information.

“AI is going to basically be able to sort through otherwise overwhelming amounts of data in ways that we just haven’t seen yet, and give police and prosecutors and the government a lot more power over us in ways that I think will be deeply uncomfortable for many of us,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance,” a book published this year.

Cris Moore, a computer scientist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a research and education center, said the technology is advancing faster than agencies, regulators and courts are able to fully assess its implications, raising questions about transparency, accountability and the role automated systems should play in policing decisions.

“It’s fair to say that the speed at which technologically created evidence has been adopted, and the aggression with which it’s being pushed makes it hard for the legal community to keep up,” Moore said.

State legislatures and police departments are still developing rules to govern how AI can be used in public safety settings. While some agencies have adopted internal policies or vendor-specific guidance, there is no consistent national framework, and state-level approaches remain limited and uneven.

At least two states, California and Utah, have recently enacted laws regulating the use of generative AI in police report writing, requiring disclosure when AI is used and adding safeguards around accuracy and oversight.

More broadly, more than a dozen states have passed laws regulating related technologies such as facial recognition, drone surveillance and automated license plate readers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Emerging tech

Some of the major companies offering AI-powered tools for law enforcement include Axon, Motorola Solutions, TRULEO, Flock Safety, Clearview AI and others. Their products can search body-worn camera footage, analyze large datasets, review digital evidence and case files and identify potential suspects through facial recognition.

Some of these systems are built into centralized platforms that are able to pull and search for data from sensitive databases and police records.

There are very real constitutional, statutory and practical risks with this new model of agentic policing.

– Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, law professor at George Washington University

Mark43, a cloud-based software company serving more than 300 public safety agencies, offers two AI-powered tools. ReportAI helps officers draft reports using information from dispatch records and body camera footage, while BriefAI summarizes case information for investigators and supervisors.

Police agencies can choose which AI features to enable and who can access them, and the system maintains audit logs of AI-assisted activity. Mark43 told Stateline that dozens of agencies are using, testing out  or evaluating the AI features.

“Our core mission is to help responders spend less time on administrative work, so that they can spend more time serving in their communities,” said Wendy Gilbert, Mark43’s senior vice president of product.

Some experts are wary of AI being used for decisions that could affect a person’s rights or freedom, such as identifying suspects, recommending enforcement actions or influencing arrests. Critics warn that AI-generated outputs can make mistakes, reflect biases in underlying data and create a risk that officers or investigators place too much weight on the technology’s recommendations.

They also argue that many AI systems operate in ways that are difficult for the public — and sometimes even officers — to fully understand.

One source of concern is the possible advent of “agentic policing.” Future technologies could integrate body-camera footage, camera networks and other data sources into a single system capable of generating investigative leads, identifying potential suspects or suggesting connections between cases.

Even if humans remain responsible for final decisions, critics say, such systems could shape investigative judgments in ways that make it more difficult to understand how conclusions were reached.

“All that data is going to be dumped into an AI model, and they’re going to query it to say who’s the most likely suspect,” said Ferguson of George Washington University. “The AI is going to be running the agentic analysis of it and come up with the answer, and then police and prosecutors have to kind of work backwards to see if it’s accurate.”

Ferguson warned that this flips the traditional investigative process on its head.

“We’ve never started with an answer and made people work backwards,” he said. “There are very real constitutional, statutory and practical risks with this new model of agentic policing.”

AI companies and some law enforcement agencies argue the technology is designed to assist officers, not replace them. They emphasize that officers are responsible for reviewing, verifying and approving AI-generated information, and that the tools are intended to reduce administrative work and help people navigate large volumes of data more efficiently.

“AI should increase accountability, not reduce it, and so we’re doing everything in our will to provide transparency, governance and human control,” said Zach Barden, the lead product manager for AI at Mark43.

In recent years, a growing number of police officers across the country have been accused of misusing AI-powered tools, including automated license plate reader systems, available through their departments to track people for personal reasons.

In April, a former Costa Mesa, California, police officer pleaded guilty to using law enforcement databases and Flock Safety cameras to monitor his wife, a mistress and several romantic rivals. Similar allegations have surfaced in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

Flock Safety, one of the nation’s largest providers of automated license plate readers, uses roadside cameras to capture images and video of passing vehicles, including license plates and basic vehicle details, and store them in searchable law enforcement databases.

Some communities have reconsidered their use of automated license plate reader systems, with at least 30 cities ending or canceling contracts since early 2025 amid growing concerns about surveillance and data sharing, NPR reported in February.

A Flock Safety representative was not available for an interview with Stateline before publication. In a May blog post, the company said misuse of its system is rare and noted that permanent audit logs help identify and investigate improper access.

The company said the camera network has helped agencies recover missing people, connect cases across jurisdictions and identify suspects more quickly.

Reshaping public safety operations

While some law enforcement agencies have moved forward with early deployments, others are taking a more cautious approach as they assess potential benefits and risks.

In Maryland, the Montgomery County Police Department, one of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, is in the early stages of exploring potential uses of AI, including tools to support non-emergency call handling, translation and transcription services, and report writing to reduce administrative workload and improve efficiency.

“We want to bring technology to policing, but we need to make sure that we do it safe(ly), we do it efficiently, and that when we do do it, we’re setting the community and ourselves up for success,” said Capt. Cody Fields, the director of the police department’s media and public information division.

In Arkansas, officials are developing the Arkansas Criminal Intelligence Network, a centralized cloud platform designed to connect data across police agencies in the state and support the use of advanced AI-powered analytical tools.

In Hawaii, the Maui County Council earlier this month approved a $1.7 million expansion of high-tech policing tools, including cameras and drones supported by AI to assist with real-time monitoring and emergency response. Last year, the Honolulu Police Department announced a pilot program with Axon, which offers a generative AI feature that helps draft police reports using video and audio transcriptions from body-worn cameras.

Legal and evidentiary concerns

Police reports often play a critical role in investigations and court proceedings, and some experts warn that errors introduced by AI systems could have significant legal consequences if they go undetected.

Errors introduced by AI systems, including inaccuracies, omissions or misinterpretations of context and language, could influence how evidence is understood by investigators, prosecutors and judges.

Experts and industry leaders generally point to a few safeguards: clear disclosure when AI is used in reports, mandatory human verification of all AI-generated text, regular independent auditing of tools, and training for law enforcement and legal stakeholders on how the systems function and how to trace outputs back to raw audio, video and other source evidence.

Those recommendations align with a framework released earlier this year by the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice, which calls for rigorous independent validation of AI systems, enforceable procurement standards, ongoing performance monitoring, and clear human oversight to ensure operators can override AI-generated outputs.

“The pace of change is really pretty dramatic, and there’s a lot of energy and churn and attention to these issues,” said Jesse Rothman, the director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s task force on artificial intelligence. “The opportunities and the risks are really serious.”

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The report estimates that imprisoning a woman costs between $87,000 and $122,000 a year, or roughly 25% to 75% more than the average annual cost of about $70,000 per incarcerated person, including both men and women.  Women make up about 10% of the nation’s correctional population.

Researchers attributed the higher costs to a combination of factors, including smaller prison populations, the need to house women with different security classifications in the same facilities and higher healthcare expenses.

“As the number and cost of incarcerating women grow, policymakers have an opportunity to pursue approaches that better enhance accountability, public safety, fiscal responsibility, and the well-being of families and communities,” Stephanie Akhter, the director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission, said in a news release.

The report projects those costs will continue to grow over the next decade. Researchers estimate the number of women under correctional control, including prisons, jails, probation and parole, will rise from about 992,000 in 2022 to 1.1 million by 2035.

Most of that growth is expected to occur in confinement settings. The women’s prison population is projected to increase 27% by 2035, while the jail population is expected to grow 20%, according to the report.

As a result, annual spending associated with women’s involvement in the justice system is projected to rise from between $23 billion and $26 billion in 2025 to between $30 billion and $34 billion by 2035.

The report says the increase reflects both projected population growth and rising correctional costs. Researchers noted that women’s prison populations declined during the COVID-19 pandemic but have been growing again since 2021, in some places rebounding faster than men’s populations.

The analysis also attempted to quantify some costs that fall outside correctional budgets. Researchers estimated that the loss of unpaid household labor and caregiving performed by women in prison amounts to about $2.8 billion annually, a figure projected to rise to $3.8 billion by 2035.

A companion report released alongside the analysis modeled the effects of cutting women’s time served in prison by 50% in Illinois and North Carolina. Researchers estimated that earlier releases would result in roughly 100 additional arrests annually in each state among women who otherwise would have remained incarcerated, with about 9 in 10 involving nonviolent offenses, while generating more than $60 million a year in net savings.

The reports were prepared for the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission, which studies women’s involvement in the criminal justice system and related policy issues.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Most of the critical violations were marked corrected during the inspection. At four facilities—a Tiffin Kroger, The Corner Restaurant in Bloomville, a Tiffin Bob Evans and Mi Tequilas in Fostoria—at least one critical violation was not recorded as corrected on-site. Under Ohio’s food code, a critical violation is one directly linked to the risk of foodborne illness.

Inspected Thursday, June 11, 2026, the Tiffin supermarket received one critical violation during a standard/process review inspection. Health district inspectors cited the store under the cold-holding rule for time/temperature controlled for safety (TCS) foods after a seafood island case registered 50°F. Inspectors recorded shrimp at 50°F and salmon at 45°F, above the 41°F maximum required to limit bacterial growth. According to the record, no temperature alert had been received for the case, and staff planned to monitor whether it was in defrost mode and remove the shrimp and salmon if it was not. Kroger #594 carries a Risk Level IV designation, the highest risk category assigned to food operations.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/10-seneca-county-food-facilities-critical-violations-june-2026/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The contributions were made to joint fundraising committees set up to raise money for Merrin’s Ohio 9th District bid, including one tied to Emmer Majority Builders, a fundraising venture led by U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minnesota, that pools major-donor money for targeted Republican candidates. Those committees transferred their net proceeds to Merrin’s campaign.

Adam R. Kidan, listed in the filings as an executive at the Florida firm Atlantic Solutions Group, contributed $3,500. Kidan and Abramoff pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and wire fraud in the fraudulent purchase of the SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet — the deal at the center of the corruption scandal that sent Abramoff to prison — and in 2006 each was sentenced to five years and 10 months in federal prison. The two were ordered to jointly pay $21.7 million in restitution; Kidan has since become a prolific Republican donor, giving more than $1 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

James H. Batmasian, identified in the filings as the owner of a Florida investment firm, gave $1,487. Batmasian, the largest commercial property owner in Boca Raton, pleaded guilty in 2008 to failing to remit about $250,000 in federal payroll taxes and served an eight-month prison sentence. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020.

Both men have contributed to numerous Republican candidates and committees.

Merrin, a former state representative from Monclova Township who describes himself as a real estate investor, won the May 5 Republican primary and faces a Nov. 3 rematch with Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a district redrawn to lean Republican. The contributions are detailed in filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Merrin’s campaign could not be reached for comment.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a statement issued June 25, DeWine said the 6–3 ruling in Mullin v. Doe means more than 10,000 Haitians living legally in Ohio through TPS — most of them in the Springfield area — “will now be here illegally and will be subject to immediate deportation.”

“Today’s decision is a legal decision. As I have stated in the past, the policy to remove these individuals from this country is a mistake,” DeWine said. He added that the Haitians “were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday,” but that “today it is now illegal to employ them.”

DeWine described conditions in Haiti as dire. “The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And, the economy is in shambles,” he said. He pointed to the federal government’s advisory against traveling to Haiti and to the Federal Aviation Administration’s prohibition on U.S. carriers flying there because of the danger of aircraft being fired on by gangs.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” DeWine said.

What the court decided

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the TPS statute bars federal courts from reviewing most challenges to the termination of the program, and that a claim by Haitian plaintiffs that the termination was motivated by race was unlikely to succeed. Justice Samuel Alito announced the judgment of the court. The decision reversed lower-court orders that had paused the terminations and cleared the way for the Department of Homeland Security to end protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

The case reached the court after then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem moved in 2025 to terminate the designations for both countries. The court’s opinion notes that Haiti’s designation was set to end following a November 2025 notice. The current homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, is the named party in the consolidated cases.

In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the TPS holders had asked only to remain in the country while their case continued, and parted with the majority over a ruling she said would expose them to severe harm. The terminations are set to take effect within weeks unless the lower courts intervene, according to legal groups representing TPS holders.

What it means for Ohio

TiffinOhio.net has reported that an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield — a mix of TPS holders, citizens and people with other legal status — part of roughly 30,000 people with temporary status across central Ohio. Local officials and economists have estimated that deportations would remove hundreds of millions of dollars in annual economic activity, including about $300 million a year in Clark County.

DeWine has been among a small number of Republicans to oppose the administration’s effort to end Haitian TPS, and he has previously argued that stripping the workers of legal status would damage Ohio’s economy. The DeWine family also has personal ties to Haiti: the governor and his wife, Fran, helped support a school there named for their late daughter, which closed in 2024 because of gang activity.

Hours after the ruling, hundreds of people gathered in Springfield to support Haitian residents, with clergy, attorneys and community leaders urging families to prepare legally for possible deportation.

Background

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to provide short-term relief for people who cannot safely return to their home countries. Haiti was first designated in 2010 after a devastating earthquake, and the protection was extended in 2021 after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Although intended as a temporary measure, TPS designations have in practice lasted for years.

Ahead of the decision, immigration attorneys and Springfield faith leaders had warned that a ruling against TPS holders would immediately strip work authorization and protection from deportation. The U.S. House voted in April to extend TPS for Haitians through 2029, but that measure has stalled in the Senate.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nathaniel H. Cain, 23, entered not-guilty pleas to both counts at an arraignment on Thursday, June 18, before Seneca County Common Pleas Judge Damon D. Alt, court records show. His bond was continued at $75,000 with no 10 percent option, and the judge scheduled a pretrial hearing for Tuesday, July 28.

A grand jury returned the two-count indictment on Monday, June 8. Count one charges domestic violence under Ohio Revised Code 2919.25(A), a first-degree misdemeanor; count two charges strangulation under R.C. 2903.18(B)(2), a third-degree felony. Cain was originally charged by complaint in May with a single count of strangulation, and the domestic violence count was added through the indictment.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/fired-trooper-cain-pleads-not-guilty-strangulation-domestic-violence/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Riley Q. Flores, 26, of Costa Mesa, California, faces two first-degree felony charges — rape and kidnapping — filed June 24 in Circleville Municipal Court, according to court records (case No. 2600530). The charges, brought by the Circleville Police Department, stem from alleged conduct on June 23. The warrants were entered with no bond, according to dispatch records.

Circleville police asked for help locating Flores shortly after 3:30 p.m. Thursday, telling dispatchers he had fled on foot the night before and was believed to be unarmed, the records show. Authorities tracked his cell phone to an area north of U.S. 224, and deputies found him hiding in a barn near the northwest corner of U.S. 224 and South State Route 19, the Sheriff’s Office said. He was in custody by about 4:35 p.m. Deputies from the office’s enforcement unit, working with the Circleville and Bloomville police departments, made the arrest without incident.

After the arrest, detectives executed a search warrant on Flores to recover evidence relevant to the investigation. The warrant was signed by Judge Damon D. Alt of the Seneca County Court of Common Pleas, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Flores was taken to the Seneca County jail and remained in custody pending transfer to Circleville, the seat of Pickaway County in south-central Ohio. He had not entered a plea, and court records did not list an attorney for him. The charges are allegations; a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until convicted.

“I am proud of all of our personnel involved in the apprehension and the execution of the subsequent search warrant to assist the Circleville Police Department with their investigation. It’s great to see the resources, training, and technology we work diligently to provide for our deputies being utilized to continue to make this county and other communities a safe place. Job well done to all involved!” Sheriff Fredrick W. Stevens said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Standing alongside local officials, demonstrators held signs reading “Jon the Con,” “First Energy’s Golden Boy” and “Ohioans can’t afford Jon Husted’s corruption,” some pairing photos of Husted with the rising cost of their electric bills. Several wore T-shirts reading “Unpaid Protester.” Community members and local leaders gathered to oppose FirstEnergy’s proposed rate increase and to link it to the fallout from the HB 6 scandal, WTOL reported.

What brought residents out was the latest in a string of rising electric costs. FirstEnergy’s proposed three-year distribution plan would add about $5.30 a month each year to a typical Toledo Edison residential bill — an average increase of roughly 2.8% annually — according to figures the company provided to WTOL. The plan affects only the distribution portion of a bill and would take effect only if the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approves it.

The officials who joined the residents echoed their message. “At a time when Ohioans are worried about affording a tank of gas or a loaf of bread, here’s just another cost that the hardworking families of Toledo and Ohio are burdened with,” Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said, per WTOL. “So we might ask ourselves why. Why is this happening?” State Rep. Erika White, a Democrat who represents Ohio House District 41 in Lucas County, called for transparency: “We pay some of the highest utility costs across the country. We need accountability first. Where are the funds going?”

FirstEnergy says the plan is about strengthening the grid, not past misconduct, and rejected any connection to the HB 6 scandal. “We’re a different company than we were back then, new leadership and new plans to improve,” spokesperson Brooke Conlan told WTOL. Conlan said the plan supports about $800 million a year in infrastructure upgrades and about $83 million a year in tree trimming and vegetation management, “all aimed at reducing outages and improving restoration times.”

The demonstrators’ anger traces back to HB 6, the 2019 law that delivered a ratepayer-funded bailout to nuclear plants owned by a FirstEnergy subsidiary and sits at the center of what prosecutors have called a roughly $60 million corruption scheme. Evidence in the state criminal case against former FirstEnergy executives Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling — and reporting by The Associated Press drawn from Husted’s official calendars — has documented meetings and phone calls between Husted and central figures in the scheme, as TiffinOhio.net has reported. Separately, the average Ohio residential electric bill has risen about $663 a year since the law took effect, based on PUCO data, though not all of that increase is attributable to HB 6.

Husted has never been charged with or accused of any crime in connection with the scandal, and he has denied playing a meaningful role. “My role was very clear. I wanted the nuclear power plants to remain operational,” he said in a January 2026 interview with NBC4 Columbus. Husted, a Republican, was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. Mike DeWine in January 2025 and faces former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in the Nov. 3 special election.

The state case against Jones and Dowling ended in a mistrial on April 1, and a retrial is scheduled to begin Sept. 28 in Akron. For residents who turned out Thursday, there is also a more immediate avenue: the PUCO will take public comment as it reviews the rate proposal. WTOL reported it contacted Husted’s office for comment and was awaiting a response.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.