About a dozen people attended the rally Tuesday near the Veterans Memorial Civic and Convention Center, according to local media reports. Photos from the event showed demonstrators holding signs calling Husted the “face of data centers,” accusing him of favoring the industry and pointing back at his recent declaration that “we are the problem.”

The protest comes as data centers have moved from a development issue to a potentially defining issue in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race.

On Wednesday, Axios reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee privately warned major artificial intelligence companies that public opposition to data centers is threatening Republicans’ chances of holding Husted’s seat. The memo said Democrats have made the issue a “centerpiece” of their campaign against Husted and warned that it would continue to dominate the race unless public perceptions change.

That is the same argument protesters in Lima were making from the sidewalk.

“Jon Husted is blaming you and I for using the tools modern life requires, while ignoring the fact that he helped flood the state with massive, power-hungry data centers without a coherent plan, without including citizens in the planning, without considering the costs that the people and the environment would pay,” Lima City Councilwoman Jeannine Jordan said at the rally.

Jordan said Ohio needs “leadership that starts with people, not with corporations.”

The criticism centers on Husted’s years promoting the data center industry while serving as lieutenant governor from 2019 until his appointment to the U.S. Senate in 2025.

Husted publicly celebrated major investments from Google and other technology companies during that period, describing data centers as essential to the digital economy and presenting Ohio as a growing technology hub. He did not create Ohio’s data center sales-tax exemption, which predates his tenure as lieutenant governor, but he became one of the administration’s most visible advocates for attracting the projects.

The cost of that incentive has since exploded. Ohio Department of Taxation figures showed the sales-tax exemption cost the state nearly $1.57 billion in 2025, compared with a previous projection of $136 million. Gov. Mike DeWine paused consideration of new exemptions in May while state officials and lawmakers examine the industry’s impact.

Separate state records show Ohio has committed at least $2.3 billion in long-term sales-tax exemptions to data center operators, including Google, Meta and Amazon.

Lew Modic, a Democratic candidate for Allen County commissioner, told the Lima crowd that residents have too little information about the agreements being made around data center development.

“The way we have done this has been behind closed doors and so much secrecy,” Modic said, according to WLIO. “Nobody knows what’s in it for us as a community long term and the information is not coming out.”

Chris Gibbs, a Shelby County farmer and chairman of the county Democratic Party, focused on what he said his own operation has experienced.

“Just in my case alone, AES has jacked rates 26% in the past 12 months, and over the past 24 months, my rates on those accounts have increased 37%,” Gibbs said.

The broader increase in electricity costs is not in dispute, although data centers are not the only factor pushing bills higher. A report released this summer projected that average Ohio residential electric costs could approach $800 for the summer, while the regional PJM grid faces rapidly growing power demand, aging generation and transmission constraints.

Data centers are a significant part of that demand growth. PJM, which manages the electric grid serving Ohio and 12 other states plus Washington, D.C., has been developing new rules aimed at preventing large electricity users from putting reliability and costs onto other customers.

Husted has responded to the backlash by arguing that data center operators, rather than households and small businesses, should pay for the new power infrastructure their facilities require.

In July, he introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act, legislation that would require states to consider standards aimed at making large electricity users cover the generation, transmission and other infrastructure costs needed to connect them to the grid.

“If America wants to lead the world in AI and strengthen our national security, we have to build the energy infrastructure to support it,” Husted said when announcing the legislation. “But we must do that without passing the costs on to working families and small businesses.”

But Husted also drew criticism after explaining the growth of data centers in a July interview by pointing to consumers’ own use of digital technology.

“We, the people, have created the demand for these data centers because we use all of these digital products that it processes,” Husted said. “So, understand, like, when we look in the mirror, we are the problem.”

Husted has also said decisions about whether individual data centers should be built should remain with local communities.

Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown has made Husted’s record on the issue a central piece of his campaign, running advertisements portraying him as the “face of data centers in Ohio.” The two candidates have increasingly offered competing approaches to the industry’s expansion, with Brown calling for an end to state data center tax breaks and Husted supporting continued development with protections intended to prevent costs from being shifted to other ratepayers.

The Lima rally offered another sign that the fight is moving well beyond Columbus and the large projects concentrated in central Ohio.

And Wednesday’s Republican campaign memo made clear that Husted’s own party sees the political danger.

According to Axios, the NRSC warned that if voters continue blaming data centers for higher costs and other local impacts, the backlash could spread well beyond Ohio.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Individually, most of those developments have already made news.

Taken together, they help explain an increasingly difficult political reality for Republicans less than three months before the November election: Ohio voters who were promised lower costs are increasingly saying they are falling behind.

Defend America Action, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization formed to oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda, calls its new nine-page report The Buckeye State Affordability Crisis. It argues that Republican policies have compounded the cost-of-living problem by reducing federal help for health care and food at the same time households are absorbing higher costs elsewhere.

The report arrives as independent polling shows affordability is already dominating the Ohio electorate.

A Fox News poll conducted Aug. 6-10 found 40% of registered Ohio voters named inflation as their top issue, far ahead of health care, immigration and political divisions. The share of Ohioans describing their family’s financial situation as “falling behind” has climbed from 28% in 2020 to 38% today.

That is the political significance of the new report. It does not identify one affordability problem. It shows how several of them are landing on the same households at the same time.

Ohio did not enter this period with much room to spare

The state’s affordability problem was already broad before many of the newest federal policy changes took effect.

A Brookings Institution analysis published earlier this year found that more than 40% of Ohio households could not make ends meet in 2024 when researchers compared income against basic expenses such as housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and utilities.

Among single-parent households, the share unable to cover basic expenses reached 73%.

That existing weakness matters because the federal policy changes enacted since then are not occurring in isolation. They are landing on households that, in many cases, were already struggling to cover the basics.

The clearest example is food assistance.

About 100,000 Ohioans have already lost food assistance

Last summer, Trump signed the Republican tax and spending law that made the largest reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in its history, expanded work requirements and shifted substantially more of the program’s administrative costs onto states.

A year later, about 100,000 Ohioans have lost SNAP assistance, a roughly 7% decline.

Ohio also faces potentially significant new costs for administering the remaining program because the federal government’s share of administrative expenses was reduced. SNAP provides assistance to roughly 1.4 million Ohioans in a typical month.

For the affordability debate, the distinction is important. A household does not need grocery-store prices to increase for food to become more expensive to its budget. Losing assistance that previously paid part of the grocery bill produces much the same effect on disposable income.

Health care is producing a similar pressure.

Ohio has lost more than 160,000 ACA enrollees

Ohio experienced the largest percentage decline in Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollment in the country after enhanced federal premium tax credits expired.

Federal enrollment data showed that Ohio marketplace enrollment fell 32.4% from February 2025 to June 2026, a loss of 161,385 enrollees.

Those losses came as consumers who buy their own insurance faced substantially higher net premiums without the enhanced subsidies.

Another round of potential coverage losses is still ahead.

An Urban Institute analysis estimated that between 176,000 and 356,000 Ohioans could lose Medicaid coverage by 2028 as new work-verification requirements and more frequent eligibility checks contained in the Republican spending law are implemented.

The range depends in part on how effectively Ohio helps eligible residents navigate the new requirements.

Those changes are especially significant in an affordability story because health coverage is not an expense families can simply eliminate. Dropping insurance may remove the monthly premium, but it transfers substantially more financial risk to the household when somebody needs care.

It also places pressure on hospitals and other health providers that continue treating uninsured patients.

Electric bills are moving in the wrong direction, too

At the same time federal assistance is shrinking for some households, one of Ohio’s most unavoidable monthly expenses has continued climbing.

Residential electric bills hit record highs across Ohio this summer. State utility survey data showed statewide bills up roughly 12% from a year earlier and 62% over the past decade, with average monthly bills approaching $200 in several major Ohio cities.

The regional power market offers little indication that the underlying pressure is about to disappear.

PJM Interconnection, which operates the electric grid covering Ohio and 12 other states, saw capacity costs remain at record levels this summer as power demand grows faster than new supply. The capacity price again reached its federally approved ceiling, with data-center demand among the major factors straining the system.

That issue has become particularly important in Ohio politics because the state spent years aggressively recruiting data centers while granting the industry a lucrative sales-tax exemption.

Husted was one of the state’s most visible data-center recruiters during his six years as lieutenant governor. As criticism of the industry’s power demand intensified this summer, Husted said consumers themselves were part of the reason for the buildout, telling an interviewer that “we are the problem” because people demand the digital services those facilities provide.

The political difficulty for Husted is that electricity costs are now colliding directly with the affordability issue dominating his Senate race.

The gas-price shock was visible in Tiffin

Gasoline provided an even more immediate example this spring.

Trump entered 2026 touting gasoline prices below $2.30 a gallon in parts of the country. After the war with Iran disrupted oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, prices surged.

By April 30, regular gasoline was selling for as much as $4.99 a gallon in Tiffin. Ohio’s statewide average reached $4.46 that day, placing the state among the 10 most expensive gasoline markets in the country.

The consequences are magnified in northwest Ohio, where commuting distances are often longer and agriculture and manufacturing make fuel costs an input for far more than the family car.

Farmers were already dealing with another part of Trump’s economic agenda.

Ohio agricultural exports to China fell roughly 74% in 2025, costing farmers nearly $76 million in sales compared with the previous year. Soybean producers were particularly exposed as retaliatory tariffs and competition from Brazil cut deeply into one of their major foreign markets.

The Trump administration responded nationally with another multibillion-dollar farm aid package, cushioning some of the losses without restoring the export markets farmers had lost.

Republicans are asking voters to look at the other side of the ledger

Republicans do not describe their economic program as a reduction in household support.

Husted has repeatedly promoted the 2025 tax and spending law as a financial benefit for Ohio families. In April, he said the law was about “helping working families get ahead and making life easier and more affordable for them,” pointing to provisions including tax deductions for tips and overtime, a larger child tax credit and tax relief for seniors and small businesses.

He voted for the measure in the Senate.

U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, the Republican whose 5th Congressional District includes Seneca County, also voted for the legislation. Latta described it at the time as providing tax relief, strengthening Medicaid, promoting American energy production and reducing fraud and abuse.

That creates the central political question underneath the affordability debate.

The Republican case asks voters to measure the law through lower federal taxes, expanded deductions and other tax benefits. Its critics are asking voters to include the other changes on the same household balance sheet: lost SNAP benefits, higher health insurance costs and the Medicaid coverage losses projected as new eligibility rules take effect.

The latest Ohio polling shows why this matters in November

The answer may be starting to appear in the electorate.

Trump carried Ohio by more than 11 percentage points in 2024. In the new Fox News poll, 56% of Ohio voters viewed him unfavorably.

Inflation was the top issue for 40% of voters. Thirty-eight percent said their family finances were falling behind.

Those voters are not evenly distributed politically. According to Fox, voters who say their families are falling behind favor Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown over Husted by 40 percentage points.

The same poll found Brown leading Husted 53% to 45%, while 51% of voters said they were concerned Husted was too closely tied to Trump. The governor’s race remained much closer, with Republican Vivek Ramaswamy at 50% and Democrat Amy Acton at 48%.

The poll does not establish that affordability alone produced those margins. It does show that economic dissatisfaction is occupying the same electorate in which Republicans are trying to defend Trump’s record and their own support for his agenda.

That is a significant change from the environment Republicans expected after Trump’s decisive Ohio victory less than two years ago.

An April Bowling Green State University/YouGov poll offered an earlier warning. Fifty-six percent of registered Ohio voters said the economy had gotten worse during the previous year, compared with 22% who said it had improved. The economy ranked as voters’ most important issue.

The August Fox poll suggests that concern has not faded as the election approaches.

The report turns separate stories into one affordability story

That is ultimately what Defend America Action’s report adds to the debate.

Ohio’s SNAP losses have been reported. So have the ACA enrollment decline, projected Medicaid losses, record electricity bills, the spring gasoline spike and agricultural damage from the trade war.

The report puts them on the same page.

That matters because households experience them on the same budget.

A family facing a larger insurance premium is also paying the electric bill. A worker who loses food assistance still has to fill the gas tank. A farmer dealing with weaker export markets also buys diesel and fertilizer. A small-business owner buying insurance through the ACA marketplace is exposed to both health care costs and the broader cost of running the business.

The cumulative effect is now showing up in how Ohioans describe their finances.

For Republicans, the timing is difficult. They spent the 2024 campaign promising to bring prices down, then spent 2025 enacting and defending Trump’s economic program. They are now entering the final stretch of the 2026 campaign with inflation at the top of Ohio voters’ concerns and nearly four in 10 saying their families are falling behind.

The November election will provide the clearest measure of which side of the economic ledger those voters believe has mattered more.

That affordability question now sits underneath Ohio’s races for U.S. Senate, governor and Congress — including in a state Trump carried comfortably just two years ago.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A private Aug. 18 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, obtained by Axios and titled Ohio Data Center Risk, offers an unusually blunt assessment of an issue Husted has spent weeks trying to neutralize.

“Brown is using it because it works,” the memo says. “More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

The NRSC says Brown has made data centers the “centerpiece” of his case against Husted and has spent millions of dollars on three television ads hammering the Republican over the issue.

Its conclusion: The attacks are working better than the standard campaign playbook.

“Our polling indicates that this messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts,” the memo says, describing data centers as a “sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

Republicans say the campaign cannot fix it

The memo goes further than acknowledging Husted has a political problem. It effectively tells the corporations building data centers that they are going to have to help solve it.

“Campaigns or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy,” the NRSC says under a section titled “WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN.”

Instead, Republicans say, “the companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans see them: who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.”

“Until that happens, the issue will continue to dominate this race,” the memo says.

According to Axios, the memo was directed to top AI companies as Republicans and industry leaders grow increasingly worried that opposition to data centers could spread beyond Ohio.

The appeal comes as the industry is already spending money to reshape public opinion. TiffinOhio.net reported in July that a Data Center Coalition-backed network, including Connected Ohio, was running similar advertising campaigns across seven states defending data centers against criticism over their electricity demand, water use and tax incentives.

Public poll has Brown up 8

The NRSC memo opens by saying Husted and Brown are in a “dead heat,” citing private polling that has not been publicly released.

But the latest public Fox News poll, conducted Aug. 6 through Aug. 10, showed Brown leading Husted 53% to 45% among Ohio voters.

The NRSC argues that Husted can pull ahead once voters hear attacks on Brown’s record. Data centers, the committee says, are the “new problem” disrupting that strategy.

“If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo warns.

Husted spent years promoting the industry

The Republican concern comes after years in which Husted publicly promoted data centers as an economic development success for Ohio.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, Husted played a prominent role in promoting billion-dollar data center investments during his six years as lieutenant governor. He praised Google’s arrival in New Albany, defended a $43.5 million state tax incentive tied to the project and later celebrated billions of dollars in additional investment from major technology companies.

That record has become the foundation of Brown’s summer advertising campaign, which brands Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

Husted has since tried to reposition himself as an advocate for ratepayers. He introduced federal legislation intended to push states toward requiring large electricity users to cover the infrastructure costs needed to serve them.

But in a July interview, Husted also told Ohioans that consumer demand for digital services helped create the data center boom, saying, “when we look in the mirror, we are the problem.” TiffinOhio.net reported on those remarks last month.

His campaign has also accepted about $69,750 from political action committees and employees tied to data center and utility interests, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Vistra, according to federal campaign finance records through June 30.

NRSC’s proposed attack does not match Brown’s position

The memo also reveals the message Republicans want to use to counter the attacks.

It says voters prefer a Republican candidate who allows data centers only in communities that approve them and requires the facilities to pay for their own power, water and other utilities over a Democratic candidate “who wants to stop data center construction altogether.”

That latter description does not match Brown’s stated position.

Brown has called for eliminating Ohio’s data center tax incentives, requiring the facilities to pay the full costs associated with their electricity use and giving local communities a say over whether projects are built. Neither Brown nor Husted has endorsed a blanket statewide moratorium on new data centers.

Ohio Democrats: Husted wants the industry to bail him out

Ohio Democratic Party Senior Communications Advisor Tony Wen seized on the memo Wednesday, arguing that Republicans are now asking the same corporations associated with Ohio’s data center boom to rescue Husted politically.

“After leading the charge to bring hundreds of data centers to Ohio, Jon Husted is now being crushed by his toxic record that has sent electricity rates soaring for families. Now Husted is begging the industry to come and bail him out, but it won’t work — and Ohioans will hold him accountable for jacking up their utility bills in November.”

The NRSC’s final warning underscores just how much Republicans believe is riding on Ohio.

“If Husted loses because of data centers, the industry will be blamed,” the committee says, “and elected officials or other parties will learn a cautionary lesson.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

His answers increasingly are not.

Less than three months before Ohio voters choose their next governor, the Republican nominee is facing new scrutiny over the biotech venture that helped make him wealthy, the convicted fentanyl trafficker who guarded his family, a Republican congressman facing abuse allegations whose endorsement he continues to advertise, and campaign spending that reporters spent months trying to untangle.

Now Ramaswamy is facing a blunt accusation from Democrats: He is hiding.

“Vivek is hiding from Ohioans because he knows he can’t own up to his record of scheming to get himself richer at the expense of Ohio families,” the Ohio Democratic Party said Tuesday. “He can dodge the questions all he wants—he can’t hide from the clear choice at the ballot box in November.”

Ramaswamy has spent years cultivating a political persona built around long interviews, town halls and unscripted exchanges.

But that defense does not answer the problem now confronting his campaign.

When questions have turned to some of the most difficult controversies surrounding his business record, campaign operation and political allies, Ramaswamy has repeatedly avoided answering them — or his campaign has not responded at all.

A new investigation into the business that made him rich

The latest questions concern the Alzheimer’s drug venture that became one of the defining episodes of Ramaswamy’s business career.

An Aug. 12 investigation by Oligarch Watch examined previously unreported details about the role Ramaswamy’s mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, played at Axovant Sciences, the company created under Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences umbrella to develop an experimental Alzheimer’s drug.

The drug had already failed multiple Phase 2 clinical trials before Axovant acquired its rights from GlaxoSmithKline for a $5 million upfront payment.

Axovant then hired Ramaswamy’s mother as vice president of medical and scientific strategy. She co-authored new analyses of data from the earlier trials before Axovant raised $315 million in what was then the largest biotechnology initial public offering in U.S. history.

Oligarch Watch reported that the analyses excluded or recategorized portions of the underlying trial data in ways that produced more favorable findings. The outlet cited medical researchers who have criticized the types of analytical methods used because they can introduce bias or increase the risk of false findings.

TiffinOhio.net examined those findings Sunday. Ramaswamy ultimately earned an estimated $260 million during his time at Roivant, according to Forbes. Intepirdine later failed its Phase 3 trial, sending Axovant shares down roughly 70% in one day.

Ramaswamy has never been charged with fraud or any crime related to Axovant. He has defended the company’s decision to continue developing the drug, saying after its failure that he would make the same decision again given the same information.

But the new reporting raised a different set of questions about what Ramaswamy knew, why his mother was placed in the role, how the failed data were reanalyzed and how those results were presented to investors.

His campaign did not respond to Oligarch Watch’s request for comment.

The Ohio Democratic Party followed with five questions for Ramaswamy, including why he promoted the drug after earlier clinical failures and why his mother was chosen to work on the trial analyses.

Ramaswamy has not publicly answered those questions.

His family bodyguard pleaded guilty. One question never went away.

One day after the Axovant investigation was published, another controversy returned to Ramaswamy’s campaign.

Justin Salsburey, the man who had guarded Ramaswamy and his family, pleaded guilty in federal court Aug. 13 to conspiring to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine and fentanyl.

Federal agents had arrested Salsburey in December after searching his Bellefontaine home. Authorities recovered 264 grams of fentanyl, along with methamphetamine, firearms and other evidence. Prosecutors said Salsburey and his wife were involved in mailing hundreds of drug packages.

There is no evidence Ramaswamy knew about or participated in Salsburey’s drug trafficking.

But the arrest created another question about Ramaswamy’s campaign that has never been publicly explained.

After Salsburey’s arrest became public, the campaign continued paying ARK Protection Group, the security company that employed him.

Campaign-finance records reviewed by TiffinOhio.net showed $14,000 in payments to ARK after the arrest. That included a $2,000 payment on Jan. 20 — four days after the campaign announced that the Ramaswamy family had begun “relieving Ark Protection Group of their responsibilities and transitioning to a new service provider.”

TiffinOhio.net asked Ramaswamy to explain why the campaign sent another payment after making that announcement.

He did not respond.

ARK shut down the following day.

Asked about Max Miller, Ramaswamy talked about something else

Ramaswamy has also been confronted directly with questions about U.S. Rep. Max Miller, the Republican congressman whose endorsement remains advertised by Ramaswamy’s campaign.

Miller has faced allegations of domestic violence from his former wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller denies the allegations and has not been criminally charged.

The House Ethics Committee has opened an investigation. Moreno has said Miller should not serve in Congress. Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, went further and called on Miller to resign and withdraw from the November ballot.

Ramaswamy had an opportunity to say where he stood when reporters approached him at the Ohio State Fair on Aug. 5.

He did not.

Signal Ohio reported that Ramaswamy “avoided weighing in on Miller”.

“I wish everybody’s family well,” Ramaswamy said. “My prayers are with the granddaughter who’s involved in that situation. And I think that is the most important thing.”

That answer did not address whether Miller should remain in Congress. It did not address whether Ramaswamy believes Miller is fit for office. And it did not address whether Ramaswamy still wants Miller’s endorsement.

Miller’s name remains on Ramaswamy’s campaign website.

As TiffinOhio.net reported Tuesday, the continued silence has become more conspicuous as other Republicans have taken positions and as the super PAC working to elect Ramaswamy has attacked Democratic nominee Amy Acton using her own history as a childhood abuse survivor.

The half-million-dollar credit card

The pattern predates the latest controversies.

Earlier this summer, reporters discovered that Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign had reported more than half a million dollars in payments to American Express without initially disclosing the individual purchases behind those bills.

The Ohio Capital Journal repeatedly sought the underlying documentation and an explanation from the campaign.

The campaign did not initially answer an email. After a follow-up phone call, a Ramaswamy spokesperson said he would look into the matter but did not provide the documentation by the outlet’s deadline.

The result was an extraordinary number sitting in plain sight on Ramaswamy’s campaign reports with little indication of what the money actually purchased.

State Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, eventually filed a complaint over $509,473.01 in American Express payments, accusing the campaign of violating Ohio’s campaign-finance disclosure requirements.

The Secretary of State’s office gave the campaign additional time to update its filing. Ramaswamy’s campaign subsequently amended the records and said it was in full compliance with Ohio law.

Whatever the ultimate legal significance of the reporting dispute, the episode followed the same sequence now repeating elsewhere: reporters raised a straightforward question about Ramaswamy’s operation and initially received no answer.

The questions keep coming

That is what makes the newest accusation politically different from a generic campaign attack.

Democrats are not simply arguing that they dislike Ramaswamy’s answers.

They are arguing that on some of the biggest questions now surrounding the Republican nominee, there have been no answers at all.

Why was his mother placed in a position to reanalyze failed Alzheimer’s drug data before an historic IPO?

Why did his campaign continue paying ARK Protection after the arrest of the man guarding his family — including after announcing that it was transitioning away from the company?

Does he still stand behind Max Miller?

And what does Ramaswamy say to Ohio voters about a business venture that made him enormously wealthy even as the Alzheimer’s drug at its center ultimately failed?

The Ohio GOP’s response is that Ramaswamy is available. He attends events. He talks to voters. He talks to reporters.

But availability and accountability are not the same thing.

Ramaswamy built his national political brand in part on his willingness to walk into hostile rooms, take questions and argue his case.

Now, with Election Day approaching and scrutiny of his record intensifying, the unanswered questions are becoming a story of their own.

Ohio voters can see Ramaswamy.

The question is whether he will answer them.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Five weeks later, the war was still going. The Pentagon had put its cost at $37.5 billion. Gasoline prices were sharply higher than a year earlier.

And Conroy was praising President Donald Trump’s handling of the conflict and saying he would support additional military spending.

“I really commend the president for what we’re doing,” Conroy said during an Aug. 14 appearance on SiriusXM’s Cuomo Mornings. “I think we’re moving it in the right direction.”

Conroy also described the military campaign as an overdue task that needed to be done and said he would vote for additional military spending.

The comments put the Trump-backed Republican, who is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman for Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, on record supporting additional defense spending after months of war and tens of billions of dollars in estimated U.S. costs.

‘Coming to a conclusion here very soon’

Conroy sounded far more optimistic about the war’s timeline during a July 11 interview on 700 WLW.

Host Mike Allen introduced the Iran discussion by pointing to Conroy’s background in the Air Force and CIA. Conroy said Iranian leaders were acting irrationally and praised Trump for “holding firm” as the administration tried to reach a resolution.

He then predicted the conflict was nearing its end.

“I really see this probably coming to a conclusion here very soon, literally,” Conroy said during the July 11 episode of 700WLW Weekends.

Conroy pointed to financial and energy markets as evidence that the conflict would not last much longer.

There had been “a little spike, but not a very big spike,” he said, arguing that markets were looking ahead and did not appear to anticipate a prolonged conflict.

That prediction did not hold.

The U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. As of Wednesday, Aug. 19, the conflict was approaching its six-month mark, negotiations remained stalled and uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz was again pushing oil prices higher.

Reuters reported Wednesday that oil prices had climbed to near a three-week high as shipping through the strait remained sharply constrained and tensions in the region escalated.

The economic picture also looked considerably different from the “little spike” Conroy described in July.

By Aug. 14, U.S. gasoline prices were 29% higher than a year earlier, according to Reuters. Trump that day urged Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as part of the cost of confronting Iran.

$37.5 billion — and a request for more

The war has also become a multibillion-dollar question for the Congress Conroy is seeking to join.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers July 21 that the conflict had cost the United States an estimated $37.5 billion.

The figure included certain anticipated costs through Sept. 30, Reuters reported.

Trump had also asked Congress for nearly $90 billion in additional funding, most of it related to the Iran conflict. The request came as lawmakers in both parties questioned the administration about the duration, cost and objectives of a war Congress never formally authorized.

The debate has repeatedly divided Ohio’s congressional delegation.

Early in the war, Ohio lawmakers split across party lines and within their own parties over Trump’s military strikes. Republican Rep. Warren Davidson broke with much of his party to support congressional limits on the president’s ability to continue military action without authorization.

More recently, Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted voted against a July measure that would have forced the withdrawal of U.S. forces, one day after telling CNN that he wanted the war to end.

Conroy would not have had a vote on any of those measures because he is not currently a member of Congress. His Aug. 14 comments, however, offer a preview of how he says he would approach military spending if voters send him to Washington.

Landsman’s position also changed as war dragged on

Conroy’s Democratic opponent was one of just four House Democrats in March to vote against an early War Powers Resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization to continue military operations.

At the time, Landsman said he supported targeted strikes against Iranian military assets while arguing for a separate deadline on the operation.

As the war continued, his position shifted.

By April, Landsman was publicly calling for the Iran war to end and said he would support another congressional effort to terminate U.S. involvement.

That leaves voters in the Cincinnati-area district with a clear foreign-policy contrast heading into November.

Landsman, after initially supporting limited military action, has moved toward ending U.S. involvement.

Conroy, after predicting in July that the conflict would conclude “very soon,” was still praising Trump’s handling of the war five weeks later — and saying he would vote for more military spending.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The crash happened at about 3:55 a.m. Aug. 19 on Interstate 80 near milepost 75 in Woodville Township, according to the Patrol’s Swanton Post.

Melody K. Wilburn was driving a 2014 GMC Terrain east on I-80 when the vehicle traveled off the right side of the roadway and into a ditch, the Patrol said. Wilburn was pronounced dead at the scene.

Wilburn was not wearing a safety belt at the time of the crash, and impairment is not suspected as a factor, according to the Patrol. The crash remains under investigation.

Troopers were assisted at the scene by Lake Township Fire and EMS, the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission, the Sandusky County Coroner’s Office and Madison Motor Service Towing, the Patrol said.

The crash is the second fatal wreck investigated in Sandusky County this month. A 20-year-old passenger was killed and four people were injured in a two-vehicle crash at U.S. 6 and State Route 53 in Ballville Township. In June, a 65-year-old Bettsville man died in a single-vehicle crash on County Road 62 in Jackson Township, and in July a Perrysburg man was killed in an Ottawa County crash.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ickes, a Republican, is still on the ballot in November. He is seeking a full term that begins Jan. 1, 2027, and a two-year suspension imposed Wednesday runs into 2028 — covering roughly the first 19 months of it. His opponent is Kimberly J. Ontko, a Fremont attorney running as an independent, who announced her candidacy in January, according to the Fremont News-Messenger. Ontko is also a magistrate in the same courthouse, assigned to the general division’s other judge, Jeremiah S. Ray.

Ray is the judge who reported Ickes.

The court was not close to the sanction its own disciplinary board wanted. The Board of Professional Conduct, after a four-day hearing and testimony from 19 witnesses, recommended a one-year suspension entirely stayed, meaning Ickes would have served no time off the bench at all. The justices threw that out.

“An actual suspension is necessary to protect the public and demonstrate that we will not tolerate the childish, inappropriate, and vulgar behavior Ickes exhibited in chambers and in the courtroom,” Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

What the court found

The justices adopted 10 findings of misconduct spanning five counts, under rules requiring judges to promote confidence in the judiciary, to be patient and courteous, to disqualify themselves when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned, and to hold their staff to the same standard.

The most consequential finding involves Ickes’s stepson, Christian Ortolani, a Fremont police officer and detective. Ortolani helped investigate three criminal cases that landed on Ickes’s docket. Ickes presided anyway, and in the case of defendant Curtis L. Elkins he never disclosed the relationship on the record or asked the parties to waive the conflict — even as prospective jurors were being asked whether they were related to any of the state’s witnesses, Ortolani among them. Ortolani testified at trial. Ickes sentenced Elkins to six to nine years.

In a separate case, Leroy A. Stratton was indicted for raping an 18-month-old child and live-streaming it. Stratton asked Ickes to step aside because Ortolani had arrested him, read him his rights, executed a search warrant and worked the investigation. Ickes refused, ruling that the standard was not met. Ortolani then testified at trial, authenticated video of the crime and sat at the prosecution’s table. Stratton was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

The Sixth District Court of Appeals reversed both convictions. In Elkins’s case it found an “unconstitutional potential for bias.” In Stratton’s it found the probability of bias violated his due-process rights. Both cases were sent back for new trials. Stratton was tried a second time in January 2026, before a visiting judge, and sentenced again on Feb. 4 to life without the possibility of parole, according to the Fremont News-Messenger — the identical sentence, reached at the cost of putting the case in front of a second jury.

Kennedy called it a “glaring conflict of interest,” and wrote that Ickes’s failures “not only wasted prosecutorial, public-defender, and judicial resources but also caused incalculable harm to public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.” The court added an aggravating factor the board had not: that Ickes harmed vulnerable victims, because his conduct “left Elkins, Stratton, and their victims to endure a second trial.”

The chambers

For the eight months the Stratton case sat on his docket, Ickes referred to it as the “baby cocksucker case.” He testified that the phrase helped him process a disturbing case. One staff member called it disgusting; another said it left her extremely uncomfortable and disturbed.

During Stratton’s February 2024 trial, Ickes texted from the bench with three court employees. They mocked a man sitting in the gallery during jury selection — Ickes called him a “potential defendant in the array” and then “next Christian creeper,” a reference to the kind of child predator his stepson investigated. While a video of the crime was being discussed in testimony, Ickes sent the group a video of a woman eating a banana, and then a dancing banana.

The court found that conduct “demeaned the seriousness of the charged offense.”

A separate count concerned Ickes’s treatment of a pregnant employee, his assignment commissioner, identified in the opinion as J.D. In April 2024 he told her to “wait until the titty fairy comes.” She told him she did not want to hear it again. He asked whether they could talk about the “butt fairy.” After she complained to the court administrator, Ickes had his wife call her; kept raising it; asked whether she wanted to be there; and insinuated he would fire her. J.D. testified that she was pregnant, had maternity leave banked, and her husband’s factory was closing. “The writing was on the wall,” she said. “And I was very scared.” She left for the other judge’s office.

That judge, Ray, reported it. Ickes then instructed county administrators to halt their investigation and hired an outside firm instead.

Another count concerned a January 2024 morning when Ickes, in his assignment commissioner’s office, quoted a line from “Blazing Saddles” containing the n-word. Nathaniel Simmons, a Black defendant with a pretrial hearing that day, was sitting in the hallway and heard all of it. Simmons’s attorney asked for a different judge. Ickes recused without explanation and self-reported. A second Black defendant, Timothy Norris, later sought Ickes’s removal from his own case, arguing the slur “applie[d] to all colored people.” Ickes said he was quoting a movie, denied the motion from the bench, and never entered a written ruling.

The opinion also catalogs a Nerf gun Ickes fired at staff in chambers and in the courtroom, including when defendants facing serious charges were present; the time he reached for the drawer with his handgun in it by mistake and joked about it afterward; the acronyms he assigned to probation titles; calling the probation secretary “Boris” because she was Black; calling his assignment commissioner a “libtard” when she disagreed with his politics; and saying “snatch chat” instead of Snapchat while instructing juries.

It also describes how he treated probation officer Logan Risch, who overdosed and blacked out after airborne fentanyl was released during a routine pat-down, hit her head, and needed physical therapy for a neck injury. Ickes handled the resulting case. Afterward he asked Risch in front of a colleague why she had not testified, calling her a “dumbass.” Later, discussing the same incident in chambers, he said “some dumbass” correction officer had touched fentanyl without gloves. Risch testified that she did not believe Ickes treated her as a victim at all.

Who stood by him

None of this was secret when Sandusky County Republicans put Ickes on the November ballot.

The disciplinary complaint became public in October 2024. The four-day hearing was held in May 2025. The board’s findings — all 10 of them, including the conflict of interest, the case nickname and the texting from the bench — were filed with the Supreme Court in October 2025. The case was submitted to the justices on Dec. 10, 2025. Ontko announced her independent campaign in January. The primary was held on May 5.

No Republican filed against him. No Democrat filed at all. The party had four months’ notice that the seat would be contested in November and did not put up an alternative. Of the 7,737 Republican ballots cast in Sandusky County on May 5, 5,092 were marked for Ickes and 2,645 were left blank in his race.

Two of the county’s most prominent Republican officeholders had already testified on his behalf. Sandusky County Prosecutor Beth Tischler, who was running for the other common pleas seat at the time, rated Ickes a nine out of 10 as a trial judge under cross-examination by his attorney. “Since I was taught by somebody you don’t give anybody a perfect score, I’ll go with nine,” she said, according to the hearing transcript.

Probate and Juvenile Judge Brad Smith called Ickes “a solid human being and a good judge” and attributed the courthouse tensions entirely to Ray — the judge who had reported the conduct — calling it “a one sided problem.” Disciplinary counsel wrote in post-hearing briefs that Smith “seemed to minimize respondent’s conduct” and noted he lacked firsthand knowledge of what happened in Ickes’s chambers. From the stand, Smith said: “I still don’t know as I sit here today, what is quite factual and accurate and what might be twisted or exaggerated.”

Tischler lost her primary to Ray by roughly 18 points. Before that vote she told TiffinOhio.net: “My decision to run against Judge Ray, and the fractured relationship between Judge Ray and my office have nothing to do with him reporting Judge Ickes to discipline.”

As of Wednesday, the Sandusky County Republican Party’s website still listed Ickes among its county officeholders, photograph and all, under the heading “Common Pleas Court Judge.” The party is chaired by Justin Smith, whom the central committee appointed to a county commissioner seat in April.

Ickes reached the bench in the first place by appointment. Gov. Mike DeWine named him to the vacancy in June 2020, replacing retiring Judge John P. Dewey. He was elected that November and to a full term beginning Jan. 1, 2021.

Even at the top, two justices wanted less

The Supreme Court’s majority went harder than its board. But not unanimously.

Justice R. Patrick DeWine would have imposed one year with six months stayed. Justice Joseph T. Deters would have imposed the full two years but stayed all of it, on the conditions that Ickes commit no further misconduct and complete an antiharassment course — an outcome that would have left him on the bench, drawing his salary, through the end of his term and into the next one.

Chief Justice Kennedy was joined by Justices Patrick F. Fischer, Daniel R. Hawkins and Megan E. Shanahan, along with Fourth District Court of Appeals Judge Michael D. Hess, who sat in place of Justice Jennifer Brunner.

The majority pointed to what Ickes had not done. He never resigned. The board did not credit him with accepting responsibility. And judges, the court said, are held to a higher standard than other attorneys precisely because “misconduct committed by a judge vested with the public’s trust causes incalculable harm to the public perception of the legal system.”

Ickes testified that he behaved as he did in order to be liked. The court was unmoved: “His misguided attempt to make some people like him was completely self-serving at the expense of others and the justice system.”

What happens next

Ickes is off the bench and off the payroll as of Wednesday. Costs of the disciplinary proceedings are taxed to him.

The opinion does not address who covers his docket. It does not address the November election. And it does not say whether the seat is treated as vacant — the order suspends him from judicial office rather than removing him from it, a distinction that determines whether the governor gets to appoint anyone.

What voters will see Nov. 3 is a two-name race with no party labels beside either one. Ohio runs partisan primaries for common pleas judgeships and nonpartisan general elections, so nothing on the ballot will indicate that one candidate is the Republican nominee, that he is currently barred from practicing law in Ohio, or that the other is an independent who works down the hall for the judge who turned him in.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In response to Trump’s application to the high court, the National Trust for Historic Preservation argued irreparable harm would result if construction continued, and that the project is “illegal” without authorization from Congress.

The Trust lawyers highlighted that the Trump administration has argued in court the ballroom will be “virtually impossible to deconstruct” because it will be constructed out of nuclear power plant-grade concrete.

“That is the essence of irreparable harm,” the Trust argued in the 48-page filing.

“Petitioners make no secret of the fact that if the Court permits construction to continue, they will declare the case over,” according to the Trust, a private nonprofit chartered by Congress in 1949 to encourage the protection of historic sites.

By contrast, the organization argued, the president and his administration would not be harmed if the Supreme Court left intact a lower court order halting above-ground construction.

Security complex

Court filings from the administration have publicly revealed that a security complex under the ballroom will descend five stories, and is well on its way to completion. 

The concrete-and-steel “superstructure,” reaching five stories deep and 70 feet high, already encompassing about 50,000 square feet, is 65% finished, according to the administration. 

Plans include a 1,000-seat ballroom incorporated into a “highly integrated military complex” with drone-proof ceilings, bomb shelters, sniper nests, “military-grade venting,” and “state-of-the-art hospital and medical facilities.” 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit panel on Aug. 7 upheld, 2-1, the lower court order blocking all but underground construction while litigation continued.

The Trust further argued Tuesday that any above-ground construction happening is already illegal because Congress didn’t authorize it, which means the administration would not likely win the case should the Supreme Court take it up. 

“The question is simply who decides whether a ballroom can be built on federal property. Our constitutional system and federal law commits that choice to Congress,” the Trust argued. 

“If Petitioners believe there is a pressing need for a ballroom, nothing prevents them from asking Congress for one — today, tomorrow, or any time in the future,” the brief reads. “But Petitioners’ efforts to foil judicial review and arrogate Congress’s exclusive powers should not be rewarded with a stay that allows Petitioners to complete a ballroom they lacked any authority to commence in the first place.”

Democrats back preservationists

More than 30 Democratic U.S. senators, U.S. House Democratic leaders and committee ranking members from both chambers filed a brief Tuesday in support of the Trust.

Lawmakers who signed the brief are from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington.

“The White House is, indisputably, federal property. It was built only after Congress authorized its construction and appropriated funds to cover that expense,” the lawmakers wrote. “And for over two centuries since, the White House has been renovated and maintained pursuant to congressional authorizations and appropriations.”

But Congress “neither authorized the demolition of the White House’s East Wing and construction of a ballroom nor appropriated funds to carry out that project,” they continued.

Trump maintains the ballroom project is being funded entirely by private donations. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who was Trump’s personal attorney before joining the government, told the Supreme Court in the administration’s application last week that $200 million has already been spent or committed to the project. 

Sauer argued that a statute governing the Department of the Interior allows private donations to cover projects on land administered by the National Park Service. The service, an agency within the Interior Department, manages the White House and President’s Park.

The Democratic senators who signed onto the amicus brief were Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Gary Peters of Michigan, Adam Schiff of California, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Ron Wyden of Oregon

The Democratic House leaders who joined the brief were Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California. 

The other representatives who signed on were Robert Garcia, Jared Huffman, Ro Khanna, Mark Takano, Maxine Waters and Zoe Lofgren of California; Jim Hines of Connecticut; Rick Larsen and Adam Smith of Washington state; Jamie Raskin of Maryland; Bobby Scott of Virginia; Bennie Thompson of Mississippi; and Gregory Meeks and Joe Morelle of New York.

Republican AGs want ballroom

A brief led by the Republican Attorneys General Raúl Labrador of Idaho and Todd Rokita of Indiana argued the Supreme Court should side with Trump because the National Trust allegedly built its case on the “associational standing” of one of its board members who would not suffer harm.

“This case is about more than a ballroom. It is about whether a passerby’s aesthetic objection to a government construction project furnishes not just the passerby standing, but an uninjured association standing to air its grievances in court,” the attorneys general wrote. 

The argument echoed Trump’s many public statements that the case against his ballroom rests on the objection of one person who sometimes walks by the White House.

That risk is “of significant interest to States across the Nation,” they wrote.  “Amici States have extensive experience litigating against organizations that invoke associational standing as their ticket into court.”

The attorneys general concluded: “The Court should not allow groups whose members claim offense to sue over virtually anything and everything.” 

A federal district judge in December had already denied the Trust’s initial request for a temporary restraining order based on the lack of irreparable harm for an initial plaintiff.

The most recent lower court decision is based on an amended complaint filed by the Trust in early March.

In addition to Idaho and Indiana, the Republican attorneys general who signed the brief are from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Two members of the Arizona state legislature also signed it.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

DNC Chair Ken Martin said during Saturday’s meeting that the early lineup reflects the diversity of the party’s electorate. 

“Our 2028 nominee, whoever they are, will have to earn the support across the full breadth of America — every region, every demographic, every generation, every economic station in life,” he said. “No shortcuts. No coronation. You want to lead this party? You go earn it.”

Saturday’s vote ratified the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee vote in late July to recommend the lineup for approval by the full party. 

Throughout the meeting, speakers and party officials from each of the six states to hold an early contest praised the impact the calendar will have for regions that haven’t always been top of mind for national candidates. 

Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair who challenged the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2020, said the calendar will tell a “whole new generation” of voters that the party is fighting for them.

Other speakers included Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, New Hampshire Democratic Committeewoman Donna Soucy and Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel Jr.

Martin said that the lineup is a “stronger, more representative path to selecting our nominee.”

“This is much bigger than a lineup of dates on a calendar,” Martin said. “This is about our approach to winning back the presidency. It’s about the kind of Democratic Party and the kind of country we aspire to be.” 

South Carolina, Nevada come out on top

For the second straight presidential cycle, South Carolina will kick off the party’s nominating process. 

The full lineup of primaries is as follows: 

• South Carolina on Jan. 22, 2028

• Nevada on Feb. 1, 2028

• New Hampshire on Feb. 8, 2028

• New Mexico on Feb. 15, 2028

• Michigan on Feb. 22, 2028

• Virginia on Feb. 29, 2028

The lineup includes at least one state from each of the DNC’s four regions. The party’s rules and bylaws committee also voted in July to expand the number of early primaries to six, selecting New Mexico and Virginia to hold the additional contests.

Several speakers Saturday said the calendar will better serve Latino and Black voters. 

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-New Mexico, said the calendar will show Latino voters they aren’t ignored. 

“With over 4.2 million Latinos in the early voting states, Latinos will not (just) be talked about,” she said. “Our stories will shape the policies of the next president of the United States, who will be a Democrat.”

Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and DNC chair from 2001 to 2005, said the calendar will put the party’s 2028 nominee “through the crucible” and force them to reach rural, suburban, urban and military voters alike. 

Iowa left out

Notably, the early lineup excludes Iowa, despite a push from its state party officials to keep it among the initial contests. 

The Hawkeye State had long held a first-in-the-nation spot in the Democratic presidential nominating cycle, including in 2020 and 2016. But after delays in reporting results of the 2020 caucus, leading to no declared winner on the night of the caucus, many national Democrats looked elsewhere to kick off the nominating cycle. 

In a speech opposing the 2028 calendar Saturday, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said that it “fundamentally misses the mark.”

“It’s a product of broken promises, and it excludes huge swaths of the country and the voters that Democrats need to win the kind of majorities it takes to restore democratic principles and reject this misguided and corrupt Trump administration,” she said. “The 2028 calendar has no representation of states with a majority of central or mountain time zones, and no Midwest state is among the first four.”

Hart noted that Republicans have kept the Iowa Caucus as its first contest of the 2028 presidential nominating process, and the resulting surge in spending in the state during its contest could harm Democratic candidates for elected office in the state if that spending is not met by Democrats. 

New Hampshire, which has also long held an early position in the nominating process, kept its position, however. 

Democrats look South 

The primary calendar reflects Democrats’ effort to court voters in the South, as well as a partial shift away from the Midwest. 

Martin began the meeting Friday — held in Austin, Texas — by emphasizing Democrats’ chance at flipping a Texas Senate seat, long held by Republicans. 

An Emerson College and Nexstar Media poll conducted from Aug. 9-10 showed state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, within one point of Republican nominee and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

On Friday, the DNC also announced a new initiative to help local Democratic parties in Southern states build up their infrastructure in order to win elections. 

The DNC said in a statement Friday that the Southern States Resource Hub will seek to address “years of underinvestment” in those Southern parties, and allocate resources for organizing, voter registration, data collection, fundraising efforts and communications systems so they can better compete in a region with a rapidly changing electorate.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The third Politics of Parenthood: Representation in State Legislatures report was recently published by the Vote Mama Foundation, a nonprofit organization that studies the political participation of mothers in the United States. 

About 4% of Ohio state lawmakers were moms of minors when the first report was published in 2022 and that number rose to 6% in 2024 for the second report. 

Of Ohio’s 132 state lawmakers in 2026, 12 are moms of minor children as of February, according to this year’s report. Ohio would need 13 total moms of minors to reach proportional representation among the population at-large, according to the report.

Only two states have reached proportional representation: California and Virginia.

Ohio ranks 23rd in this year’s report — a significant jump compared to being ranked 37th in 2024. 

“It’s important to have well-rounded conversations, and the only way to do that on each piece of legislation is to have a variety of people in these elected positions,” said Ohio state Rep. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown. 

Ohio lawmakers who are moms of minor children are:

• State Sen. Susan Manchester, R-Waynesfield

• State Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey, D-Cincinnati

• State Rep. Rachel Baker, D–Cincinnati

• State Rep. Beryl Brown Piccolantonio, D-Gahanna

• State Rep. Kellie Deeter, R-Norwalk

• State Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, R-Ashtabula

• State Rep. Latyna Humphrey, D-Columbus

• State Rep. Crystal Lett, D-Hilliard

• State Rep. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown

• State Rep. Monica Robb Blasdel, R-New Waterford

• State Rep. Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington

• State Rep. Heidi Workman, R-Rootstown

The Ohio Capital Journal talked to Fowler Arthur, McNally, Bryant Bailey, and Piccolantonio about balancing motherhood and their work in the legislature. 

“We need more moms in every state legislature across the country,” Bryant Bailey said.

“The ability to truly understand wholeheartedly a lot of the issues that plague our residents really starts with the lens of how we learn to be protectors as mothers, and it pains me that our government is not really suited for moms, I’ll even say for parents in general, especially of young kids.”

Nationally, 8.3% of state legislators are moms of minors — a 5.3% increase since the 2024 report. 

Of the 7,386 state legislators in the United States, only 613 were moms with children under 18, as of February, according to the report. 

About 730 more moms with kids under 18 are needed to have proportional representation in state legislatures, according to the report. 

“(Being a mom) is one of the busiest phases of life,” Piccolantonio said. “That is one of the reasons why the numbers are so low, and also the reason why it is so important to have those voices at the table when making policy decisions.”

California and Virginia have reached proportional representation. 

“Getting mamas at every decision-making table requires paying attention to state legislatures, which pass tens of thousands of bills each year that affect nearly every aspect of families’ lives,” Liuba Grechen Shirley, founder and CEO of Vote Mama Foundation, said in a statement. 

This is the first year moms of children under 18 have been elected to all 50 state legislatures, according to the report. 

Challenges experienced

An often mentioned challenge of balancing motherhood and being a lawmaker is the distance from a lawmaker’s district to the Ohio Statehouse and missing out on family activities. 

“I can’t just be home after session, regardless of what time session ends,” said McNally, who lives about three hours away from the Statehouse and has four children — ages 12, 10, 9, and 6. 

“I can’t come home for an emergency. I’m not home in time for their baseball game because committee ended at four. I’m doing homework in between committee on FaceTime at the Statehouse with them, or helping my daughter pick out her school outfit for picture day on FaceTime while I’m down in Columbus.” 

McNally acknowledged it can be hard to make it to events in the evenings or on the weekends. 

“I get that you want me to come to your event on Sunday, but I want to go to my kid’s soccer game on Sunday,” McNally said. 

To squeeze in extra time with her kids, she tries not to work on President’s Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day when her kids are off school. 

“When I am home, I try really hard to make moments that are exciting for them.” 

But the work does not always stop, even when she is with her family.

“There’s very few places I go where I don’t get stopped to have a conversation about something, and that includes my kids’ baseball game or my kids’ dance competition, where my kids want me to focus on them,” McNally said.

Bryant Bailey has two children — ages two and seven — and she said there is some guilt at times when it comes to balancing legislative duties and motherhood. 

“I don’t live in Columbus, so when I’m there to do the legislative work — whether we’re in session or not — it’s always going to be time away,” she said. 

“Even when I am in Cincinnati, the work doesn’t stop. … There’s always that short-term feeling of are they seeing me enough?”

Becoming a mom has changed how Fowler Arthur spends her time traveling to and from the Statehouse, which is at least a three hour drive.  

She typically leaves early Tuesday morning for committee meetings and goes back home Wednesday after session. 

“I really try hard to be here to tuck them in and be here when they wake up as much as I can,” Fowler Arthur said. 

“They’re always so happy to see that, but it is a lot more wearing, I think, on me personally just to be driving on top of these really full days that we already have.”

Even though Piccolantonio lives in Central Ohio, she’s not able to make it to everything for her sons. 

“There are definitely sacrifices missing out on activities or things that get scheduled,” she said.

Her youngest son plays tennis, but she’s only been able to make it to one of his matches. 

“I work to find ways to be constantly connected with him, even if I’m not physically there with him,” Piccolantonio said. 

“We try — in the times that I’m not as busy — to schedule more time together. I try as hard as I can to keep Sundays clear.” 

State Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur

Fowler Arthur and her husband legally adopted their children — ages 8, 9, and 10 — almost three years ago after fostering them. 

Becoming a mom has made Fowler Arthur, who is the chair of the Ohio House Education Committee, more passionate about children learning how to read and the importance of math. 

“I didn’t really connect how absolutely unprepared for everyday life someone could be until my kids came into my house officially going into second grade and going into first grade in the public school, and still could not read, and seeing them struggle through the process,” she said.

“If they have those two basic fundamental skill sets (reading and math) they really do have the world at their fingertips. If they don’t, they are at such a huge disadvantage compared to their peers who can read.”

Fowler Arthur occasionally brings her children to the Ohio Statehouse — sometimes if they can’t find child care and other times as part of their homeschooling education. 

“They really love to come and to observe and be a part of just the day-to-day activities of the legislature, which I think is a really neat hands-on experience,” she said. 

“They love coming home and playing state representatives.” 

State Rep. Lauren McNally

McNally had her three youngest children while serving on Youngstown City Council before being elected to the Ohio Statehouse. 

“Both times I ran for city council, I was pregnant,” she said. “They’ve been my winning lucky charm.” 

At the Statehouse, most of McNally’s testimony for bills includes a personal story about her children.

When she testified in support of Ohio House Bill 63 — which would require security cameras at all rest areas — McNally talked about how her family decided where to stop on a road trip while driving through West Virginia. 

“I didn’t know it, but our then three-year-old was getting motion sickness,” she said in her April 2025 testimony. 

“Our family weighed the pros and cons of stopping … It wasn’t until we made it to a Welcome Center that we finally stopped, got her cleaned up, and went on our way. … (Travelers are) looking for locations with a presumption of safety.”

From wearing her campaign shirts during election season to conversations about McNally’s work during dinner, her children are “very much involved” in her job as a lawmaker. 

“It’s not a traditional job from that perspective,” McNally said. 

“Protecting your family unit while also being in the public eye like this is a balance.”

State Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey

Being a mom impacts every decision Bryant Bailey makes and the implications it will have for her two children. 

She introduced Ohio House Bill 768 which would allow certain child care staff members to receive publicly funded child care. 

“My daughter goes to daycare, and I know full well there are teachers at her daycare that can’t afford to send their own kids there,” she said. 

“I talk to the child care workers at my daughter’s school all the time about how difficult it is, and I know firsthand how expensive childcare can be.”

State Rep. Beryl Brown Piccolantonio

Piccolantonio said her sons — ages 22, 20, and 16 — are the reason she serves in the Ohio legislature. 

“It’s at the forefront of my mind whenever I’m thinking about any bills that we’re talking about,” she said. 

“When I’m making decisions, a lot of times I’m thinking about it from the perspective of what would my kids think about me doing this.” 

Piccolantonio often finds herself asking how a bill would affect young people and families. 

“How would this legislation make it easier or more difficult for a family, for a mom, to be able to afford to live in Ohio or to be able to have opportunities in this state?” she said.  

Piccolantonio wrestles with her children being part of public life. 

“You are a public servant, it really is a full family commitment … but for kids who are minors, they’re not consenting to be part of public life, and yet they are part of public life,” she said. 

Most people Piccolantonio’s sons interact with know their mom is a state representative. 

“Their identities are set in that way without them having made a choice about that,” she said.

“It weighs on me a lot. They are young people trying to forge their own identities. That’s a lot to carry on their shoulders.”

She often talks about that with her sons. 

“I have a lot of different roles, but in my mind, my first role is always as mom.” 

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.

Rader, D-Lakewood, wants the Public Utility Commission of Ohio to hold hearings in AES’ service territory to allow ratepayers, local governments, and other stakeholders to weigh in before making a final decision.

“This is a consequential decision for the future of Ohio’s electric system,” Rader wrote in a letter to PUCO chair Jenifer French.

“With rates increasing, data-center demand accelerating, and billions of dollars in new grid investment likely ahead, Ohioans deserve the opportunity to ask questions and be heard before control of their electric utility changes hands,” he went on.

A PUCO spokesman acknowledged they’d received the letter and filed it in the case docket.

The Commission set an Aug. 13 deadline for comments in the case, and it has yet to make a final decision on the deal. A staff review, however, indicated the buyers are a “suitable owner for AES Ohio.”

The consortium

The buyers include the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, California’s public employee pension program, a Swedish private equity firm called EQT, and Global Infrastructure Partners, a subsidiary of the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock. The consortium put up $10.7 billion in cash.

In a March press release, the parties said AES will have “improved access to capital to invest in critical energy infrastructure assets,” and it would “continue to invest prudently in utility assets to meet the growing energy needs of all 1.1 million customers.”

The consortium’s said it intends to leave the utilities’ management team intact and make additional investments in the competitive energy generation market.

The release plainly stated, “this acquisition is not expected to impact customer rates in AES’ regulated utilities.”

The PUCO staff report leans heavily on the consortium’s assurances that it won’t meddle in the utility’s day-to-day operations.

The report notes the company’s rates and management aren’t changing, the company isn’t rebranding, and merger costs won’t get recovered through rates. Customers will use the same website, call the same call center, and receive the same bills.

“Staff believe that a change in ownership has little to no foreseeable drawbacks for AES Ohio,” the report said. The new owners might even give the company more opportunities to invest energy infrastructure, PUCO staff added.

“The benefits of an active investing ownership outweighs the foreseeable drawbacks,” the report said.

It’s a point AES Board chairman Jay Morse brought up when the deal was announced. In the press release, he emphasized the benefits for current stockholders and noted the company had “significant need for capital to support growth beyond 2027.”

Without the acquisition, Morse warned, AES would have likely cut or eliminates dividends and might have issued a “substantial” number of new shares in the company — diluting current stockholders’ stake.

Skeptics concerns

The consortium aiming to purchase AES emphasizes the “enhanced financial flexibility” it will have as a private company, but Rader worries that also mean less transparency.

“It’s a big change,” he said. “Going from a publicly traded company to completely privately held. (It) closes some doors and makes it a little more opaque.”

He’s also concerned about conflicts of interest. BlackRock has substantial investments in artificial intelligence and data centers.

AES sees data centers as a significant growth opportunity within its service territory. So what happens when the company that controls the grid also has a stake in one of its biggest customers?

“It feels like, seems like to me, there might be some, if not double dealing, at least some incentives here to give data centers a great deal, (while) at the same time passing those costs on to customers,” Rader said.

“Incentives don’t seem to be quite lined up in my opinion,” he added.

Just east of Dayton, Kim McCarthy chairs the Greene County Democratic Party, and she’s running for a state House seat in November.

By day, she’s an accountant, and she isn’t thrilled about private equity taking over the local utility. She described losing her job in 2021 after a private equity firm bought the local IT company where she was working.

“So, when I heard that private equity groups were looking to purchase AES,” McCarthy said, “I couldn’t help but think, oh wow, they’re just going to hollow out our electrical system.”

As for Rader’s idea to holding public hearings in the Dayton area, McCarthy’s on board, so long as it’s “impactful,” rather than an exercise to “placate the public.”

“Qatar? BlackRock? And no offense to the California pension fund, but what do they care?” she said. “They want to make money. That’s all they want to do. They have no ties to this area, they’re not going to care about the lives that are impacted here.”

And she isn’t the only one skeptical of the consortium’s long-term plans.

In a filing with the PUCO, representatives from the city of Dayton pressed for binding assurances from the utility’s new owners.

If regulators are going to rely on the consortium’s claims to justify approving the purchase, the city reasoned, they should take steps to ensure the consortium sticks to its promises.

Among Dayton’s asks, PUCO should require the new owners maintain AES’ headquarters, senior leadership, and at least 90% of its baseline workforce in the area for the next 20 years.

And while the consortium plans to continue programs investing in local infrastructure and economic development, Dayton argued choosing not to eliminate that work isn’t the same as providing a benefit.

“The city would like to see how the merger improves upon the great work AES is already doing,” the city’s filing stated, “not whether the merger will simply maintain AES’ existing commitments.”

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.

So Kansas City fire officials went on a nationwide hunt for trucks. But their frantic search turned up just four they could buy immediately, and the vehicles were designed for smaller, more rural departments.

Their experience was not unusual: Municipalities and fire departments in every state are struggling with soaring prices and years-long delivery times for trucks. It’s a crisis many cities and departments lay squarely at the feet of the country’s biggest fire apparatus manufacturers.

“There must come a day of reckoning when the manufacturers of our most important tools are held accountable for runaway pricing and extended delivery times,” Dennis Rubin, the chief of the Kansas City Fire Department, told U.S. senators last fall at hearing convened to investigate price increases and delivery delays on fire trucks.

Kansas City is one of more than 60 cities, counties and fire departments across the nation — from Milwaukee to San Diego, Pittsburgh to Tampa — that say the country’s three biggest fire truck manufacturers have conspired to suppress competition, resulting in skyrocketing prices for fire trucks and repair parts, and yearslong manufacturing delays.

In April, a federal court rolled up their claims into a trio of antitrust class action lawsuits in a Wisconsin district court.

The defendants are fire apparatus manufacturers REV Group Inc., Oshkosh Corporation and Rosenbauer Group, along with some of their subsidiaries and related companies, as well as their trade group, the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association.

By some estimates, the three manufacturers together control 70-80% of the U.S. fire truck market. Fire engine prices have nearly doubled since 2020, from about $589,000 to over $1 million, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Fire departments also are reporting extended wait times for new fire trucks. In 2024, officials with the Seattle Fire Department noted it took more than four years to replace a ladder truck — a process that had previously taken just a year.

And some departments are accusing manufacturers of charging them “floating prices” that increase soon before a truck is ready to be delivered. The president of a volunteer fire department in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, said his department paid a 50% deposit on a fire truck and the supplier later said it could no longer deliver at that price, leading to the department paying an additional $110,000, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

“By hiking prices for trucks and replacement parts without competition, the defendants have made it harder for the city of Pittsburgh and other municipalities across the country to make the required investments in lifesaving services and put the burden back on our communities,” Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor said in a July statement announcing its antitrust lawsuit. A city representative declined to comment further.

The plaintiffs in the suit assert that manufacturers worked together to throttle the production of fire trucks nationwide and minimize competition to increase prices. Many cities and fire departments also allege the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association — the industry’s primary trade group — helped the manufacturers coordinate price increases and limit production by passing secret or proprietary data between them.

Dan Meyer, vice president of sales at Pierce Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Oshkosh, has said his company has worked to expand its manufacturing capabilities and hired more workers. REV Group did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

On Tuesday, the defendants moved to dismiss two of the suits.

“The pandemic prompted skyrocketing demand and disrupted supply chains causing price increases and longer wait times,” they said in a joint court filing. “None of that has anything to do with an antitrust violation.”

The defendants also assert that the trade association shared “anonymized and aggregated industry statistics” that weren’t anticompetitive, and that the rollups and acquisitions of fire truck manufacturers occurred “many years ago” and didn’t result in anticompetitive harm to the plaintiffs.

Some states, too, have recently jumped into the fray.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, launched an investigation in February into potential anticompetitive conduct of the same three manufacturers, after hearing complaints from Texas cities and their fire departments. His office said it had already uncovered “multiple potentially unlawful price hikes” involving Texas fire departments.

California has also filed an antitrust suit, asserting that REV Group and its former private equity owner, American Industrial Partners, created monopolies in fire truck markets. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara, a Democrat, held a hearing in her district in March, proposing future legislation to address the issue.

And Congress is getting involved. In July, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, along with Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont and Republican Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, filed a resolution directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the consolidation in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

The resolution comes on the heels of a 2025 Senate investigation, launched by Warren and Banks, into the effects of private equity rollups in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

At local, state and even federal levels, there’s a bipartisan appetite for antitrust enforcement, said Basel Musharbash, an attorney who represents some of the cities involved in the class action suit, including Little Rock, Kansas City and Las Vegas.

“You can look at any number of industries that supply things to municipalities and you’ll see the same dynamic,” he said, pointing to consolidation in the ambulance industry, public works and public transit buses.

“Across the economy, there’s no shortage of industries where we’re seeing decision-making and control being concentrated in the hands of a few executives at a few companies, and that’s just inconsistent with American’s views about freedom and markets and democracy.”

Attracting investors

Last fall, the Garden City Fire Department in rural Garden City, Kansas, had been waiting nearly two years for the two new fire trucks it had ordered for one of its fire stations. The department serves all of Finney County, an agricultural area in the southwest part of the state.

Without the new trucks, the department was moving trucks around from its other stations to try to fill the void, and using three aging backup vehicles — the oldest was built in 1989; the newest in 2006 — that had a host of repair issues and few or no safety features.

Fire truck manufacturers rely on cities, counties and other local and state governments to purchase their products — and that steady flow of public funding has proven attractive to investors.

A decade ago, private equity firm American Industrial Partners began buying fire truck manufacturers around the country, eventually rolling them up into one conglomerate called the REV Group. As it consolidated smaller companies, it also shut down some of its manufacturing plants even as fire truck orders climbed after federal pandemic assistance dollars flowed to state and local governments, said Musharbash.

REV Group may control as much as 40% of the market now, he said, with Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing controlling around 25-30% and Rosenbauer a smaller piece.

In 2024, REV Group’s private equity fund owner, American Industrial Partners, divested from its fire truck conglomerate, and the other companies are publicly traded. But they’ve boosted profits through private equity-like tactics, he said.

For example, Los Angeles County and other municipalities say that Oshkosh, a publicly traded company, boosts its profits partly by requiring customers of Pierce Manufacturing to purchase only Pierce proprietary parts, despite cheaper prices available from competitors.

Draining public dollars

In Providence, Rhode Island, city officials purchased three pumper trucks in 2021 from Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing for $449,159 per truck. In 2024, when the city bought five more, the cost had jumped more than 63% to $734,320, officials said in court filings. Those trucks won’t be delivered until next year.

Fire chiefs, industry watchers and local officials hope the FTC will commission a study to dig into the industry to better understand why smaller manufacturers are having a hard time entering the industry.

“In an industry like fire trucks, where you’ve seen skyrocketing prices, backlogs, deteriorating quality over a period of more than half a decade, we should be seeing a large number of new manufacturers cropping up,” Musharbash said. “We should see smaller manufacturers expanding, and yet that’s not happening.”

Musharbash said cities and local lawmakers should reexamine how they purchase fire trucks, ambulances, city transit buses and other equipment manufactured by big corporations.

“There are these rackets in these industries that local governments depend on, and they’re draining dollars out of municipal budgets and state budgets. It’s a huge waste of public funds.”

This story has been updated to include arguments from the court filing the defendants submitted on Tuesday. 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.

City Engineer Matt Watson walked to the public podium carrying a stack of paper. He distributed copies to councilmembers, the administration and people sitting in the audience.

The packet contained questions an Advertiser-Tribune reporter had sent him, his written responses, two recorded sewer service agreements, mapping of the city’s sewer agreements and the industrial concept plan that has been at the center of the dispute.

“I came here this evening because I wanted to make sure that that same transparency is being provided to city council and the public,” Watson said.

What followed was roughly 17 minutes from a department head who has been referenced repeatedly in council discussions over the annexation and, more recently, in newspaper coverage. Watson defended why his office drew the plan, explained how much work went into responding to the records request and eventually put a question directly to council: if Tiffin does not intend to enforce the sewer agreements that help make this annexation possible, tell him.

Later, Anna Flechtner and Lindsay Parkins described the same proposed development from the other side of the property line.

Watson told council that his office prepares each site-specific sewer service agreement from a template drafted by the law director, coordinates its execution and records it with the Seneca County Recorder’s Office before a property owner receives a permit to connect to city sewer.

He said 364 agreements have been executed and recorded. A 365th was sitting on his desk awaiting a check from the finance department.

At $70 apiece to record, Watson calculated that the city has spent $25,550 in recording costs alone. Including staff time, he estimated Tiffin has invested more than $50,000 in the agreements.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/tiffin-family-property-pulled-into-industrial-annexation-without-consent/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Vivek Ramaswamy has made four of those calls in public this year. They do not line up.

A state representative investigated over an accusation involving a minor relative came off his endorsements page and has stayed off, without Ramaswamy ever saying a word about why. A second state representative came off the same page and was back on it two hours later. A congressman under a House Ethics investigation into domestic violence allegations, condemned by both of Ohio’s Republican U.S. senators, is still listed as of Tuesday. And the super PAC that exists to elect Ramaswamy has twice built television ads around the fact that his opponent was sexually abused as a child.

Four allies. Four outcomes. None of them tracking how serious the underlying accusation was. There is no principle that produces that set, and the campaign has never articulated one.

What the campaign did in April

In April, TiffinOhio.net reported that Ramaswamy’s endorsements page listed two state representatives: Rodney Creech of West Alexandria, whom a minor female relative accused in 2023 of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation records; and Gary Click of Vickery, the Republican who represents Tiffin and Fremont, who had told a legislative committee that young girls confided in him about their sex lives.

Click’s remark came during sponsor testimony on House Bill 68 before the Ohio House Public Health Policy Committee on April 19, 2023. Describing what he said were the effects of puberty blockers, Click, a former fundamentalist Baptist pastor and community theater actor, told the committee that “young girls who’ve gone through this have told me it is very, very painful to have sex.” A former senior pastor at Fremont Baptist Temple, Click has never publicly identified who those girls were, how old they were, when the conversations happened, or in what capacity he was having them.

Creech was never charged. The Republican special prosecutor who closed the case wrote that Creech’s conduct was “concerning and suspicious,” but that the evidence fell short of the threshold for prosecution. Creech denied the allegations and called them demonstrably false. That was still enough for the leader of his own caucus: House Speaker Matt Huffman stripped him of all four committee assignments and asked him to resign. Creech did not. Nine months later Huffman restored the assignments and asked the state party to endorse him, explaining that the allegations “either weren’t true” or it “wasn’t clear if they were true.”

Within two days of the TiffinOhio.net reports, both names came off vivekforohio.com. No announcement. Web Archive snapshots caught it. Then, roughly two hours after this outlet documented the removals, Click’s name reappeared, and Click told his followers that reports of his removal had been “greatly exaggerated.” The archived snapshots said otherwise.

Nothing about the underlying allegations changed in those 48 hours, or in the two hours after that. This was not a stale endorsement sitting on an abandoned page nobody had noticed. The page moved. Click vanished. The removal became public. Click returned. Whatever the campaign was weighing, it was not the substance of what either man had been accused of, because none of that substance changed at any point in the sequence.

What the episode does establish is capability. This campaign knows how to take a name off its website, and it can do it inside a business day.

Creech’s name has stayed off since. Ramaswamy has never publicly asked him to step aside, and Creech is the Republican nominee in House District 40 on the November ballot.

The Miller test

Which brings us to the name that is still there.

A fetch of Ramaswamy’s endorsements page on Tuesday shows U.S. Rep. Max Miller listed under “Ohio Congressional Delegation,” alongside Jim Jordan and Warren Davidson. Gary Click is listed under “Ohio State Legislators.”

Miller is the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation opened Aug. 4 into whether he engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use. He asked for the investigation himself. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has alleged in court filings and police reports that he threw scalding water on her, shoved her against a wall and held a gun to her head, and that their 2-year-old daughter was injured in his care. Miller denies all of it — “I categorically deny abusing my former wife,” he said in a livestream on Aug. 2 — and he faces no criminal charge.

This is the easiest call a candidate will ever be handed, because the pressure is coming from inside the party. Emily Moreno’s father is U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, who wrote that “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.” On Aug. 6, Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, called on Miller to quit both the race and the seat. Gov. Mike DeWine called the allegations troubling. Americans for Prosperity’s Ohio director called Miller unfit to serve.

Asked about Miller at the Ohio State Fair on Aug. 5, Ramaswamy said: “I wish everybody’s family well. My prayers are with the granddaughter who’s involved in that situation. And I think that is the most important thing.”

Two U.S. senators, a governor and a major conservative advocacy group found words. The nominee for governor found prayers. Ohio Democratic Party spokeswoman Katie Seewer put it more sharply, saying in a statement that “Vivek Ramaswamy’s silence regarding the horrifying abuse allegations against Max Miller is disqualifying.”

The deadline for Republicans to replace Miller on the ballot passed at 4 p.m. on Aug. 10 with no substitute filed. He is locked in. Ramaswamy’s endorsement survived that deadline too, and it has now survived more than two weeks of allegations graver than the ones that got Creech scrubbed inside 48 hours. Congressman Mike Carey held a fundraiser with Miller as co-host after the ethics probe opened. Silence is passive. A campaign page is a published document, and buying a ticket is not passive at all.

What the ads say

Here is what makes this more than an argument about website maintenance.

During the same months that Ramaswamy’s campaign was moving names on and off a page, the super PAC whose sole stated mission is electing him has twice put his opponent’s childhood sexual abuse on Ohio television.

In 1994, Dr. Amy Acton answered a question on her Ohio medical licensure application disclosing that she had sought therapy after being sexually abused as a child. That question no longer appears on Ohio applications, because it was found to deter applicants from getting treatment. V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims built an ad around that disclosure in the spring, telling viewers Acton “admitted to emotional or mental illness, drug addiction, or an alcohol problem,” and closing by telling them they would not want her as their doctor and “definitely not as governor.” Days after the Cook Political Report moved the race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on July 10, the material ran again.

That is not an argument about taxes, or COVID policy, or schools, or energy. A woman was sexually abused as a child and got therapy. Ramaswamy’s most powerful outside political operation turned that into a reason to distrust her.

Acton campaign manager Phil Stein said in April that “we were shocked and disgusted to see Ramaswamy’s allies shame Amy for being sexually abused as a child.” In July, after the second round, he said: “Vivek Ramaswamy is once again spreading lies about Dr. Acton and shaming her for being a survivor of childhood sexual assault, all to distract from the fact that Ohioans can’t stand him.”

The day after the first round of criticism, he posted a video to X dismissing Acton as having no vision “other than complain about what someone else did to her.” That was Ramaswamy speaking. Not a super PAC. Not an anonymous account. The man asking Ohio to make him governor.

V-PAC is not a grassroots operation with a message problem. Federal filings show five men — Jeff Yass, Ross Stevens, Ratmir Timashev, Elon Musk and Bill Ackman — have supplied $37 million of the roughly $42 million it has raised. None of them lists an Ohio address. In June alone, the committee reported more than $8.2 million in spending against Acton, nearly $8 million of it in a single payment. Somebody with money approved that ad, twice.

The money and the record

The pattern is not confined to endorsements. Ramaswamy’s campaign accepted more than $10,102 from Andrew Havas, a Statehouse lobbyist who served 90 days in jail after a 2009 guilty plea in a case involving a 15-year-old — originally charged as sexual misconduct with a minor, reduced to misdemeanor assault. Havas had already resigned as Husted’s Franklin County campaign chair over the same case. The campaign also took $10,000 from Mark Hauser, who served federal prison time in the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. No campaign-finance violation has been alleged in either instance. The question is not legality. It is what a campaign does once it knows.

The Acton campaign has added a further count, noting that Ramaswamy declined for months to call for release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and that a pro-Ramaswamy super PAC took $100,000 from Epstein associate Glenn Dubin in 2023 and dissolved without refunding it, despite a pledge to do so. Dubin was never criminally charged and has denied wrongdoing; that money went to the PAC, not to Ramaswamy’s campaign, and Ramaswamy said at the time that his campaign would redirect the smaller sum he personally received to anti-trafficking causes.

And there is the part of this that is about governing rather than campaigning. Ramaswamy’s running mate, Senate President Rob McColley, stalled Senate Bill 341, the bipartisan measure that would end marriage for 17-year-olds in Ohio with no exceptions. In February he said the Senate would “certainly take a serious look at it and probably pass it.” By May, Republicans had pulled it from the Judiciary Committee’s agenda and McColley was saying, “We’ve still got time left in this legislative session.” Lawmakers went home for the summer without passing it. Ohio’s next lieutenant governor is on the ballot with Ramaswamy.

What it adds up to

Every individual fact here has a defense available. Miller denies the allegations and has not been charged. Creech was never charged. Click has broken no law. The ads belong to the super PAC. Donations are not endorsements. A bill can always be scheduled next session.

What they do not describe is a standard.

Rodney Creech drew a BCI investigation, a special prosecutor who called his conduct concerning and suspicious, and a speaker of his own party who asked him to resign. His name came off the page, and Ramaswamy has never said why or asked him to leave the ballot.

Gary Click gave testimony about young girls and sex he has never explained. His name came off the page and went back up two hours after the removal was reported.

Max Miller is under a House Ethics investigation into domestic violence and drug allegations, has been called unfit by his former father-in-law and told to resign by Ohio’s other Republican senator. His name is still up.

Amy Acton is not an ally, so she got the other end of it: her childhood sexual abuse on television, twice, paid for by five men who do not live in Ohio.

Rank those four by the seriousness of what is alleged and you get one order. Rank them by how Ramaswamy’s operation treated them and you get a different one. The two lists have nothing to do with each other.

The issue is not whether Vivek Ramaswamy committed the conduct attributed to anyone else. He did not. The issue is what he does when he is confronted with it. That is what judgment is, and it is the whole of the job he is applying for.

So here is a question he should have no trouble answering:

What does someone in Vivek Ramaswamy’s political orbit have to do before Ramaswamy decides he no longer wants their name attached to his?

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Kraus announced the write-in campaign in a graphic posted to Facebook that splits the screen between himself and Caleb Stidham, the Erie County treasurer and county Republican Party chairman who was nominated by a six-member committee on which he sat and voted. Stidham’s half of the graphic is labeled “POLITICAL INSIDER” and lists “Establishment Pick,” “Special Interests,” “Backroom Deals” and “Questionable Ethics.” Kraus’s half is labeled “POLITICAL OUTSIDER” and lists “Anti-Establishment,” “Your Interests,” “Transparent Networking” and “Highly Ethical.” Across the middle, in block capitals: “DISTRICT 89 DESERVES A CHOICE.” Along the bottom: “WRITE IN STEVE KRAUS.”

The first objection came from a supporter. “I support Steve, but I’m afraid this will split the conservative vote and allow a Dem to take the seat,” Richard Russell wrote in the comments.

Kraus answered that the split had already happened, and that it was not his doing.

“I understand your concern, however, it’s the establishment that didn’t allow the voters a choice in who the candidate would be that is splitting the vote,” he wrote. “Call/text Secretary of State Frank LaRose and tell him no for Calab.”

Another commenter, David Desser, replied to Russell that the warning was familiar and had stopped working. “yeah where I live they tell us that too. And now I’m an old man and we always get the rino,” he wrote. “why wouldn’t they keep nominating rinos if rinos keep winning because we never split the vote?”

Six days to file, and the ballot is not settled

Ohio law gives Kraus until the end of Monday. Under section 3513.041 of the Ohio Revised Code, a write-in candidate must file a declaration of intent by 4 p.m. on the 72nd day before the election, and in a district that spans more than one county the filing goes to the board of elections in the most populous county. House District 89 covers Erie, Ottawa and Huron counties, so that is the Erie County Board of Elections. County election calendars set the deadline for the Nov. 3 general election at 4 p.m. Monday, Aug. 24.

Write-in votes are counted only for candidates who have filed. TiffinOhio.net could not confirm whether Kraus has done so.

The deadline lands before the question of who else will be on the ballot has been answered. The Erie County board deadlocked 2-2 on Aug. 14 over whether to certify Stidham as the Republican nominee, sending the decision to LaRose, whose ruling under state law is final. He has until Friday, Aug. 28. That is four days after the window for Kraus to get his name on the write-in list closes — and it is also the deadline for anyone to file a protest against a write-in candidacy.

How the fight started

The seat opened Aug. 4, when state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, delivered a letter to the Erie County board withdrawing from the November ballot after four terms, saying he was under consideration for a new role and that continuing his campaign would not have been fair to voters.

Because the district spans more than one county but fewer than all of them, state law handed the replacement decision to a district committee made up of the chairperson and secretary of each county Republican central committee in the district — six people, choosing for roughly 175,000 residents. Stidham was one of three applicants. He was also one of the six entitled to vote. The committee met the afternoon of Aug. 10 and picked him, 4-2.

Erie County board Chairman Edward J. Leonard, a Democrat, voted against certification and read a position statement into the record. “After reviewing the circumstances of the Republican District Committee meeting at which Caleb Stidham was selected, I have concluded that the meeting was not conducted in accordance with Ohio law,” he wrote.

Stidham has rejected the conflict-of-interest claim. “There seems to be some confusion; there is no conflict of interest because I did not lead or chair the meeting that selected me as the candidate,” he told NBC4 in Columbus. Huron County Republican Chairman Sven Stahl chaired the Aug. 10 meeting because Stidham was a candidate. Stidham left the room while his rivals made their pitches, returned for deliberations, and voted.

Kraus had been attacking the process publicly before the committee ever met, and kept at it afterward. “Excusing it as ‘Legal’ is not the same as moral or ethically right,” he wrote in one exchange. “Elected officials are suppose to abstain from even the appearance of impropriety.”

In the same comment he asked: “And what about Honor? Is Winning by any means necessary worthy of the title ‘the Honorable State Representative’?” He closed it: “He’s NOT the kind of Leadership we need OR WANT!”

Kraus also invoked Ohio’s open-meetings law. “And not allowing the public to attend? Isn’t that what the Ohio Sunshine Law is all about, transparency?” he wrote. Ohio’s Open Meetings Act generally does not reach political parties, which courts have treated as voluntary associations governed by their own rules.

In a separate comment, Kraus assigned a motive. “Calab has a history of ‘not inviting’ people to meetings that he had a responsibility do, now he didn’t invite the public and it may cost the party the house rep seat,” he wrote. “All because of greed.”

He is not the only Republican making the cost argument in public. Consultant Jon Paul Morrow, who worked on the 2014 campaign that first put the district in Republican hands, argued this month that Stidham should have recused himself and may have handed the seat to the Democrats. Party officers and activists across the three counties had been warning about the same outcome before the vote.

The candidate asking for the write-in

The 2014 campaign Morrow worked on was Kraus’s. Kraus beat then-Rep. Chris Redfern, the sitting chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, and took office in January 2015. He held the seat seven months. A jury convicted him of theft, a fifth-degree felony carrying an elderly-victim specification, and under state law the conviction cost him the office on July 27, 2015. He was acquitted of breaking and entering.

A court later sealed the conviction. When an Erie County resident sued to keep Kraus off the 2024 primary ballot, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he could run, sidestepping the question of whether a sealed conviction counts as expunged and holding instead that the office of state representative does not involve the kind of “substantial management or control” over public property that triggers disqualification. Kraus ran. Swearingen beat him in the March 2024 primary.

Whatever LaRose decides, one name is already settled on the November ballot. The Democratic nominee in House District 89 is Easton Retzke of Sandusky, who won his party’s nomination in the May 5 primary.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Shelly Bland, of Fostoria, faces two counts of failure to stop after an accident charged as third-degree felonies and two counts of the same offense charged as fifth-degree felonies, according to a release from Sheriff Todd D. Frey. The Wyandot County Prosecutor’s Office reviewed the case before the charges were filed.

Detectives with the Wyandot County Major Crimes Unit identified a suspect in the death of Keith Wagner after what Frey described as months of intensive investigation.

The Sheriff’s Office received the 911 call at approximately 1:42 a.m. on Wednesday, April 23, 2025, from an individual who reported striking a body lying in the roadway, according to the release. Deputies responded along with Mohawk EMS and Fire and found a man in the road. The Wyandot County Medical Examiner pronounced him dead at the scene, and he was taken to the Lucas County Coroner’s Office for an autopsy.

The release does not give Wagner’s age or hometown. An obituary published by Wonderly Horvath Hanes Funeral Home and Crematory in Fremont lists Keith Anthony Wagner Jr., 37, of Tiffin, as having died April 23, 2025. Wagner graduated from Fremont Ross High School and worked in landscaping and roofing in the Tiffin area, according to the obituary, which says he is survived by two sons and two stepchildren and was preceded in death by an infant daughter. His burial was planned for Greenlawn Cemetery in Tiffin.

Under Ohio law, failure to stop after an accident is a third-degree felony when the crash results in a person’s death and a fifth-degree felony when it results in serious physical harm. Each rises one degree if prosecutors prove the driver knew what the crash caused.

The release does not state Bland’s age, whether Bland is in custody or when an arraignment is scheduled. It also does not explain why four counts were returned in a case involving a single victim.

In the days after Wagner was found, Wyandot County authorities described the case as a suspicious death. The Sheriff’s Office, the Major Crimes Unit and the METRICH Enforcement Unit were dispatched to County Highway 9 that morning, 95.3 WKTN reported at the time, and investigators asked anyone with information to come forward.

Frey thanked the public for its assistance throughout the investigation and commended the Major Crimes Unit in Tuesday’s release. He again asked residents to report suspicious activity through the Sheriff’s Office app or by contacting their local law enforcement agency.

An indictment is an accusation. Bland is presumed innocent unless and until convicted.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“He was supposed to be coming to my community to rebuild his life,” Pizzulli, R-Scioto County, said at a press conference. 

Instead, officials who visited the recovery home with the man found cockroaches crawling across the floor, dog feces inside, and doors falling off the hinges. 

“Somewhere in the middle of all this was a man battling with addiction, a man who had been sent there court ordered because the system said this was where he was supposed to get better,” Pizzulli said. 

“A person in recovery deserves dignity and a genuine chance to rebuild their life.”

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently signed an executive order that gives the Ohio Department of Behavioral Health the power to create a statewide-certification program for recovery housing operators. 

“As Ohio’s behavioral health system has grown, so has the need for stronger and more consistent oversight,” said Ohio Department of Behavioral Health Director Tia Moretti. 

“We’ve identified opportunities to strengthen monitoring, enhance compliance, and create a more uniform statewide system. …  This gives us the ability to respond more quickly, act more consistently, and better protect the people who depend on these services every day.”

There were 356 recovery houses in Ohio in 2022 and today there are more than 1,700 — a nearly 400% increase. 

“With this rapid growth, oversight of this industry has been difficult to be able to keep up,” DeWine said. 

Recovery houses are only supposed to house four to five people at the most, Moretti said. 

But Pizzulli said he has seen recovery houses with 10 people. 

“There’s bunk beds, folks are crammed in there like sardines,” he said. 

“As a result of that, the septic plumbing is failing because it’s a residential home. It’s not set up for commercial use.” 

The state is seeing unregulated recovery houses operating without a certification. 

“These non-certified homes are operating illegally,” DeWine said. 

The Ohio Department of Behavioral Health has taken legal action against many of the homes operating illegally, DeWine said. 

“But frankly, we have to do more,” he said. 

“Many of these unregulated recovery houses reportedly have unsafe living conditions. We’re particularly seeing this in southern Ohio, where communities were heavily impacted by the opioid epidemic.” 

Pill mills were rampant across southern Ohio and Scioto County was hit particularly hard. As Attorney General, DeWine closed the last pill mill in Scioto County in 2011. 

“For us, the opioid crisis was something that we lived,” Pizzulli said.

“We watched friends become addicted. We watched families fall apart. We went to funerals, and we lost friends close to us.” 

A pill mill was in the same strip mall as the pizza shop were Pizzulli worked when he was in high school in 2009. 

“I remember going to work and seeing people lined up early in the morning, waiting to get their prescriptions a mile out the door for OxyContin,” he said.  

“I saw men and women consumed by addiction. I saw children caught in the middle of it. While delivering pizzas one day, I was actually once robbed by someone struggling with addiction.”

Pizzulli has seen how good recovery housing can change people’s lives. 

“But bad actors have discovered something very disturbing,” he said. 

“You can profit from addiction even when recovery is not happening, and without strong enough standards and oversight, parts of this system have become the wild west.”

The state is also seeing potential abuse of the system between recovery housing operators and recovery treatment providers. 

“That deserves further scrutiny to determine if it is, in fact, fraudulent,” DeWine said. 

“For example, recovery housing operators and treatment providers cannot provide services out of the same location. That is against the law.” 

DeWine’s executive order gives the Department of Behavioral Health investigate authority to make sure recovery housing providers are operating within the law. If a provider is found to be operating illegally, the department will refer them to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for prosecution. 

“Fraud, waste, abuse, and exploitation of people who are fighting for their lives will not be tolerated,” said Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson. 

“To those folks, to those providers, to those recovery house owners who are engaged in this activity, you need to stop right now because your time is coming.”

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The OPSB initially approved the Oak Run Solar Project in March 2024, but the case has since been bogged down by an appeal filed by Madison County and three of its townships.

Oak Run Solar would bring 800 megawatts of solar and 300 MW of energy storage to a state that has become increasingly hostile to clean energy, even as mounting electricity demand increases power prices and threatens grid reliability.

Though the county and townships filed their appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court in October 2024, it was not until this past May that the court weighed in. A majority of the seven justices rejected all objections to the project except one.

To deal with that issue, the court sent the case back to the board with instructions for regulators to ​“more thoroughly address the Oak Run project’s visual impacts,” specifically by reviewing photo simulations or artist’s sketches of how the project’s proposed substations would look from public vantage points.

On July 28, Ohio regulators heard testimony on this narrow issue. Briefing wrapped up last Friday.

Once the full board reviews the transcript, briefs, and other filings, it will issue a decision. The OPSB’s staff has already weighed in: Its Aug. 7 brief asks the full board to confirm Oak Run’s permit.

The board is under no obligation to vote according to its staff’s recommendation, and there is no specific deadline for it to act. Any additional appeal could also eat up more time.

“The project represents a significant opportunity for long-term economic investment in Madison County while supporting Ohio’s growing energy needs,” Samantha Sawmiller, senior development manager for the Oak Run Solar Project, told Canary Media. ​“We respectfully await the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision.”

Oak Run’s saga demonstrates the difficulty of developing clean energy in Ohio. In recent years, the state has blocked 5.3 gigawatts of wind and solar projects and garnered a reputation as the place ​“where wind and solar projects go to die.”

Since 2021, the General Assembly has enacted multiple laws that create extra hurdles for new solar and wind, but not for fossil fuel projects.

Meanwhile, the OPSB has played a central role in restricting solar’s growth, especially for grandfathered projects exempted from local government bans under those state statutes.

In March, the OPSB denied permits for the proposed 94-MW Crossroads Solar Grazing Center in central Ohio. Last month, it asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss an appeal from the developer of the planned 175-MW Kingwood Solar installation, whose permits the regulators denied in 2022. The project’s interconnection agreement has expired while it awaits a court decision — a fact the board used to justify its request for dismissal.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s multiple opinions on May 26 in the Oak Run case may also suggest a growing partisanship among some of its members. Previously, the court’s members had generally shown more deference toward the OPSB’s expertise on its factual findings.

When those opinions are pieced together, six of the court’s seven justices found fault with the OPSB’s grant of the permit because the developer’s visual evidence didn’t include renderings of the project’s three substations.

Three of those justices found that was the only shortcoming. Three others also sided with the local governments and would have required more evidence on issues dealing with water, wildlife, and fears about the safety of battery storage.

Jennifer Brunner, the court’s only Democrat, would have affirmed the OPSB’s decision in its entirety, based on the case record’s other evidence.

Taken together, the opinions ​“added more confusion to an already uncertain legal environment” for utility-scale renewables, said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer with the Ohio Environmental Council, which is a party in the case supporting the project.

“Ohio is facing a massive energy crunch and ever-rising energy prices [and] really needs a clear substantive standard for reviewing these proposed projects,” she added. ​“And that’s not what we got from the court in this case.”

Testimony at the July 28 hearing was relatively brief. Lauren Devine, director of permitting and environmental matters for Savion, the project developer, said the company had the consulting firm EDR do additional work to show how public vantage points would look with the planned substations.

Gordon Perkins, a division manager with EDR, reported on that new work and its photo simulations with the substations included. The substations ​“would not contribute to visual impacts that were not already identified” in the group’s earlier review of the Oak Run project, he said, adding that the developer would take various steps to minimize visual impacts.

Mark Bellamy, a utilities specialist on the technical staff that advises the OPSB, reported that he had reviewed the consultant’s new report and concluded that Oak Run’s aesthetic appearance would be consistent with that of other solar farms — hence the staff recommendation to greenlight the project.

The local governments’ sole witness was Errol Gattis, a resident of London, Ohio, who said he’d be able to see the project from his yard and porch and objected to EDR’s choice of vantage points.

Ohio’s rules don’t require consideration of a project’s expected appearance from every possible angle, however. And state law doesn’t guarantee that viewsheds won’t change, said Tom Bullock, executive director for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio, a consumer watchdog group that promotes clean energy and is not part of the case.

An Aug. 7 brief filed by the opponents’ lawyer, Jack Van Kley — a longtime renewable-energy opponent in the state — took issue with the vantage points for the visual analysis and argued that the developer should have provided the materials as a supplement to the company’s project application, complete with various steps for public participation.

Those stances are similar to arguments that the Ohio Supreme Court rejected in its Oak Run ruling in May, about the general approach for a visual analysis and whether regulators had properly found that the developer’s application was complete. Moreover, the court didn’t order a supplement to the application, just the review of additional material on a single issue.

“This was the evidentiary hearing that is very narrowly focused on the simulations for the substations,” said Christine Pirik, a lawyer for the developer, when Van Kley tried to use the argument to block admission of the additional evidence into the case record.

Administrative Law Judges David Hicks and Isabel Marcelletti sided with the developer and the siting board’s staff, noting their belief that the hearing process complies with the court’s directive.

Filings by the OPSB’s staff and the Ohio Environmental Council, which advocates for clean energy, also took issue with Van Kley’s arguments. ​“The Local Governments’ alleged procedural violations apply to service requirements for an application, not supplemental evidence submitted on remand,” lawyers Karin Nordstrom and Chris Tavenor wrote in the council’s Aug. 14 reply brief.

The clock is ticking for Oak Run, as lawyers for the developer noted in a May 18 court filing: ​“Oak Run is now in dire need to have the appeals process come to a close as soon as possible.”

Besides having spent more than $13 million already, the developer faces contractual deadlines from grid operator PJM Interconnection and others to reach commercial operation by 2030.

“Should the Project fail due to the lengthy time for considerations, Oak Run will lose its significant financial investment and the community and state of Ohio will lose the employment and financial benefits that would result from construction and operation of the Project,” including about $250 million for local governments, its filing said.

Plus, of course, the clean energy and battery storage.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The documents, first reported by The New York Times, were filed by a defense attorney in the federal case against 15 Minnesotans accused of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal agent.

The feds’ surveillance programs, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Whipple Shield,” go far beyond the 15 people indicted. 

Homeland Security agents used administrative subpoenas — subpoenas issued by the federal agency rather than a judge — to obtain financial records from organizations including the labor unions Service Employees International Union and Communications Workers of America; Voices for Racial Justice, a longstanding racial justice training organization; and Sunrise Movement, an environmental justice organization that organized noise protests outside of immigration agents’ hotels during Operation Metro Surge.

“This broad collection of financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations, done in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate, violates both the First Amendment and these organizations’ right to financial privacy,” wrote Kevin Riach, the defense attorney for defendant Isaac Sant.

Undercover agents posing as activists surveilled and recorded meetings at the United Labor Centre building in Minneapolis, Loring Park, the Augsburg Park Library and various churches. 

At a Sunrise Movement meeting at the Minneapolis Public Library, one undercover agent said he worked in construction and that he “could build items that might assist other groups with more ‘direct action’ protests,” according to an internal Homeland Security report. (The meeting, according to the undercover agent in attendance, centered on peaceful tactics, including noise protests and sit-ins.)

Agents collected the license plate numbers of attendees during a meeting of anti-ICE protesters at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville to obtain the names of the attendees. The agents then compiled a dossier including attendees’ names, photos, addresses, vehicle registrations, family and employment information.

The feds also used Clearview AI, a facial recognition software, to compile photo dossiers of activists and protesters, including many who were not charged. 

A diagram shown to the grand jury during the indictment process linked a number of organizations to the conspiracy — centered around an organization called “Direct Action MN” — with no evidence, according to the defense attorney. The organizations include SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Monarca, Democratic Socialists of America and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, the labor union representing state workers. 

“The Minnesota AFL-CIO and several of our affiliated unions are being targeted simply because our state’s Labor Movement stood in solidarity with our immigrant union members and neighbors when our state was under siege this past winter,” Minnesota AFL-CIO president Bernie Burnham said in a statement.

In a statement to the grand jury as the DOJ presented its charges against the 15 protesters, HSI agent Desmond Garcia told the jury “No one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for First Amendment protected activities.”

“Every single individual that we have investigated there is a criminal predicate to why we’re investigating them, either statements that they have made that are criminal to their actual participation in overt criminal acts,” Garcia said, according to the transcript.

A memorandum issued by President Donald Trump in September directed the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security to investigate “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.” It also expanded the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include crimes like revealing personal details of federal agents or getting in the way of immigration enforcement. 

Riach argues that the memorandum has formed the basis of political prosecutions and surveillance campaigns across the country. 

Many of those prosecutions have fallen apart, including at least half of the cases against anti-ICE activists in Minnesota. 

“The government’s initial disclosures reflect that HSI and DOJ embarked on an improper investigation of First Amendment protected activity without any suggestion that the investigation’s targets had committed any crime,” the defense attorney wrote. The motion continues: “Indeed, HSI undercover officers seemingly sought to manufacture a basis for prosecution where no crimes had been committed.”

Riach is seeking a swath of documents from the federal government, including communications between the DOJ and Homeland Security regarding decisions to charge protesters; downloads of undercover agents’ laptops and phones; and all Clearview AI reports generated during Operation Metro Surge. They are also seeking additional investigative reports filed by undercover agents and their supervisors, writing that the number of undercover agents involved and the data gaps in their summaries suggest the government has not produced all of its documentation on “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Whipple Shield.”

The court records also mention the existence of another undercover operation called “Project Keyhole,” though the documents provided no explanation or details. 

In the prosecution of the 15 anti-ICE protesters, prosecutors said they have 20 terabytes of data in their possession, though not all of it is directly related to the defendants.

“I’m inferring that not every bit of evidence was necessarily gathered pursuant to a warrant,” said U.S. District Judge David Schultz in an earlier hearing in the case.

All 15 of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.

In response to the revelations in the court documents, a number of organizations released a joint statement, distributed by Unidos MN. The signees include Education Minnesota, Minnesota 50501, MAPE, SEIU and several of its locals, and the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

“Minnesotans will not be intimidated or divided by sham accusations or investigations of some of the countless groups and community members who organized, acted, and stood up together to protect their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge,” the statement reads. “Around the country, the Trump regime’s weaponized DOJ is lashing out desperately in hopes of intimidating people and organizations that have shown the power of communities acting together to challenge abuses of government power and defend democracy.”

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The company announced Thursday that it will recommend that police agencies retain license plate reader data for seven days, down from 30, while adding tools to restrict data sharing between agencies and detect potentially abusive searches. Flock also plans to require law enforcement users to associate searches with case codes and automatically suspend users whose activity is flagged as abnormal.

The changes come amid growing scrutiny of a surveillance network that Flock says has more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and serves thousands of law enforcement agencies and communities.

The cameras photograph passing vehicles and record information including license plates, vehicle characteristics, location and time. Police can search the resulting data during investigations, sometimes across jurisdictional lines.

More than 50 agencies or communities have canceled, suspended or rejected a Flock contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of 2026, according to DeFlock, a grassroots group that tracks license plate reader deployments. Cameras have also been vandalized in communities around the country.

Recent incidents involving police officers accused of using Flock to track friends, relatives and romantic partners have added to concerns about how the data can be accessed and shared. The technology also has been criticized after inaccurate license plate information contributed to wrongful police stops, arrests and detentions.

Flock says the new measures will give communities greater control over their data while strengthening safeguards against misuse.

“These changes, like I said, are the next chapter of a long book I hope to write on how we build a better version of America that’s both safer, protects our privacy and holds those who have power accountable,” Flock Safety co-founder and CEO Garrett Langley said in a video statement.

But civil liberties advocates say some of the safeguards have been tried before and question whether the company’s changes address broader concerns about a system that can create a record of people’s movements even when they are not suspected of a crime.

States have taken different approaches to regulating technologies used in policing, including artificial intelligence, facial recognition, drones and automated license plate readers. More than a dozen states have enacted laws governing such technologies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but there is no consistent national framework for their use.

Strengthening privacy and accountability

Flock’s seven-day retention recommendation is one of its most significant changes.

When the company launched nine years ago, it set 30 days as the default recommendation, while allowing communities to choose shorter or longer periods.

For investigations that require older information, Flock is introducing “Evidence Mode,” which will allow detectives to preserve specific license plate data as evidence in an active case.

The change does not automatically apply to existing customers, which can keep their current retention policies. Communities also will continue to choose their own retention periods.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the shorter retention period a potential step forward but said its impact will depend on how the new mode works. In a statement, the group recommended a 48-hour retention period and warned that if searches cause data to be preserved, the new system could allow significant amounts of location information to remain available longer than seven days.

Flock also is giving communities more control over which outside agencies can search their cameras. Under the new “offense filtering” system, a community could allow another agency to search its cameras for specific crimes or offenses and block searches related to immigration enforcement, for example.

Flock also will require all law enforcement customers to adopt its audit assistance tool by the end of the year. The system looks for unusual search activity and flags it for administrator review. Flock plans to automatically suspend users whose activity meets certain criteria for abnormal behavior while their access is reviewed.

The company also will require case codes for law enforcement searches by the end of the year. Officers can bypass the requirement during emergencies, but those searches also will be flagged for review.

Police misuse and erroneous alerts

Flock’s new controls build on safeguards the company has introduced in recent years, including electronic audit logs and requirements that users provide a reason for searches.

The ACLU, in its statement, said some of those earlier safeguards were ineffective. The group pointed to cases in which officers circumvented search-purpose restrictions by entering vague or meaningless explanations before Flock replaced a free-text field with a list of approved search reasons.

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that nearly 50 police officers had been charged or accused of using Flock cameras for unauthorized purposes, many involving attempts to track current or former romantic partners or family members.

In Savannah, Georgia, four police officers and two civilian employees were fired last week after a department investigation found searches involving personal acquaintances and family members, according to a news release. The investigation also found that an officer had allowed an outside law enforcement agency to access Savannah’s Flock system.

The activity was identified using Flock’s audit assistance tool. All six cases were referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for independent criminal investigations.

The technology has also drawn scrutiny when information in the system is inaccurate or outdated.

In Wisconsin, a woman was pulled over at gunpoint earlier this month after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged her vehicle as being involved in a homicide. Brookfield police stopped Amber Newell on Interstate 94 after receiving the alert, but Milwaukee police told officers they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. Newell was released.

Milwaukee police later said the incident was caused by an employee’s failure to remove an outdated wanted-vehicle alert from the Flock system, rather than an error by Flock itself. Newell said she had also been stopped at gunpoint earlier that week and was afraid to drive afterward.

In its announcement, Flock said its alerts are intended to be investigative leads rather than conclusions and that officers should visually confirm a vehicle’s license plate before taking action. The company said its system produces fewer than nine human-reported errors for every 1 million alerts.

Bipartisan interest

A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers announced Monday that they plan to introduce legislation establishing statewide privacy and accountability requirements for automated license plate readers, including Flock cameras.

The proposal would establish rules governing access to the data, documented reasons for searches, audit trails, data retention and transparency. It also would create civil penalties for unauthorized access, use or disclosure and allow people harmed by misuse to bring civil suits.

“Technology that can help keep our communities safe should never become a tool for stalking or abuse,” Democratic state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara said in a statement announcing the proposal.

Republicans in Congress also have introduced or plan to introduce at least two proposals aimed at restricting automated surveillance technology. One would restrict federal agencies from purchasing or using certain automated surveillance technology, while the other would bar state and local police from using federal funds to acquire automated license plate reader systems.

Last month, 15 Democratic lawmakers in Michigan sent a letter to the state Department of Transportation to end an agreement allowing federal agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations, to install surveillance technology on state property. The lawmakers argued that automated license plate readers infringe on residents’ constitutional rights.

The West Virginia House Democratic Caucus also released a statement last month opposing Flock cameras and said it is monitoring canceled contracts and lawsuits involving the technology.

Abandoning the technology

Some local governments are going further by ending their relationships with Flock altogether.

DeFlock’s tracker lists dozens of communities that have canceled contracts, deactivated cameras or rejected proposals since 2021.

More than 50 agencies or communities have taken one of those steps since the beginning of 2026.

Several communities in Rhode Island and Nebraska have acted this month, with city leaders voting to cancel contracts or uninstall cameras.

Earlier this month, the Burnet County Sheriff’s Office in Texas announced that it had removed all fixed Flock cameras after repeated vandalism damaged the equipment. The cameras were provided by the Heart of Texas Auto Theft Task Force, a multi-agency, multijurisdictional task force in Central Texas. The sheriff’s office has initiated criminal cases, but there are currently no suspects, according to a news release.

The debate over this technology is likely to continue through the rest of the year and into 2027, when more state legislatures return to session. That could bring additional proposals to regulate artificial intelligence tools used in policing, as well as how license plate reader data is collected, retained, shared and used.

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.

Nacole Bartolet died at the scene, according to the Patrol’s Fremont Post. The crash was reported at about 3:32 p.m.

A preliminary investigation found that a 2004 Saturn ION driven by Dylon Sinley, 23, of Seville, was northbound on State Route 53 and failed to yield while turning left, the Patrol said. The car was struck by a southbound 2019 GMC Sierra pickup driven by Angela Ebbing, 59, of Troy.

Bartolet was a passenger in the Saturn. Sinley and another passenger in the car, Leia McIntire, 22, of Wooster, were seriously injured and taken by ambulance to Mercy Health – St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, the Patrol said.

Ebbing and her passenger, Michael Ebbing, 64, also of Troy, were taken to ProMedica Memorial Hospital in Fremont with injuries the Patrol described as not life-threatening.

Troopers were assisted at the scene by the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, Sandusky County EMS, the Ballville Township Fire Department, the Sandusky County Coroner’s Office and Madison Motors.

The crash remains under investigation.

The Fremont Post investigated a fatal single-vehicle crash on County Road 62 in Jackson Township in June that killed a 65-year-old Bettsville man. In July, a Perrysburg man was killed in Ottawa County after a driver failed to yield at a stop sign.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Since announcing her candidacy in January 2025, the Democratic nominee has framed nearly every appearance around what Ohioans pay for housing, power, groceries and health care. Acton is a physician and a Youngstown native who was appointed director of the Ohio Department of Health by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019 and led the state’s early COVID-19 response before resigning in June 2020. Her running mate is David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chair who previously served on Cincinnati City Council and as a Hamilton County commissioner.

The centerpiece of her platform is a working families tax cut. Acton is proposing a state earned income credit she says would reach up to 775,000 working families, paired with a child tax credit of $1,000 a year for children up to age 6 and $500 for children 7 through 18, available to households earning up to $85,000. By her campaign’s math, that is about $1,778 a year for a married couple with two children earning $60,000.

“As governor, my priority will be to secure a tax cut for Ohio’s working families to put money back in their pockets, lift families out of poverty, and make sure Ohioans see their hard work pay off,” the plan reads. “This state has put special interests and wealthy elites before working families in this state for far too long.”

The rest of the agenda, released April 6 at a Columbus coffeehouse roundtable, runs through health care and utilities. Acton would launch a state platform called Ohio Rx to use Ohio’s Medicaid pharmacy purchasing power against prescription prices, direct the state to buy and forgive medical debt the way Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo have, push for price transparency from insurers and hospitals, and strengthen enforcement against surprise billing and aggressive collections. On energy, she has pledged to appoint utility regulators “not beholden to utility companies,” restore funding for the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, and reinstate the efficiency and renewable standards gutted by House Bill 6, the 2019 nuclear bailout at the center of the largest corruption scandal in state history.

“As governor, my number one priority will be lowering costs for working families,” Acton said at the rollout. “I’ll combat high prices with common sense solutions, fight back against the fraud and corruption that raise costs for Ohioans, and work with both sides of the aisle to deliver for our state.”

The contrast she draws with Republican Vivek Ramaswamy runs through the same ledger. His signature proposal is phasing out Ohio’s income tax, which brought in more than $10 billion last fiscal year, roughly a quarter of the state’s operating budget, and he has not said what he would cut to cover it. “I think he’s frankly a danger, a real danger, his leadership, to Ohio because he has no idea how to do this,” Acton said.

‘Ohioans are working harder than ever’

The numbers underneath the campaign are not in dispute. United For ALICE — the research initiative that measures households earning above the federal poverty line but below the cost of living where they actually live — found 37% of Ohio households below that threshold in 2024, an improvement from 39% in 2022 but still more than 1.7 million households. The group calculated that a single adult in Ohio needed $27,732 a year to get by and a family of four needed $81,854. Its Essentials Index, which tracks only housing, child care, food, transportation, health care and technology, rose 58% in Ohio between 2007 and 2024, against 52% for the broader Consumer Price Index.

Health coverage has moved faster than any of it. After Congress allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits to lapse at the end of 2025, Ohio marketplace enrollment fell by 161,000 people — 32.4% — according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. In the open enrollment period alone, Ohio posted the second-largest percentage drop of any state in the country. Ohio uses the federal exchange rather than running its own, and states with their own exchanges held onto more of their enrollees.

Food assistance is contracting at the same time. A year after the federal budget law cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, roughly 100,000 Ohioans have lost SNAP help, the Ohio Capital Journal reported in July. About 1.4 million Ohioans still use the benefit each month at a cost above $270 million, and in October the state’s share of administrative costs jumps from 50% to 75%.

The electric bill

Energy is where the affordability argument meets the biggest fight in Ohio politics. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio reported this month that residential electric bills in the Columbus area were more than 7% higher than they were a year ago. AEP Ohio, which serves about 1.5 million customers in the state, said bills rose an average of $27 a month in the summer of 2025 on generation costs alone. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimated that regional capacity prices — driven substantially by data center demand — would add roughly $16 a month to the average Ohio residential bill.

Acton has put her own bill in her campaign literature. “Last summer, Eric and my electric bill went up $140 in one month – and I know I’m not alone,” her agenda reads.

Her plan would require data centers and their investors, rather than ratepayers and local governments, to absorb the added electricity, gas, water and environmental costs they create, end the nondisclosure agreements that keep the deals from residents, and require union labor and community benefits agreements. In July she went further, saying she would back a conditional statewide moratorium on new facilities that fail to meet six conditions. Ramaswamy has rejected a moratorium and argues Ohio should keep building.

What it looks like here

The campaign’s own example household is a Tiffin family. Seneca County has been living the same arithmetic from the other end. Tiffin City Council voted 6-0 on Monday, April 20, to freeze data center development inside city limits for a year — before any project had been proposed — because members wanted to know who would pay for the power first. Weeks earlier, Tiffin voters approved a 0.75% earned income tax levy for the school district, its first operating levy since 2012, generating roughly $3.2 million a year to hold existing programs in place rather than add new ones. Acton campaigned in Tiffin last October, before the primary.

A close race

A bipartisan poll conducted for AARP by Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research in mid-June found Acton at 47% and Ramaswamy at 44% among 800 likely Ohio voters, within the survey’s 3.5-point margin of error. The age split is stark: Ramaswamy led by 10 points with voters 50 and older, a bloc that made up 65% of the state’s electorate in the 2022 midterms, while Acton led by 24 points among voters under 50. A Bowling Green State University survey in April had Ramaswamy up 48% to 47%.

The same AARP poll found 56% of Ohio voters 50 and older worried about their personal financial situation, and 67% of older swing voters. Acton has been campaigning in rural counties that broke heavily for Donald Trump in 2024, and has picked up union endorsements in northwest Ohio, including the state firefighters’ association and the North Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council.

Ohio votes Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

An invitation obtained and verified by TiffinOhio.net shows the Committee to Elect Gary Click is hosting a Sept. 21 golf fundraiser in Tiffin for Click and neighboring House candidate Jeff McClain. Congressman Bob Latta, Ohio House Finance Committee Chair Brian Stewart and state Rep. Kellie Deeter are billed as “special guests.”

The top package costs $1,500 and includes a foursome, “major signage” and a tee sponsorship. A $1,000 hole sponsorship includes a foursome and signs at the practice green and a tee. Other options include a $750 scoreboard-and-range sponsorship, a $500 foursome, $150 individual golf registrations, $100 tee sponsorships and $75 reception-only tickets.

It is a conventional campaign fundraiser carrying an unmistakable political message: the Republican establishment is still standing behind Gary Click.

That message matters because Republican voters nearly knocked him down.

A victory without a mandate

Click entered the May 5 primary as a three-term incumbent with party backing, a substantial financial advantage and years of relationships inside the Statehouse.

He emerged with 6,859 votes.

First-time challenger Eric Watson received 6,260.

Click survived by 599 votes out of 13,119 cast — 52.28% to 47.72%. Nearly half of the Republicans who voted in the district tried to replace their sitting representative with a candidate who had never held elected office.

The damage was worse in Seneca County, where the fundraiser will be held. Click lost the county by 8.5 points, preserving his nomination only through a stronger showing in his home county of Sandusky.

He won the ballot count. He did not leave the primary with anything resembling a mandate.

Watson has since said he will “never” endorse Click. A post-primary meeting between the two did not close the divide. Watson said Click failed to persuade him on data centers and digital identification.

Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner, a Republican, has also publicly told Click to stop presenting his participation in campaign activities as an endorsement.

The Sept. 21 fundraiser does not show that Click has repaired those relationships. It shows that he can still summon officeholders.

Those are not the same thing.

The names on the invitation

The guest list is built to project institutional strength.

Latta is the longtime Republican congressman representing Ohio’s 5th Congressional District, which takes in all of Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Stewart is not simply another state representative. As chair of the House Finance Committee, he chairs the committee responsible for developing the state’s operating and capital budgets. His own district — Madison and Pickaway counties and a slice of western Franklin County — sits roughly 100 miles south of Tiffin.

Deeter, a first-term representative from Norwalk, partnered with Click on legislation creating a state Data Center Study Commission — the same approach Watson attacked during the primary as inadequate protection against large-scale data-center development. Click’s data center work has drawn scrutiny at home, including $3,000 in contributions from the PAC of Columbia Gas parent NiSource Inc. between 2021 and 2025.

McClain brings an establishment résumé of his own. He represented the neighboring 87th District for eight years before resigning in 2016 to become the Ohio Chamber of Commerce’s director of tax and economic policy. He later served as Gov. Mike DeWine’s tax commissioner.

Now McClain is seeking to return to the House seat currently held by his term-limited son, Riordan McClain. He was unopposed in the Republican primary and faces Democrat Lora Covrett in November. The 87th District covers Crawford, Morrow and Wyandot counties and part of Marion County — none of it in Click’s district, and none of it in Tiffin.

An invitation is not an endorsement

The email describes Latta, Stewart and Deeter as “special guests.” It does not call their appearances endorsements.

That distinction should not be blurred, particularly for a candidate who has spent much of the summer arguing publicly about who supports him. A name on a fundraiser invitation establishes that a person is advertised as appearing. It does not, by itself, establish the scope of that person’s political support, and none of the three has publicly confirmed attendance or announced an endorsement in connection with the event.

The financial arrangement is also unexplained. The email describes the outing as a fundraiser for both men but carries only the disclaimer “Paid for by The Committee to Elect Gary Click.” Registration questions are routed through an email address on the domain of the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee, the House GOP caucus fund — the same address readers are told to use “to support Jeff.” The invitation does not say how registration revenue will be divided between the two campaigns or which committee will report the event’s expenses and contributions.

The money machine is familiar

Click’s reliance on institutional money predates this fundraiser.

Campaign filings reviewed by TiffinOhio.net show Click reported $69,461.37 in contributions during 2026 through primary day — roughly four times the $17,488.05 Watson reported across his filings.

The spending comparison was closer: $53,662.58 by Click through May 5 and $42,128.99 by Watson. But $45,000 of Click’s reported spending consisted of transfers to the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee. That committee subsequently reported providing $38,611.62 to Click’s campaign.

The money moved in a circuit between the incumbent and the institution protecting its incumbent.

A broader review of Click’s fundraising from 2020 through 2025 found that less than 14% came from individual donors inside Seneca and Sandusky counties. More than 65% came from corporate political action committees and industry groups.

Golf is a familiar line item. Click has repeatedly held golf fundraisers, and a review of his complete campaign finance record found roughly $12,000 in golf outing expenses across his tenure, alongside $19,055.33 in conference travel. One outing billed $2,890 to Mohawk, the private club south of Tiffin, plus separate Walmart runs for coolers and canned drinks. Another charged $2,636.12 for food from Ironwood Steakhouse, the club’s restaurant.

The September event fits that record. The featured attraction is not a reconciliation meeting with the Republicans who rejected Click. It is proximity to officeholders, legislative power and the broader Republican fundraising network.

The sponsorship menu even puts prices on visibility: $100 for a tee sign, $750 for the scoreboard and driving range, $1,000 for the practice green and $1,500 for major signage.

The number the invitation leaves out

Four months after nearly half of Republican primary voters tried to remove him, Click is returning to the county he lost — with a congressman, the House Finance chairman, a legislative ally and the House GOP’s fundraising infrastructure behind him.

Waiting in November is Aaron Jones, the Tiffin city councilman, U.S. Army veteran and factory supervisor who lives and was elected in Seneca County. Jones has picked up the UAW, VoteVets, the Ohio Federation of Teachers and, this month, the Ohio Education Association.

The invitation lists every price from $75 to $1,500.

The one number it leaves out is 599.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, was one of 45 House members who cosponsored House Bill 412 in 2002, a measure that folded nursing homes and residential care facilities into Ohio’s legal definition of a “medical claim.” That change cut the window for filing suit against them from two years to one and barred state inspection findings from being introduced in court. Husted has since accepted more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the nursing home industry, its executives and lobbyists, NBC4 in Columbus reported this month.

He faces former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

What inspectors found

The pattern was documented in April by Signal Ohio, which reviewed federal inspection reports and interviewed long-term care advocates. Reporter Jake Zuckerman found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had cited Eastland Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Columbus and six other Ohio facilities over efforts to discharge patients to shelters, most of which went through.

At Eastland, a woman was involuntarily discharged after being caught drinking beer. Staff could not find her a substance-use treatment bed and never called the county’s psychiatric bed board, inspectors wrote after an Aug. 3, 2023 visit. They took her to a shelter instead, where roughly 100 people were already on the waiting list. She arrived using a walker, incontinent, carrying a large bag of medications, managing diabetes, a tibia fracture and alcohol-related dementia. The shelter initially refused her and left her outside in late-summer heat before relenting and calling a city rapid response team. Neither the facility nor the inspectors could locate her by the time the report was written.

Three other cases run through the reporting. A man who had lived at the Laurels of Hillsboro for 22 years — diabetic, with glaucoma, cataracts and suspected autism — was taken to a shelter after his insurance stopped paying, according to a Dec. 29, 2025 inspection. Federal law entitles residents to 30 days’ notice. He got none, was never taught to manage his own medications, and arrived without needles. The facility was sold in July 2025 and now operates as Hillsboro Health and Rehab; a receptionist told Signal the facility is in substantial compliance with the state.

Meadowbrook Manor in Trumbull County gave a resident a 30-day notice and moved him out in 20, a July 2025 inspection found. He left with two weeks of medication, no prescriptions, no appointments and no care plan, and the shelter flagged a mismatch because he could not climb to a top bunk. The facility refused to take him back. At New Lebanon Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center, a woman with spinal and neural disorders, depression and arthritis was discharged to a shelter on roughly 24 hours’ notice after her insurer cut off her treatment.

The industry’s answer

Scott Wiley, chief executive of the Ohio Health Care Association, the state’s largest long-term care trade group, told Signal the situation reflects a national trend.

“This issue has been growing as more residents face unstable housing. State oversight and resources are needed to help tackle the issue on a larger scale to find meaningful, long-term solutions for Ohioans who struggle with homelessness. It will require a collaborative approach that a single nursing facility provider is not equipped to manage on their own.”

OHCA has spent decades building the political relationships that shape that oversight. Between 2016 and 2020, Ohio’s nursing home industry put roughly $6.1 million into state politics through trade association PACs, a nonprofit linked to OHCA and facility operators themselves, an Ohio Capital Journal analysis found. The DeWine-Husted ticket took about $331,000 of it.

Neil Clark, the Republican lobbyist indicted in the FirstEnergy bribery investigation who died in 2021, described OHCA’s fundraising reach in a posthumous memoir quoted by the Capital Journal: “If FirstEnergy were a bank, then the nursing home industry is like having 500 ATM machines located around the state. Walk up, punch in a number and take out what you want. They have perfected the art of keeping politicians happy.”

The association also runs an awards program. Its published list of quality award winners shows Arbors at Sylvania receiving a Bronze Quality Award in 2024. That September, according to a wrongful death lawsuit Signal reviewed, a resident at that facility was left in the same position through 33 consecutive eight-hour shifts and developed a pressure ulcer that exposed bone and led to a fatal infection. The suit is pending and has not been ruled on. Prestige Healthcare, the Louisville company that operates the Arbors chain, declined to comment; a spokesperson said the company’s position is no comment.

Across the chain’s 16 Ohio facilities, at least 11 plaintiffs have filed suits since Jan. 1, 2024 alleging negligence or medical errors that caused deaths, and CMS inspectors concluded that care at three Arbors homes — Milford, Stow and Minerva — contributed to residents’ deaths. CMS has fined Arbors facilities more than $648,000 over the most recent three-year period. Medicaid paid the chain $233 million over three years.

How Ohio measures quality

The state’s system for rewarding good care has been questioned for years. Experts interviewed for a January 2022 Ohio Capital Journal investigation said the quality incentive metrics written into state law are easily gamed, letting substandard homes collect incentive payments.

“If you set the bar so low that everybody can meet it, then you haven’t differentiated anyone,” said Jane Straker, director of research at the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University. “You’re not paying for quality; you’re just paying everyone for checking a box.”

The federal record is not reassuring either. ProPublica’s database of CMS inspections, updated in July, shows 191 of Ohio’s 922 nursing homes — about one in five — were cited for a serious deficiency in the past three years, meaning inspectors found immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety. Ohio homes have drawn $21.2 million in penalties and 172 payment suspensions.

Locally

Seneca County has five nursing homes. One has been cited for a serious deficiency in the past three years, and four have been cited for infection-related deficiencies, according to the same data. Total penalties across the county come to $14,400, with no payment suspensions.

The discharge rules at the center of the statewide reporting have been enforced in Tiffin. In a June 2024 complaint inspection, Autumnwood Care Center on East State Route 18 was cited three times over a transfer: for discharging a resident without an adequate reason or the required documentation, for failing to give timely notice of the transfer and appeal rights to the resident and the ombudsman, and for failing to let a resident return after a hospital stay that exceeded the facility’s bed-hold policy. Inspectors graded all three as causing no actual harm. The record contains no finding that anyone was sent to a shelter. Autumnwood has no fines or payment suspensions on file for the past three years.

The money and the vote

Ohio Secretary of State campaign finance records covering Husted’s state committees from 1999 through 2026 show the Ohio Health Care Association’s political action committee gave him $39,250 across 17 contributions, beginning three weeks before the 2000 general election and running through June 2014. Two more of the association’s own people gave $2,500 on top of that — including Peter Van Runkle, listed in the filings as the association’s president, who gave in 2006, 2007 and 2015. Together, OHCA’s PAC and its executives account for $41,750.

A second nursing home trade group, the Ohio Academy of Nursing Homes, gave another $17,500 through its PAC between 2001 and 2009. Counting both associations and OHCA’s executives, the trade groups that speak for Ohio’s nursing homes have given Husted’s state campaigns $59,250.

The operators themselves gave far more. Across the same records, contributions from nursing home chains, their owners and their executives total roughly $449,000 from about 84 donors. The largest are familiar names in the industry: Ronald Wilheim of CommuniCare Health Services and his wife, Dina, gave $15,499.69 each on July 12, 2023. Chris Chirumbolo, chief executive of Carespring Health Care Management, gave $10,000 on Aug. 1, 2023. Brian Colleran, who the Capital Journal reported operates Foundations Health Solutions and manages 57 Ohio nursing homes, gave $45,145 across five contributions between 2004 and 2010. Gerald Schroer Jr. of the Schroer Group, which operates the Altercare chain, gave in 11 separate years, most recently $1,000 in August 2023.

The giving continues at the federal level. Federal Election Commission records show the American Health Care Association’s political action committee — OHCA is that group’s only chartered Ohio affiliate — gave Husted for Senate $1,000 on Aug. 26, 2025 and another $1,000 on June 15, 2026. NBC4 reviewed Husted’s most recent campaign finance report and found more than a dozen nursing home PACs or lobbyists have given at least $34,000 to his Senate campaign so far.

The example was raised by Norm Wernet, president of the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, a labor-affiliated group that pushes for home- and community-based care and argues the nursing home industry lobbies against it.

“Wrong to see that somebody like Sen. Husted, when he was in the legislature, would co-sponsor a bill that, in fact, avoided the liability on the nursing homes,” Wernet told the station. “So that, that’s one example of how the politicians get continued support again and again.”

Husted’s office responded to NBC4 on a different question — the federal budget law — saying nursing homes received no net cash infusion or additional federal dollars under H.R. 1, and that the law made it easier for states to move toward home- and community-based care. The statement did not address the 2002 state legislation.

That distinction matters for the people at the end of these inspection reports. Medicaid, not Medicare, pays for most long-term care in Ohio, and the same federal law is squeezing the home-based programs that keep people out of facilities in the first place. Nearly 140,000 Ohioans rely on Medicaid-supported home care and face uncertainty as the deepest cuts take effect Jan. 1. Disability advocates have warned that the shift could push people back into institutions. Husted has also voted against amendments that would have directed federal investigations into insurance denials and Medicaid coverage losses — the same insurer cutoffs that preceded several of the shelter discharges.

Leilani Pelletier, Ohio’s statewide long-term care ombudsman, estimated roughly 13,000 Ohioans are discharged from a nursing home every month. Involuntary discharges to shelters are rare, she said, but facilities are legally required to ensure a discharge is safe and appropriate and do not get to decide unilaterally where someone goes.

“The real issue is when people are discharged to a homeless shelter and there’s been no work or investigation done on if that would be a safe or appropriate discharge,” she said.

Chip Wilkins, who runs Dayton’s long-term care ombudsman program, put it more plainly. Residents sent to shelters typically end up in a hospital within days because the shelter cannot meet their needs, he said, and he has seen an uptick over the past six months.

“It is as cruel as it sounds,” he said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

An invitation reviewed by TiffinOhio.net shows that House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith of Missouri and Rep. Max Miller of Ohio invited donors to an event supporting Carey today, Monday, Aug. 17, at the GBX Group offices at 2101 Superior Ave. in Cleveland. The schedule runs from a 4 p.m. chair committee reception through a 5 p.m. general reception and a 6:30 p.m. private dinner. Giving levels start at $500 for an attendee and climb to $25,000 for a seat on the chair committee. The invitation says the event is paid for by the Carey Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that federal records confirm is registered with the Federal Election Commission.

Miller is the sitting congressman whose ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of throwing hot water at her, holding a gun to her head and fracturing their 2-year-old daughter’s collarbone. He denies every allegation. He has never been criminally charged, and prosecutors brought no charges in connection with the injury that prompted a police investigation. Earlier this month the House Ethics Committee announced it would review whether Miller may have “engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use.” Miller requested that review himself.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s former father-in-law, has said publicly that Miller is dangerous and should not serve in Congress. Sen. Jon Husted has called on him to resign. Neither man is a Democrat. Both are the sitting Republican senators from Miller’s own state, and both said what they said before this invitation went out.

Carey is not a bystander in this

It would be one thing if Carey were a rank-and-file member who happened to accept a check. He is not. Carey’s own campaign site describes him as a deputy whip and an NRCC co-chair — a member of the whip organization that counts Republican votes and an officer of the committee that exists to elect and protect Republican incumbents. He sits on Ways and Means with both Smith and Miller.

The money has also moved in both directions, in amounts that match almost to the dollar and dates that match almost to the day.

Federal Election Commission filings show Miller’s leadership PAC, the Dependable Conservative Leadership PAC, has given Carey for Congress $11,200 across four contributions: $2,900 in June 2022, $2,500 in March 2023, $800 in June 2023 and $5,000 in May 2025.

Carey’s own leadership PAC, Carry On PAC, has given Max Miller for Congress $11,200 across four contributions: $2,900 in June 2022, $2,500 in March 2023, $800 in June 2023 and $5,000 in June 2025.

Same amounts. Same three dates in 2022 and 2023. A $5,000 pair four days apart in the spring of 2025. This is not a donation Carey received and can shrug at. It is a standing arrangement between two members who have been funding each other for four years, and Carey is the one hosting.

Other Republicans have handled Miller’s money differently. Minnesota Rep. Brad Finstad’s campaign returned its $5,000. Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s campaign said it would give the money to charity. New York Rep. Mike Lawler said he is keeping his, arguing the allegations belong in family court. Carey has not been reported to have done any of the three. He scheduled a fundraiser, and it is tonight.

The third name on the invitation

Smith’s presence carries its own weight. As Ways and Means chairman he controls the committee Carey and Miller both sit on, and a chairman’s name at the top of an invitation is the most valuable thing a member can lend a colleague’s finance operation.

It is also worth knowing how Smith has voted on the federal law written for the people making the allegations in this case. Smith voted against final passage of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act in April 2019 and again in March 2021. VAWA funds legal aid, emergency housing, victim advocacy and law enforcement training for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking. Both bills passed the House over his objection.

Carey and Miller were not in Congress for either vote. Smith was, twice.

What the party says versus what the party does

Speaker Mike Johnson has declined to push Miller out. Asked about the allegations, Johnson said, “The key word there is allegation,” and pointed to the Ethics Committee process. Miller himself has been blunter about where he thinks he stands. Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, he said, “Speaker Mike Johnson, everyone else, they’re standing behind me.”

The Ohio Republican Party let the replacement deadline pass without a substitute candidate, locking Miller onto the November ballot. Vivek Ramaswamy, the party’s nominee for governor, has kept Miller listed among his endorsers, even after removing other endorsers within 48 hours of critical coverage. And through most of this, as TiffinOhio.net has reported, Ohio Republicans said very little at all.

That is a pattern, and the fundraiser is its logical end point. Silence is passive. Buying a ticket is not.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has moved Ohio’s 7th District from Solid Republican to Likely Republican to Toss Up in the space of a summer. That is the measurable cost of the party’s choice, and it is the only language in which this appears to register.

The part that isn’t about the horse race

While all of this has played out, Ohio’s domestic violence system has been failing the people it exists to serve. TiffinOhio.net reported Sunday that more than half of Ohio survivors seeking shelter last year were turned away, with centers in Miller’s own district reporting double-digit increases in demand. Constituents in that district have said plainly that they want consequences.

Those are the same survivors VAWA money reaches. The gap between a $25,000 chair committee seat in a renovated Cleveland warehouse and a shelter bed that does not exist is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a set of priorities, written down on an invitation with three congressmen’s names on it.

Carey is entitled to raise money from whomever he likes. Miller is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and this newsroom has said so in every piece it has published on him. But entitlement is not the question. The question is what a party does when its own senators say one of its members is unfit, and the answer, in Cleveland tonight, is to sell tickets.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The other candidate hasn’t responded to questions about the matter.

John Kulewicz, the Democratic nominee for AG, last week amended his complaint to Ohio Inspector General Randall J. Meyer with details of other possible conflicts of interest on the part of Josh Rubin, a lobbyist who chairs the board of JobsOhio, that were reported last week by the Capital Journal. 

The latter calls itself a private corporation. But it was created by the General Assembly and Gov. Mike DeWine appoints its board. 

JobsOhio was allowed to lease the state liquor franchise for far less than it was worth. It has since disbursed more than $2 billion in what at least used to be public money to businesses in the form of incentives.

Kulewicz’s complaint says that Rubin’s dual roles raise questions about whether he’s using JobsOhio funds to benefit his lobbying clients.

The Capital Journal’s new reporting showed that “Mr. Rubin continues to lobby for Intel even during his tenure as chairman of the board,” the amended complaint said. “Mr. Rubin was actively lobbying the governor on Intel’s behalf as recently as April 2026.”

It added, “This conduct continues to raise ethical questions about Rubin’s ability to serve the interests of the People of Ohio versus the interests of his clients and his own pecuniary interests as CEO of the CJR Group.”

A spokesman for Keith Faber, Kulewicz’s Republican opponent in the attorney general’s race, didn’t respond to questions for this story.

Last week’s analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records showed that Rubin was registered to lobby both JobsOhio and the governor on behalf of Intel from the time Gov. DeWine appointed him to the JobsOhio Board in September 2023 until the beginning of this year. 

They also show that Rubin actively lobbied DeWine for Intel through that period and into 2026. 

The state has awarded Intel more than $600 million for construction of what is now a long delayed chip-making plant northeast of Columbus. JobsOhio has awarded at least $27 million for the project.

With the project delayed by at least five years and its future uncertain, Rubin is in a position likely to have some authority over whether to try and claw back some portion of the money JobsOhio has awarded. The agency won’t answer questions about the matter.

A spokesman for DeWine said Rubin’s multiple roles didn’t amount to a conflict. Despite being registered to lobby JobsOhio for Intel, his “activity and expense” filings show he actively lobbied the governor’s office on the Intel project, while he made no such filings regarding JobsOhio, DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney said.

In emailed responses to written questions, Kulewicz disagreed, saying, “This is an apparent conflict of interest. And at a time when we urgently need to restore public confidence in government, this also creates a clear appearance of impropriety. When you take on a job like this and answer the call to public service, you do so knowing that you can only serve the People of Ohio. You can’t serve both the public and the powerful.”

Faber’s spokesman was sent the same questions as the Kulewicz campaign. He didn’t respond.

With narrow exceptions, JobsOhio was exempted from the state’s ethics laws when it was created in 2011. 

Paul Nick, executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission, said that his office for the most part doesn’t have jurisdiction over Rubin, the rest of the JobsOhio board, or its staff. However, he said, Rubin’s roles as a board member and an Intel lobbyist appear to contradict his pledge to the governor to “cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio…”

Nick said that when JobsOhio was created, the Ethics Commission advocated that it be subject to the same ethics laws that state agencies are. Kulewicz said that should happen now.

“JobsOhio replaced several functions of the Ohio Department of Development,” he said. “It serves a public purpose doing work on behalf of the People of Ohio. It would function better if it were subject to the same ethics rules and laws as everyone else who works on behalf of the People of Ohio.”

DeWine’s office and JobsOhio say JobsOhio’s ethics policy requires board members to declare possible conflicts and for the board to vote whether to recuse them. Both said it’s a strong policy.

A review of the few board records that are public apparently held no instances in which Rubin, a lobbyist with dozens of clients, declared a potential conflict. Asked multiple times to share documents showing that Rubin had ever declared a potential conflict, JobsOhio didn’t respond.

Kulewicz said that shows JobsOhio’s dealings need to be investigated by a third party. That’s why he filed his initial complaint regarding another Rubin client, utility giant AEP.

Kulewicz added that subjecting JobsOhio to open-meetings and records laws would allay suspicion and prevent the need for outside investigation.

“None of this would be necessary if the legislature were to remove this veil of secrecy,” he said. “That is my preferred method to correct this. We already have sufficient protections for trade secrets and certain business information in Ohio — JobsOhio does not require near-complete exemption from our public records laws. I would advocate for that change.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Miller requested an ethics probe from the U.S. House after he was accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, daughter of Ohio GOP U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Two other women have leveled allegations against Miller. The congressman has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, and said he believes the ethics investigation will end in his favor.

Even as fellow Ohio politicians on both sides of the aisle expressed concerns about Miller staying in the reelection race for his seat representing Ohio’s 7th district in Congress, Miller has vowed to remain in the fight. The deadline for him to withdraw from the race and allow Ohio Republicans to replace him was Aug. 10.

In a 20-minute live stream on his X account earlier this month, he pushed back against the claims and public opinion of them.

At one point during the live stream, Miller said “if I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?”

“Would she have invited me to spend an afternoon at the playground with her and our daughter,” he went on. “Would she have written that we were in a friendlier place? No, she wouldn’t have, ladies and gentlemen.”

Domestic violence resource providers in the state say complexities about the issue can often be oversimplified in public conversations. Abuse can come from many sources, including physical violence, but also financial control, isolation from friends and family, and emotional manipulation.

“Survivors often continue to care for or stay with a partner between incidents out of fear, love, hope for change, or to protect their children, but that is not evidence that abuse didn’t happen,” the Ohio Domestic Violence Network said in a statement after Miller’s comments. “It’s one of the most common ways survivors are discredited when they come forward.”

In Miller’s district

Resource centers in Miller’s 7th Congressional District are providing services to a diverse and ever-increasing population.

In the first half of 2026, the Hope and Healing Survivor Resource Center that serves Summit and Medina counties saw a 27% increase in responses to hospitals for reports of intimate partner violence.

The center, which provides services at no cost, has seen an increase in clients served, and 23% more participants in their domestic violence prevention and outreach programs.

Already since January, the 24/7 support and crisis intervention hotline hosted by the center has received more than 3,500 calls.

“So, across the board, we’re just seeing an increase in demand,” said Teresa Stafford-Wright, chief executive officer at the center. “We have constantly seen an increase year after year for our services.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233, or text BEGIN to 88788

Ohio Domestic Violence Network

The Ohio Domestic Violence Network’s 76 local programs provided services to nearly 75,000 survivors in 2025, with more than 120,000 call, texts, and chats answered, according to the network.

State shelters housed nearly 9,500 individuals, with half of those being children. But shelters are reaching capacity levels and lack  staffing to serve all those asking for help.

According to the network, more than 50% of all Ohio survivors seeking shelter were turned away last year.

Stafford-Wright said the survivors coming into shelters in Summit and Medina counties are dealing with more complicated needs on top of the trauma of domestic violence.

“There’s a lack of affordable housing that we’re seeing, which keeps survivors from being able to get away, there’s a lack of income, and on top of that you can have substance abuse issues as well,” Stafford-Wright said.

The impact of domestic violence is felt among all cultures and populations, creating a need for resources to help with language barriers, navigation of immigration issues and other legal hurdles amid domestic violence issues.

“A lot of the community members, if they’re dealing with domestic violence or human trafficking, they may need family law, they may also need victims of crime law, they may need assistance with immigration law,” said Anna Chen, manager of communications and civic engagement for Asian Services in Action.

“A lot of these survivors are, unfortunately, heavily taken advantage of by their abusers.”

Asian Services in Action is a social health and legal services agency that has a strong immigrant and refugee population. It’s also located in Miller’s district.

The organization staffs a federally qualified health center, provides civic engagement, and voter education as well.

Also included in their services is Ahimsa, a confidential service for survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault. Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word for the concept of avoiding harm and violence.

“We were seeing that there were a lot of survivors in the immigrant-refugee population, and they are barred out of a lot of the resources in Northeast Ohio, just because they don’t have the language accessibility that we do,” said Emily Henthorn, manager of government affairs for Asian Services in Action.

Helping survivors may even mean the identification of cultural norms that might cause hesitation in reporting intimate partner violence, from patriarchal beliefs and downplay of abuse, to a religious aversion to divorce.

“So there’s a lot of coaching these women to believe that the abuse is happening, and it is real, because they tend to downplay, and … also we have to be very careful with confidentiality,” Henthorn said.

Looking ahead

Many centers rely on federal grant funding for the vast majority of their revenue, and some receive state funding, along with individual donations.

The Hope and Healing Survivor Resource Center’s funding is made up of about 75% grant funding, and without that funding, the center would have a lot of trouble continuing to provide the services, especially at no cost to the individuals.

“We’re hoping that in this new climate that we remain an organization that is seen as competent and is able to maneuver through the changing times,” Stafford-Wright said.

Henthorn said even more of their funding comes from grants, and they receive some from the Violence Against Women Act. But because of the population they serve, they’ve also seen a decrease in federal funds specifically going to their immigrant and refugee services.

“If we’re going to make it through the next few years of the Trump administration, we’re going to have to have more donations,” Henthorn said.

Advocates see the increase in public attention as a way to perhaps show those dealing with violence – or who may know someone that might be experiencing it – a way forward.

While headlines can bring attention to one particular case, Stafford-Wright said it’s important to remember that the person next door may be dealing with the same thing, and having someone that can help when the time is right will be vital.

“Try not to tell the person what they need to do in this moment, because sometimes you may alienate them,” Stafford-Wright said. “Definitely know the resources, be a listening ear, and stay close to that person.”

High-profile accusations can result in more people coming forward with their own experiences, and Henthorn warns against narratives that experiences are fictional or used for attention. Many times, it’s as simple as a lack of recognition of the problem, or the resources available.

“On average, it takes seven attempts to leave an abusive situation before a survivor gets out,” Henthorn said. “And a lot of times in those seven times, they’re seeing health care providers for injuries, they’re filing police reports, but people just aren’t seeing the signs.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Activists didn’t call it a “funeral.” Yet no one underplayed the latest reversal of progress for Blacks, Latinos and other people of color in this nation’s long, tortured and oft-racist history.

The hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act reveals again how too many white Americans abhor notions of equality with Black Americans, and the steps they will take to hinder equitable Black and Latino representation in Congress and at the state and local levels.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation on Aug. 6, 1965, several months after Alabama state troopers pummeled peaceful marchers on “Bloody Sunday.” Rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 and earlier this year, though, have gutted one of the landmark achievements of the civil rights era.

The former decision ended federal preclearance that state and local governments – mostly in the South – had needed before changing voting procedures. (A 2023 analysis found that at least 29 states had passed 94 restrictive voting laws in the decade following that decision.) 

The latter Supreme Court decision said Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – thus making it difficult to create a second majority-minority district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“As a direct result” of Chief Justice John Roberts’ court’s “decades-long quest to undermine the right to vote, our nation is experiencing a modern-day political Jim Crow where too many Republicans act with impunity to dilute the voting power of Black and Latino communities across the country,” said Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, led passage of a Virginia Voting Rights Act in 2021 while in the state Senate. It created new protections against voter discrimination based on race, color or language. It made the commonwealth an outlier across the South when providing equal access at the polls.

Virginians should feel confident about enfranchisement, McClellan told me in an interview. “But I’m fighting at the national level so that everybody’s right is protected,” she said.

However, McClellan noted of the federal law: “It’s on life support.” 

That’s much too optimistic.

Henry Chambers Jr., law professor at the University of Richmond, told me the violence that was once commonplace against African Americans before the VRA became law is basically non-existent today.

State legislatures, though, can often draw districts that negate the will of voters – and keep people of color wondering whether their votes have any meaning. 

“It’s possible you get people who say voting is pointless,” Chambers added. “The clearer it becomes people of color will be ignored,” the more likely they might stop heading to the polls.

That’s exactly what conservatives – including today’s Republican Party – would love to see.

Other factors include voter identification requirements and felon disenfranchisement, issues that tend to affect African Americans and Latinos moreso than whites. Virginia has been one of the toughest states for freed felons to regain civil rights. It could finally change that process – born in racism during the 1901-02 Virginia constitutional convention – through a referendum this fall.

Chambers said that If more nonwhites voted for Republicans, voter suppression tactics would decrease. Blacks and Latinos, however, usually select Democratic candidates overwhelmingly because of the party’s agenda and its embrace of their concerns.

Still, the professor added: “Blacks have historically been treated differently by the government.”

When African Americans advance in the United States, too often there’s a virulent white backlash – and not just regarding voting. It seems as if the majority wants to dehumanize people of color just to prove a point: You will never be equal.

Examples are painfully easy to cite.

Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” didn’t even want freed slaves to remain in the country. I guess Lincoln saw no use for Black Americans after they weren’t working for free any more.

Before the Civil War, he discussed plans to export Black people to Liberia. After the war’s start in 1861, the year he became president, Lincoln explored options to extradite freedmen to Panama and an island near Haiti.

Then in August 1862, he invited five Black men to the White House – not including Frederick Douglass, the most prominent abolitionist of the day – to urge an exodus. 

“But for your race among us there could not be war,” Lincoln said, “although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another,” according to David W. Blight in “Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom.”

Victim-blaming at its absolute worst. Black activists and abolitionists excoriated the idea, and it never gained much traction.

The war’s end led to Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877 that saw African-Americans gain political and economic clout. The reaction to the Black empowerment was swift, violent and merciless:

Jim Crow. Lynchings. Black codes. Second-class citizenship in education, employment, housing and human decency. Verdicts in criminal cases, including the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, that blessed white killers.

Where violence wasn’t an issue, African Americans still got the shaft. Among the most notable was the passage of a GI Bill toward the end of World War II that, in practice, denied mortgages to Black veterans. Urban Renewal projects, time and time again, destroyed Black communities for a perceived “greater good” for cities. 

President Donald Trump now has the gall to continue advocating for a nearly $1.8 billion, taxpayer-backed slush fund to “comfort” his supporters – including those who attacked the U.S. Capitol while trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the few surviving victims of the racist siege of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 – which killed as many as 300 Black people – never were able to collect reparations in court. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their lawsuit in 2024.

With the weakening of the VRA, people of color will keep fighting for voting rights and fair representation. They fear regression.

The regret is that, in this country, it’s always been this way.

This story was originally produced by Virginia Mercury, 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.

“We’re no longer talking about hypothetical situations,” said Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, noting the president’s push to nationalize election administration and to question the integrity of upcoming elections.

Brown is among the many Democratic state officials raising alarms over how Trump may seek to interfere with or challenge the results of November’s midterms. At stake is not only whether Republicans will maintain their grip on Congress, but also the control of state legislatures across the country. Democratic gains at either the state or national levels could provide a new check on Trump, who has sought to significantly expand executive power in his second term.

State lawmakers have introduced new legislation this year with the aim of protecting polling places this November. And behind closed doors, Democratic attorneys general and local election officials have sought to anticipate and prepare for ways the federal government could interject itself into local elections.

In recent months, Democratic attorneys general have been meeting to prepare for worst-case scenarios — including the possibility of federal immigration officers patrolling polling locations or the FBI visiting county election offices. Those AGs are gearing up to immediately fight potential intimidation or interference efforts in court, Brown said, and are working to educate local election administrators on basics of election law.

“Absent some very unusual circumstances, you can’t send the military to polling locations just to hang out. You can’t do those sorts of things,” he said.

The White House did not respond to Stateline’s questions. Republican state officials told Stateline they will respect voting laws and the outcomes of local races — no matter how the president reacts. Some Republicans have opposed Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting and resisted requests for private voter data.

Brown said he’s less worried about a White House effort to cancel or attack the legitimacy of elections across the country. Rather, he fears a more targeted effort to interfere with or challenge results in a few states that could determine the balance of federal power.

The president still refuses to acknowledge his 2020 electoral defeat, and Brown noted some fellow election deniers now hold power in state and local governments. At least 25 county election officials who align with the broader election-denier movement have taken office across the country since the last federal election in 2024, according to a recent New York Times analysis.

“That is what worries me, is a half a dozen local elected officials saying I have doubts about the election because the president said there was something shady, and I’m not going to certify it,” Brown said. “And we’re just in a chaos moment. And I think that’s a very real possibility.”

He added: “The struggle I have often in this job, and particularly on this issue, is raising the alarm for people about these possibilities, while not sounding like an alarmist, but I think we really need to in this circumstance.”

Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said elections have always had “some issues,” but he said there’s no evidence of anything coming close to major voter violations of election laws in the recent past. He said he expected Republican and Democratic secretaries of state to continue their long tradition of conducting elections with integrity.

“I feel confident in the election system in this country, and I hope that politicians will be responsible,” he told Stateline, “that you’ll win the right way, and there’s a right way to lose, too, and I hope we’ll see more of that.” 

Election officials preparing

Midterms generally favor the party that doesn’t control the White House, but this cycle looks particularly competitive for Democrats as the president’s popularity sinks and consumer angst grows over high prices. 

In New Hampshire, both Republican-controlled legislative chambers are considered competitive this November, along with key U.S. House and Senate races. 

New Hampshire Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan said voters in his state generally trust local election officials to administer and count ballots. And he said the Trump administration would have to “have facts” to refute any unfavorable results.

“The results are going to speak for themselves,” Scanlan told Stateline. “And the results are factual.”

Scanlan has heard concerns about the prospects of federal agents showing up at the polls, but said he has no indication that will actually occur. While federal officials could arrive unannounced, he said he’d expect some kind of communication from Washington.

“At this point, if something were to happen, we would be prepared for it. I won’t say what that preparation is at the moment, but when you conduct an election you have to be ready for whatever gets thrown at you, whether it’s a fire in the polling place, or really bad weather, or some type of natural disaster. We prepare for those things.”

Katy Owens Hubler, director of elections and redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said local election officials have spent months running through tabletop exercises about all manner of potential disruptions, including the potential for federal involvement. 

“There is more rhetoric coming from the federal government than we have typically seen,” she said. 

While federal law prohibits ordering armed forces to polling places in most circumstances, lawmakers in multiple states this year introduced and passed legislation to prevent the presence of immigration officers or troops at voting locations, according to NCSL tracking.

Democratic governors in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Virginia signed new laws this year to limit law enforcement and military presence at voting sites and ensure more protections against voter intimidation.  

Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they were not planning an aggressive campaign at voting sites. In a statement to States Newsroom, the agency said it conducts “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement” that could bring officers to polling places if they were endangered by a public safety threat.

“ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” the statement said. 

Broad election concerns

Many Republican lawmakers have embraced the president’s push to purge noncitizens from voting rolls. Experts say noncitizen registration and voting, already illegal under federal law, are rare. But since 2018, 15 states have adopted constitutional amendments to verify citizenship status, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And several states have passed similar laws this year.

Those include a Mississippi law signed in April that requires election officials to verify proof of citizenship with documents such as birth certificates and passports when registering voters — which raised major concerns from voting rights advocates about restricting voting access for citizens without the proper documentation. 

Republican state Sen. Jeremy England, who sponsored that measure, said he sought to balance election security against voting access. He said media attention of even one case of a noncitizen voting in an election can cast doubt on the entire election system.

“At least the last couple of presidential elections have really led to a lot more questions,” he said, “and a lot of I would say probably a lot less confidence by the people.” 

Still, England rejected Trump’s call for the federal government to take over elections. The U.S. Constitution grants states primary responsibility for election administration.

“This idea of federalizing the election system, I don’t think the people of Mississippi would support that,” England said. “And we’re a red state with a Republican president.”

In July, Trump raised the alarm over election security in a primetime address from the White House. The president said Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and some other groups could compromise the country’s election infrastructure. Without evidence, Trump cast doubt on the integrity of the Los Angeles mayoral race and the state’s recent gubernatorial race. 

And in an interview with a conservative commentator this week, the president did not rule out declaring a national security emergency and federalizing control over November’s elections. 

England was among a bipartisan group of state leaders who discussed election preparations at last month’s National Conference of State Legislatures summit in Chicago. Joining him on a panel discussion was Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat.

Fontes urged state leaders to exercise more self-discipline when talking about and regulating elections.

“This should not be a partisan issue. That’s the hill that I’m willing to die on,” he said during that panel.

If states want to beef up election integrity, Fontes said lawmakers should provide local election officials with more funding to improve security — rather than making it more difficult to vote. And he held up the right to vote as among the most sacrosanct in society, giving ordinary people their constitutional right to check government power.

“That’s the real issue here,” he said. “The one chance citizens get, the one chance the governed get to keep us in our place, is being the most heavily regulated.”

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The updated criminal complaint increased the number of charges filed against the SPLC from 11 to 14 and included another defendant, Heidi Beirich, who managed the covert program the civil rights group operated to obtain intelligence from extremist groups dating back to the 1980s.

“The indictment unsealed today reflects the continued work of federal investigators and prosecutors in examining this alleged scheme,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas Govan, in a statement published Wednesday. “We look forward to presenting the evidence in court and allowing the judicial process to determine the facts and the defendants’ responsibility for the alleged crimes.”

The SPLC said in a statement Thursday that confronting extremist groups “is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do.”

“The actions taken by the DOJ will not shake our resolve,” the statement said. “We remain steadfast in our fight for justice and in our commitment to ensuring the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all. We are confident in our position and look forward to presenting the evidence and making our case in court.”

Michael Procter, an attorney for Beirich, said in a statement that Beirich was innocent,” and this case is without merit.”

“We believe the charges against her and the SPLC are politically motivated, and Dr. Beirich has been targeted in this case because of the important work she has done to combat hate groups and extremists,” the statement said.

He added that “violent extremists have not prevented Beirich from continuing her work.”

“Dr. Beirich won’t be silenced or intimidated by the government’s false and politicized allegations now,” Proctor said. “She welcomes the opportunity to present the truth in court.”

A message was sent to Proctor on Thursday seeking additional comment.

DOJ alleges that a now-discontinued paid informant program run by SPLC, intended to monitor and disrupt the activities of white supremacist and terrorist groups, amounted to material support for those groups and fraud on SPLC donors.

The U.S. Justice Department alleges in the indictment that Beirich and the civil rights group opened bank accounts for various shell companies that the SPLC used to pay individuals embedded with white supremacy groups

The money the SPLC used to pay informants came from donations collected by the organization for the stated purpose of dismantling such groups. However, the government said in the indictment that the money was used for a different purpose.

“However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance,” the superseding indictment said. “The SPLC’s paid individuals (‘field sources’) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.”

SPLC says the program was necessary to obtain information on the plans of such groups. According to SPLC, the materials were passed on to law enforcement to assist with investigations and were used as content in various publications that informed the public about the activities of the groups. The fictitious companies also protected the identities of their informants.

SPLC moved to have the case dismissed this spring, arguing the DOJ was pursuing vindictive prosecution for SPLC’s opposition to the actions of President Donald Trump. A federal judge last week denied the motion.

Bryan Fair, who was then the president and CEO of the nonprofit, pleaded not guilty to the 11 charges in May. The trial is tentatively scheduled for October.

SPLC Second Superseding Indictment

This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, 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 fantasy author Rae Carson launches her newest novel, “Monster, Monarch, Maiden,” at the bookstore on Saturday, August 22. Horror novelist Markus Redmond follows on Sunday, August 23, with a talk and signing that kicks off a mini book crawl through downtown businesses.

Both events are free and open to anyone, though the store encourages reservations.

Saturday: Rae Carson and Mindy McGinnis

Carson will take part in a moderated conversation and book signing from noon to 1 p.m. at Pan Yan Bookstore, 144 S. Washington St., in conversation with Ohio author Mindy McGinnis. Copies of both authors’ books will be available for purchase.

Guests can also join the authors for a cocktail “hour” from 12:30 to 1 p.m. at The Empire Bistro, 138 S. Washington St. Readers can reserve a spot or set aside copies through the store.

“Monster, Monarch, Maiden” is a stand-alone fantasy from Greenwillow Books, priced at $19.99 in hardcover. The main character loses everything and pledges herself to a secretive young man on a perilous quest in order to survive, in a story built around gods, monsters, magical gifts and life-or-death stakes.

Carson is the author of two bestselling, award-winning trilogies and the stand-alone novels “Any Sign of Life” and “The Empire of Dreams.” Her debut, “The Girl of Fire and Thorns,” was a finalist for both the William C. Morris Award and the Andre Norton Award, and “Walk on Earth a Stranger” was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award and won a Western Writers of America Spur Award. She has also written for the Star Wars universe, including the novelization of “The Rise of Skywalker.” Her books, as she puts it, tend to contain adventure, magic and smart girls who make mostly smart choices.

Originally from California, Carson now lives in Ohio with her husband.

McGinnis is an Ohio author and former school librarian whose Gothic historical thriller “A Madness So Discreet” won the 2016 Edgar Award for best young adult novel.

Sunday: Markus Redmond and a mini book crawl

Redmond will speak and sign copies at The Empire Bistro, next door to the bookstore, in conversation with Columbus author D.M. Guay, who writes the 24/7 Demon Mart horror-comedy series. Drinks and light lunch options will be available to order.

That session doubles as the kickoff for a book crawl. Guests move to other downtown spots to grab a drink or a snack and sit and read for a while — Bailiwicks Coffee Company from 1:20 to 2:05 p.m., Pan Yan Bookstore from 2:10 to 2:55 p.m., and The Renaissance of Tiffin from 3 to 4 p.m., where the authors will mingle with readers.

An optional $25 Book Crawl Pass bundles a voucher at each stop: a drink at Bailiwicks, an appetizer, flatbread or cocktail at The Empire Bistro, and a glass of wine, two beers or two mocktails at The Renaissance. RSVPs and book reservations go through the store’s event page.

One scheduling note for readers heading downtown Sunday: Pan Yan Bookstore will be closed from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. for a private event before it opens as a crawl stop.

“Blood Rising” is the sequel to Redmond’s debut, “Blood Slaves,” and is published by Dafina at $28 in hardcover. It is a blend of supernatural horror and alternate history in which a vengeful vampire tribe formed of formerly enslaved Africans wages war across the Southern colonies. The publisher pitches the series to fans of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and to readers of Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones. Publishers Weekly gave the first book a starred review.

Redmond is an actor, director and screenwriter turned author. His work draws on an interest in history and how it shapes the present, along with a fascination with supernatural creatures and what they represent in the real world. He is also, by his own account, obsessed with Singaporean television dramas. Originally from Philadelphia, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Isis.

Pan Yan Bookstore is an independent shop selling new and used books, coffee and snacks in the heart of the downtown district.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“The truth of the matter is, you know, no matter what happens in whichever direction we go, people in my generation have already made it,” he said. “We’re gonna be fine. It’s gonna be your generation…that pays the price.”

The room turned on him. He tried to push through, asked who still believed in capitalism, told the ones who clapped they would be carrying everyone else on their backs, said “Peace out, see you guys” and walked, roughly 16 minutes ahead of schedule, to another wave of boos. It happened July 29 at the Young Americans for Liberty national convention, held on Xavier University’s campus in Cincinnati. TiffinOhio.net covered the appearance and the week of backlash that followed it.

The consensus reading was that Ramaswamy misjudged the room. That is too generous. He did not misjudge the room. He described, in one sentence, the arrangement that made him a billionaire — and a room of 20-year-olds who have spent their lives on the wrong end of arrangements like it recognized the shape of it immediately.

The structure, not the gaffe

Two weeks after the boos, the investigative newsletter Oligarch Watch published the most detailed account yet of how Ramaswamy actually made his money. Caleb Ecarma’s Aug. 12 investigation is a case study in who absorbs a loss.

In December 2014, Axovant — a subsidiary of Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences — bought the rights to an experimental Alzheimer’s drug from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million. Glaxo had already given up on it. The drug, later named intepirdine, had failed multiple Phase 2 trials, including two involving 576 and 684 patients.

Then, according to Oligarch Watch, the failed data got a second look. Axovant hired Ramaswamy’s mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, as vice president of medical and scientific strategy in 2015. Oligarch Watch reported that she had never conducted a clinical trial, and that within weeks of the company’s record-setting initial public offering she had co-published two reanalyses of Glaxo’s failed 684-patient study — one that sorted patients into pass-or-fail buckets rather than measuring cognitive performance, and one that simply dropped the more than 30% of patients who left the study before it ended. Both methods are long-criticized in the medical research literature for producing biased results. Both produced numbers Axovant could sell.

The IPO raised $315 million on a $1.4 billion valuation, with no revenue and, as the trade press noted at the time, not a single patient recruited for a future trial. Ramaswamy went on television and told investors the drug could help millions.

Oligarch Watch reported that when rival drugs in the same class began failing, Ramaswamy could not quietly dump 75 million Axovant shares on the open market without tanking the price and triggering disclosures. So Roivant’s position was monetized privately instead, through a $1.1 billion SoftBank transaction disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission in September 2017. Less than a month later, intepirdine failed its Phase 3 trial. The stock fell about 70% in a single day. The company was eventually renamed, lost nearly all its value and shut down.

Ramaswamy made an estimated $260 million from Roivant, per Forbes. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System — a pension fund for schoolteachers, in another state, whose members had no idea any of this was happening — watched its Axovant stake fall from about $1.2 million to about $68,000, according to SEC filings cited by Oligarch Watch.

David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, gave Oligarch Watch the cleanest description of the arrangement: it was, he said, “heads I win and tails I also win.” Ramaswamy has told BioPharma Dive there was “probably nothing in a meaningful way” the company could have done differently.

Writing for TiffinOhio.net in May, Randy Kemp argued that a business model that pays the founder whether or not the product works is a scam in every sense that matters to the people on the losing end, even when it is entirely legal. The new reporting on how the underlying data got massaged does not soften that judgment. It sharpens it.

The same arrangement, now on the ballot

The Xavier speech was not a one-off embarrassment. Every major plank of Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor has the identical structure: he names an upside, and someone else carries the risk. It is the Axovant arrangement, scaled to a state.

The tax plan. Ramaswamy has pledged to eliminate Ohio’s personal income tax, which raises roughly $10 billion a year — about a quarter of the state operating budget, funding K-12 schools, Medicaid, public universities, prisons and services for seniors, veterans and disabled Ohioans. He says growth and spending discipline will close the gap. He has not said which programs get cut. Outside analyses have been consistent: the benefits flow to wealthy Ohioans and corporations, and replacing the revenue through property taxes would require an increase of roughly 20% statewide. Heads he wins. Tails your school levy.

The data centers. Ramaswamy wants to accelerate Ohio’s data center buildout and has called the boom good on tape at least 10 times, with no conditions attached. What he offers the communities absorbing it is free electricity and lower property taxes for the people who live nearest the facilities. Call that what it is: a scam. A single hyperscale data center can draw as much power as 100,000 homes, according to the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, and new baseload generation takes years to bring online. Ramaswamy has never said where the surplus that makes anybody’s power free is supposed to come from. Innovation Ohio President Michael McGovern called the plan unserious. Meanwhile a May report from the group found Ramaswamy’s personal holdings span every tier of the industry he would regulate — chip makers, cloud and data center operators, industrial real estate, crypto — and McGovern said he is too entangled with it “to make sure it does right by our communities.” As governor he would appoint all five members of the Public Utilities Commission, the body that sets the rates. He has also taken nearly $100,000 from energy interests while Ohioans’ electric bills climb.

The crypto push. Ramaswamy has praised House Bill 18, which would let the state treasurer and five public pension boards put money into bitcoin-tied funds. He holds a stake of roughly $69 million in Strive, a leveraged bitcoin treasury company that lost $257.6 million last quarter. He faces no legal requirement to divest. The people whose retirements would ride on that bill are teachers, firefighters and public employees — which is to say, the same category of person who held the Axovant shares.

The campaign itself. Ramaswamy has put $25 million into his own campaign, about 83% of what it raised this year. It is structured as a loan, meaning donors’ money can be used to pay him back. The super PAC behind him has been financed overwhelmingly by a handful of out-of-state billionaires, including Elon Musk. Even the money is a downside-protected position.

‘Your generation’

The rest of the record fills in the line about generations.

Ramaswamy told Ohio parents in November 2025 that the fix for child care costs was to keep kids in school year-round and until 4 p.m. Then the video came down, without explanation, and the proposal has not resurfaced. In December 2024 he argued that tech firms hire foreign-born engineers over Americans because American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” — while the company he founded had filed for 29 H-1B visas. On July 4 this year he worked a parade in Lancaster, shook hands in Upper Arlington, and then boarded a private jet to Paris, his fifth international trip of the year on a plane he has flown more than 50 times during the campaign.

None of that is illegal. Little of it is even unusual for a very rich candidate. The Xavier crowd was not booing a policy disagreement. It was listening to a man explain, without apparent embarrassment, that he had already collected and they had not.

Why that room

Young Americans for Liberty grew out of Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and organizes college students around limited government and free markets — the exact principles Ramaswamy built a national brand on. This was not a hostile crowd bused in by the opposition. It was his own coalition, in the city where he was born.

The complaints shouted from that floor were about bills. Attendees heckled him over data centers and energy prices — the same two complaints that moved Tiffin City Council to vote 6-0 on Monday, April 20, to freeze data center development inside city limits for a year. No data center had even been proposed here. Council wanted to know the cost first. That instinct — find out who pays before you say yes — is the same instinct that filled the Xavier hall with noise.

Democratic nominee Dr. Amy Acton has been making the out-of-touch-billionaire argument for months against his jet travel and his self-funding. What changed on July 29 is that a room full of Republicans and libertarians made it for her, louder.

The race remains close. A Fox News poll of 1,008 Ohio registered voters conducted Aug. 6 through 10 put Ramaswamy at 50% and Acton at 48%, a two-point margin inside the error bars, with the poll finding cost of living dominating voter concerns statewide.

Ohioans vote Tuesday, Nov. 3. When Ramaswamy says his generation has already made it, he is not speculating. He is reporting a result. The unsettled question is who holds the bag the next time one of his ventures does not work out, and whether Ohio wants to volunteer.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He was the pastor from Vickery.

The small-town preacher who spent nearly two decades leading Fremont Baptist Temple before carrying that identity into the Ohio Statehouse. His political brand was built around ministry, faith and the image of a local pastor who happened to become a state representative.

That version of Gary Click is increasingly out of date.

Click is no longer leading a local church. He has been traveling around the country. He has moved deeper into national Christian political organizations. He says he has established a nonprofit of his own. His legislation is being promoted beyond Ohio. And campaign finance records show thousands of dollars spent over the course of his legislative career on conferences, flights and hotels — including stays at luxury resorts.

Taken together, the pieces show a striking transformation in Click’s public life.

The pastor-legislator from Sandusky County is increasingly operating in a much bigger world.

The pastor quietly leaves the pulpit

The most consequential change happened almost completely out of public view.

Click stepped down as lead pastor of Fremont Baptist Temple at the end of March 2025 after 19 years in the position, according to his later account.

But constituents did not learn about the change from Click.

TiffinOhio.net discovered and reported the pastoral transition in February, nearly 11 months later. At the time, Fremont Baptist Temple’s website was still presenting Click as its active pastor even though his official Ohio House biography had been changed to say he had “recently stepped down and assumed the honorary title of pastor Emeritus.”

Click quickly disputed the characterization that he had left quietly.

“Actually, it was very public. You just missed it,” he wrote on X after the story spread.

When asked to identify the public announcement, no further response was identified.

Days later, Click discussed the departure in a damage-control interview with the Advertiser-Tribune. The church’s website was also updated after TiffinOhio.net’s report to reflect Rick Ash as pastor and Click as pastor emeritus.

But Click’s explanation for leaving day-to-day church leadership revealed something much more significant than a pastoral retirement.

He was making room for something else.

California. Colorado. Alabama.

Click said his new emeritus status had freed him to expand a speaking ministry far beyond Fremont.

He told the Advertiser-Tribune he had preached in California, Colorado and Alabama, along with Springfield, Kettering and Cincinnati in Ohio.

The subject was not simply traditional evangelism.

Click said he was preaching about what he called “the justice and biblical role of Christians in civil government.”

And he disclosed another development: Click said he had filed paperwork to establish a nonprofit called “We the Church” to advance that work.

For nearly two decades, Click’s religious authority was rooted in one congregation in Sandusky County. The operation he described after leaving the pulpit has no such geographic boundary.

It involves interstate speaking engagements, politics, religious advocacy and an organization of his own built around Christianity’s role in government.

By this summer, that national network was becoming even more visible.

From Fremont to a national political network

Click is now a leader in the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, an organization that brings Christian elected officials together around public policy.

The group currently lists Click as vice chair of its Ohio organization and vice chair of its national Committee on Education.

In June, the organization held its National Policy Conference at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The three-day gathering, themed “America’s 250: Save the Nation,” brought together conservative elected officials, pastors and activists for committee meetings, panels and political programming.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a keynote address. The organization’s own description of the conference invited “Christian elected officials” to gather with faith leaders and supporters from around the country.

Click’s involvement is not merely ceremonial.

His work in the Ohio Statehouse is beginning to travel through the same national network.

Click is a primary sponsor of House Bill 486, the “Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act”, which passed the Ohio House last year and would expressly permit instruction about what the legislation calls the positive influence of Judeo-Christian values on American history.

National reporting this year found that the National Association of Christian Lawmakers was interested in sharing Click’s legislation with members in other states as possible model legislation.

That represents a considerable change in scale.

Click is no longer simply introducing bills in Columbus.

He is participating in a national organization capable of carrying those ideas into statehouses around the country.

The travel started before the nonprofit

There is another part of Click’s changing life that became visible much earlier: the travel.

A February TiffinOhio.net investigation of Click’s complete campaign finance history found $19,055.33 in conference travel and related expenses during his legislative tenure.

The destinations included Scottsdale, Denver, Orlando, Chicago, Washington and Texas.

And some of the accommodations were decidedly upscale.

In December 2024, Click’s campaign paid $1,204.14 for lodging at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess in Arizona, a AAA Five Diamond resort. The campaign reported another $1,043.45 American Airlines transaction connected with travel to the conference.

There was an $881.91 stay at the Hyatt Regency Denver.

A $772.89 stay at a Marriott in Orlando.

A $376.62 hotel stay in Chicago.

Campaign records also show expenditures connected with national organizations including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Family Research Council and WallBuilders, the Texas organization founded by conservative Christian activist David Barton.

In September 2025, Click’s campaign paid $307.97 for what the filing described as a “Legislative Conference” at WallBuilders in Aledo, Texas.

There is an important distinction: the records do not establish that the campaign paid for every trip Click has described as part of his new speaking ministry, and those two categories should not be conflated.

What the records do establish is that extensive travel through national conservative political circles was already part of Click’s life well before he publicly explained that leaving day-to-day church leadership would give him more freedom to travel and expand his ministry.

Four hotel stays labeled ‘Non legislative’

Some of Click’s campaign-funded lodging raises a separate question.

Four Columbus hotel stays in late 2025 were explicitly described in his own campaign filings as “Non legislative.”

They totaled $572.09.

The campaign paid $313.48 for one stay in September, followed by stays costing $129.80, $77.29 and $51.52.

TiffinOhio.net’s review found no corresponding reimbursement to the campaign for those expenses.

That stood in contrast with how Click handled a personal campaign-account transaction much earlier in his political career.

In October 2020, Click took $200 cash out of his campaign account for personal use, returned it three days later and documented exactly what had happened.

“CASH TAKEN OUT, BUT PUT BACK IN 10/8/20,” the filing said.

Five years later, four hotel stays were described by his own campaign as non-legislative.

The money stayed spent.

Then there is the golf

Travel is only one part of the more comfortable political world surrounding Click’s career.

TiffinOhio.net’s review found another $12,044.72 in expenses connected with campaign golf outings since he entered the Ohio House.

The 2025 outing alone cost the campaign $5,653.85.

That included $3,140 to Mohawk Golf and Country Club in Tiffin, $1,944.39 to Ironwood Steakhouse for catered food and drinks, $383.16 for custom signs, plus purchases from Walmart and Ideal Bakery.

The campaign has held a golf outing every year.

Campaign golf outings, political conferences and donor-funded travel are hardly unique in American politics. But the significance here is not that Click attends a fundraiser or gets on an airplane.

It is what those expenditures look like alongside everything else that has changed.

The local pastorate is gone.

In its place are national conferences, interstate speaking engagements, political networking, upscale travel and a nonprofit venture.

A different Gary Click

None of this happened overnight.

Click had relationships with national Christian conservative organizations long before leaving Fremont Baptist Temple. His official House biography notes more than 30 years in ministry and his past work lobbying Congress on behalf of churches and Christian schools.

But the pieces increasingly fit together in a way they did not when Click first ran for the Ohio House in 2020.

He gave up leadership of the church that anchored his public identity for nearly two decades.

He says doing so freed him to preach around the country.

He created “We the Church.”

He holds leadership positions within a national Christian lawmakers organization.

His Ohio legislation is being discussed for use in other states.

And years of campaign records document nearly $20,000 in conference travel, five-figure spending on golf outings and stays ranging from ordinary hotels to a Five Diamond Arizona resort.

Meanwhile, the political base back home has shown signs of strain.

Click survived his Republican primary by just 599 votes in May, losing Seneca County to challenger Eric Watson. Watson later said he would “never” endorse Click. Click now faces Democrat Aaron Jones of Tiffin in the Nov. 3 general election for what would be Click’s fourth and final consecutive House term.

That puts two versions of Gary Click side by side.

One is the political identity District 88 voters were introduced to six years ago: the longtime Fremont-area pastor who became their representative in Columbus.

The other is taking shape now: a national speaker, nonprofit founder and Christian political organizer whose travel schedule and political network increasingly extend far beyond Sandusky and Seneca counties.

Click himself supplied perhaps the clearest explanation for the transformation when he finally discussed leaving his church.

The new arrangement, he said, gave him greater freedom to travel and expand his ministry.

Less than a year and a half later, it is becoming increasingly clear what he meant.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

OEA represents roughly 120,000 teachers, education support professionals and higher education faculty across Ohio, including educators in the public districts serving Seneca and Sandusky counties. According to the campaign, the association notified Jones in a letter from OEA President Jeff Wensing, a Parma City Schools math teacher elected to lead the union in 2025. The endorsement followed a review by an OEA screening committee of Jones’s written responses on public education issues.

The union’s endorsement process runs through its members rather than its officers. Candidates seeking OEA’s backing complete a written questionnaire covering school funding, employee rights, retirement and privatization, and are screened by committees made up of members from the local associations in the district.

The endorsement makes Jones the choice of both of Ohio’s major teachers organizations. The Ohio Federation of Teachers endorsed his campaign in June, in a letter from OFT President Melissa Cropper.

“I’m a Clyde High School graduate, and the people who taught me set me up for everything that came after,” Jones said in the announcement. “The teachers and support staff in this district are folks I know by name. When they tell me what’s happening in their buildings, I listen. Having them behind this campaign matters to me.”

Jones has made public school funding a central issue of his campaign, tying decisions made at the Statehouse to local classrooms and local tax bills.

“Those decisions get made in Columbus, but they show up here,” Jones said. “They show up in classrooms, and they show up on property tax bills. I want the people making them to hear from the folks doing the work.”

A district where school funding is already on the ballot

Jones faces three-term Republican Rep. Gary Click of Vickery in the Nov. 3 general election. TiffinOhio.net has reported that Click cosponsored House Bill 186 and voted for House Bill 129 — two measures signed into law that are projected to cost Tiffin City Schools roughly $1.2 million a year beginning in tax year 2026 — and that he has since introduced House Bill 420, which would force all continuing property tax levies in Ohio to expire after 2029.

District 88 has long been considered safe Republican territory, but Click emerged from his May 5 primary severely bruised. He defeated challenger Eric Watson by fewer than 600 votes, 6,859 to 6,260, or 52.28 percent to 47.72 percent, according to returns from the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections. Click carried his home county of Sandusky but lost Seneca County — where Jones lives and was elected — and Watson declined to endorse him afterward.

Labor and veterans backing

The OEA endorsement adds to a list that already included organized labor. The United Auto Workers endorsed Jones in July through the executive committee of the UAW Ohio State CAP Council, on the recommendation of the Fostoria Area UAW Community Action Program, which represents members in Seneca County. VoteVets, which backs Democratic veterans running for office, is also listed among the campaign’s endorsements.

Jones, a 1991 graduate of Clyde High School, served four years as an Airborne Infantryman with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — The Old Guard — in Washington, D.C. He has represented Tiffin’s 1st Ward on City Council since 2024. He and his wife, Tracy, live in Tiffin and have four grandchildren.

He has worked for more than 20 years as a production supervisor at JVIS USA (formerly Toledo Molding & Die), the Tiffin auto parts plant on North Maule Road.

The campaign says it does not accept corporate PAC money. More information is available at jonesforohio.com.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Four days later the Erie County Board of Elections refused to certify him, splitting 2-2. And now the Republicans who spent a decade holding this seat are turning on him in public, under their own names.

The sharpest of them is Jon Paul Morrow, the political consultant who worked on the 2014 campaign that put the 89th District in Republican hands in the first place. In a long public post this week, Morrow argued that Stidham should have walked out of the room, and that by staying in it he may have cost his party the seat.

“In 2014, Steve Kraus won Ohio’s 89th House District and put the seat in Republican hands. It has stayed there ever since,” Morrow wrote. “Now Caleb Stidham may have found a way to hand it back to the Democrats.”

Stidham denies there was any conflict. “There seems to be some confusion; there is no conflict of interest because I did not lead or chair the meeting that selected me as the candidate,” he told NBC4 in Columbus.

That answers a question nobody is asking. Huron County Republican Chairman Sven Stahl did chair the Aug. 10 meeting, precisely because Stidham was a candidate. Stidham was sent out of the room while his rivals made their pitches. Then he came back in for deliberations, and he voted.

‘Not picking a Lincoln Day Dinner speaker’

Morrow’s case is not that Stidham broke a rule. It is that the missing rule was never the point.

“A candidate for the nomination sat on the committee deciding who should receive the nomination, participated in the process, and then voted in a contest he won,” he wrote.

Ohio’s vacancy statute contains no recusal requirement for a committee member who is also an applicant. Morrow’s answer to that defense is blunt. “The fact that a statute does not contain the words ‘you cannot vote for yourself’ does not automatically settle every question about self-interest, public authority, and the integrity of the process,” he wrote.

He then drew the same line the Erie County elections board chairman would draw a day later — the line between a party’s own housekeeping and a job the legislature handed it.

“This committee was not picking a Lincoln Day Dinner speaker. It was not deciding party bylaws. It was not issuing an endorsement that voters were free to accept or reject in a primary,” Morrow wrote.

Republican voters had already picked D.J. Swearingen in the May 5 primary. When Swearingen walked away from the ballot on Aug. 4, state law handed six county party officers the power to decide whose name replaced his. Ohio courts have found that party officials can take on a public character when the state gives them that kind of power: in 1962 the Ohio Supreme Court held that county central committee members act as public officers when they exercise the statutory authority to fill vacancies in county offices. Morrow argued the same logic reaches this committee.

He was careful about what he could not prove. Republicans in the district have questioned whether Erie County Republican Party bylaws would even let someone serving in the Ohio House stay on as county chairman. “I have not independently verified the controlling bylaw language, so I am not presenting that claim as fact,” Morrow wrote. “But somebody should verify it.”

And he put his own interest on the table. “For disclosure, I worked as a consultant on Steve Kraus’s campaign,” he wrote. “Readers are free to take that into account. They should.”

The bill comes out of the campaign account

Much of the post is aimed at Republicans on money, not ethics. A fight over the nomination means lawyers, filings and hearings — paid for out of the same account that is supposed to be reaching voters before Nov. 3.

“Every dollar spent defending the nomination process is a dollar that is not being spent communicating with voters and defeating the Democratic nominee,” Morrow wrote.

His point is that none of it had to happen. “He should have left the room during deliberations and abstained from voting on his own nomination,” Morrow wrote. “A victory secured without his own vote would have been easier to defend politically and far less damaging to the legitimacy of the process.”

The obvious rebuttal is arithmetic: Stidham’s vote was needed to get to four. Morrow dismissed it. “The problem is not simply whether his vote supplied the winning margin,” he wrote. “The problem is that a candidate reportedly participated as one of the judges in the contest he was trying to win.”

He closed on the line he used as his title: “What Steve Kraus giveth, Caleb Stidham may yet taketh away.”

Who signed on

Then came the comments, and that is where the damage shows.

Ottawa County Auditor Jennifer Widmer — one of the three Republicans who applied for the seat Stidham voted himself into — thanked Morrow publicly and drew a contrast with how it was handled.

“I was among the group of Ottawa County Republican Women in 2010 who set out to change the perception of what it meant to be Republicans,” Widmer wrote. “We contrasted our service with the slimy politics of the other side. Ottawa County continues to hold those same principles because we know that doing the right thing matters.”

Marcell Strbich — the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who took 29.79% against Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague in the May Republican primary for secretary of state — endorsed the post from his campaign account, writing that Morrow had made the case that “there is no excuse not to recuse yourself.”

One commenter went further and pointed Republicans at the Democrat. “Support Retzke for Representative,” the person wrote. “I’d bet Retzke would have recused himself. #charactermatters”

The November math

Republicans were warning each other about the cost of this before the committee ever met.

Ron Coop, who posted publicly hours before the Aug. 10 vote, argued the bill would come due statewide rather than locally. “The 89th District is a solid 10 point Republican district. A point or two of grassroots staying home will not change local results,” Coop wrote. “However, it takes away votes from State wide candidates. This year will be a tough election for Republicans. They need all the votes they can get.”

Polling taken while the district committee was meeting suggests he was reading the year correctly. A Fox News survey of 1,008 Ohio registered voters conducted Aug. 6-10 found Democrat Sherrod Brown beating Republican Sen. Jon Husted 53% to 45% — with 11% of Republicans crossing over to Brown, and 25% of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement doing the same. Republican Vivek Ramaswamy led Democrat Amy Acton 50% to 48% in the governor’s race. Fifty-four percent of Ohio voters said they view the Republican Party unfavorably; 57% said the same of the MAGA movement. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

He is still not on the ballot

For all of it, Stidham has not been certified.

The Erie County Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 on Friday, Aug. 14, its two Democrats voting against certification and its two Republicans voting for it. Under state law a tie at a county board goes to the secretary of state, who decides the question summarily and whose decision is final.

Board Chairman Edward J. Leonard said both sides agreed to file written position statements with Director Alexander W. Jones by 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 21, so he can send them up the same day. The statutory outside deadline is Friday, Aug. 28.

The Republican who decides is Frank LaRose, term-limited as secretary of state and his party’s nominee for state auditor on the same Nov. 3 ballot.

Waiting on the other side is Easton Retzke of Sandusky, who has had the Democratic nomination locked since May 5 and has spent the summer campaigning while Republicans fought over who would face him. An Ohio State political science graduate, Retzke has been endorsed by the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the UAW’s Tri-County CAP Council and has run on public school funding, utility rates, the tax treatment of data centers and an overhaul of JobsOhio.

Swearingen carried this district with 58% of the vote in 2024.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

One vehicle was diverted during the two-hour operation, according to the Patrol. The release does not say why.

The checkpoint ran from 7 to 9 p.m. near the intersection of South Shaffer Park Drive, with the Patrol working alongside the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office and the Tiffin Police Department. The Ohio Department of Transportation assisted with traffic control.

The operation was paid for with federal grant funds and was held in coordination with saturation patrols working nearby, the Patrol said. Those patrols are intended to reach impaired drivers who never pass through the checkpoint itself.

The Patrol’s results release does not include any figures from the saturation patrols, and it does not report whether officers working them made arrests.

The agency has run joint enforcement campaigns in Seneca County before, including a month-long effort with the Sheriff’s Office targeting failure-to-yield violations.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 60 Plus Association was created in 1992 as a far-right alternative to the AARP. The group claims to represent the interests of American retirees over 60. It was started with seed money from conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch.

In 1997, the 60 Plus Association boasted that it was “the first national senior citizens group to endorse privatization of the Social Security program.” More recently, it has backed efforts to turn Medicare into a voucher system.

Health policy experts warn that these changes could force seniors to spend more out of pocket for health care and imperil the long-term solvency of both programs. The 60 Plus Association acknowledged in 2011 that its goal was to gradually phase out Medicare for future generations.

California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who caucuses with House Republicans, accepted awards from the 60 Plus Association in 2025 and 2026. The award, which recognizes lawmakers as “Guardians of Senior Citizens,” is essentially a campaign endorsement. On both occasions, Kiley posed for photos with 60 Plus Association President Saul Anuzis.

Other recipients this year were Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, Michigan Reps. Bill Huizenga and Tom Barrett, New York Rep. Mike Lawler, and Pennsylvania Reps. Ryan Mackenzie and Scott Perry.

All of these lawmakers also posed for photos with Anuzis.

Past recipients include New Jersey Rep. Tom Kean Jr., Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, and Texas Rep. Monica De La Cruz.

Virginia Rep. Rob Wittman received the award in 2025. In June, Wittman was caught faking a phone call to avoid answering a reporter’s questions about Republican proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare.

The 60 Plus Association has also made several social media posts recognizing the birthdays of various Republican lawmakers, including Virginia Rep. Jen Kiggans, California Rep. David Valadao, Florida Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Maria Elvira Salazar, Minnesota Rep. Brad Finstad, Ohio Reps. Mike Turner and Mike Carey, Pennsylvania Rep. Rob Bresnahan, and Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil.

Anuzis has also advocated for repealing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has included all of these lawmakers on its list of most vulnerable incumbents facing reelection in 2026. All of these Republicans supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which will impose a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid over the next decade.

“Slashing Medicaid, cutting the ACA tax credits, and shutting down rural hospitals was just the warm-up act for House Republicans’ true mission: ending Medicare and Social Security as we know it,” said DCCC spokesperson Liam Buckley. “They’re beholden to their dark-money backers and they can’t be trusted in November.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a report that aired this week, NBC4 in Columbus reported that Husted, as a state lawmaker, cosponsored a bill to shield Ohio nursing homes from liability, including in wrongful death and abuse cases, and that he has since accepted more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the nursing home industry, its executives and lobbyists.

Husted’s office pushed back in a statement to the station, though its response addressed the federal budget law rather than the state legislation. Nursing homes did not receive a net cash infusion or additional federal dollars under H.R. 1, the office said, adding that the law actually made it easier for states to move toward home- and community-based care.

The station separately reviewed Husted’s most recent campaign finance report and found that more than a dozen nursing home PACs or lobbyists have given at least $34,000 to his Senate campaign so far.

The example came from Norm Wernet, president of the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, a labor-affiliated group that advocates for home- and community-based care for aging Ohioans and argues the nursing home industry lobbies against it. Wernet told the station that big-dollar giving distorts state policy, saying $100 million campaigns exert a corrupting influence and do not address the changes Ohio needs.

“It is wrong to see that somebody like Senator Husted, when he was in the legislature, would co-sponsor a bill that, in fact, avoided the liability on the nursing homes,” Wernet said, according to a transcript of the segment circulated by the Ohio Democratic Party. He called it one example of how politicians keep drawing industry support.

What the 2002 law did

Neither the broadcast nor the station’s written report named the bill. Ohio legislative records identify it as House Bill 412, enrolled as Amended Substitute House Bill 412 in the 124th General Assembly and titled “Residential care facilities—liability.” It took effect Nov. 7, 2002. Husted, elected to the Ohio House in 2000, was one of 45 House members listed as cosponsors, alongside 10 senators. Then-Rep. Bill Seitz was the primary sponsor.

Rex Damschroder, then a Fremont Republican in the Ohio House whose district covered Sandusky County and part of Seneca County, was also among the cosponsors.

The law rewrote how Ohioans sue nursing homes in three ways.

It added nursing homes and residential care facilities to the state’s legal definition of a “medical claim,” which cut the deadline for filing suit from the two years that applies to ordinary negligence to one year, with an outer bar of four years. It also folded lawsuits brought under Ohio’s nursing home residents’ rights law into that same definition. Those are the claims families bring over care inside a facility, and they can be filed by an estate after a resident dies.

It set new rules for punitive damages. When a jury weighs punitive damages against a nursing home, the law directs it to consider whether the home can afford to pay, whether the award is enough to deter future conduct, and whether the home would still be financially able to provide housing, personal care and skilled nursing care.

And it restricted the use of state inspection findings in court. The results of Ohio Department of Health inspections of nursing homes, including statements of deficiencies, generally cannot be used or admitted as evidence in court proceedings, with narrow exceptions. The act created a parallel restriction for the Medicaid surveys that regulators run on nursing facilities.

Democrats push the segment into the Senate race

The Ohio Democratic Party circulated the segment Friday, along with a clip the party posted to its own YouTube channel, and a statement from senior communications adviser Tony Wen.

“Jon Husted said Ohioans’ work ethic is broken and championed legislation to slash Social Security and Medicare — and now reporting reveals he protected the abusive nursing home industry after taking more than $1 million from its lobbyists. Jon Husted sided with special interests over Ohio seniors, and he can’t be trusted.”

The work ethic reference points to a January radio interview in which Husted, discussing his Upward Mobility Act, said the country’s work ethic is broken and that the federal government pays people more to stay home than to work. TiffinOhio.net covered those remarks and the criticism that followed.

Husted went on to lead the Ohio House as speaker from 2005 to 2009, served in the Ohio Senate, became secretary of state in 2011 and later served as lieutenant governor, according to his official Senate biography. He was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2025.

Medicaid, the long-term care bill payer

The dispute lands on top of the federal budget law Husted voted for. The Senate passed H.R. 1 on a 50-50 vote on July 1, 2025, with the vice president breaking the tie. Husted was recorded in favor.

Medicaid is the primary payer for long-term nursing home care in Ohio, which is why cuts to the program and the fight over home- and community-based services run through the same set of facilities. The law reduces federal Medicaid and CHIP spending by $911 billion over a decade. A Public Citizen analysis published in March identified nine Ohio hospitals at heightened risk of closing or cutting services, and an Urban Institute projection found Medicaid work requirements could strip coverage from as many as 356,000 Ohioans, on top of roughly 113,000 who lost Affordable Care Act coverage after enhanced tax credits expired. States can direct Medicaid dollars toward home- and community-based care, but those services are optional, and analysts expect them to be squeezed first as funding tightens.

Seneca County residents have already seen what strain inside a nursing home looks like. In June, an HVAC failure at Spring Creek Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Green Springs forced a full-day evacuation involving more than 30 agencies, with ventilator-dependent and bariatric residents moved to Bellevue Hospital. Statewide, a Signal Ohio investigation this summer documented wrongful death suits and regulatory penalties against facilities in one large Ohio chain, with families alleging thin staffing led to fatal falls and pressure ulcers.

The most expensive Senate race in the country

NBC4 reported that the Democratic Senate Majority PAC will spend $64 million backing Democrat Sherrod Brown and that the Republican Senate Leadership Fund is investing $79 million behind Husted, in what is expected to be the most expensive Senate contest in the nation.

Brown has his own organized-interest money. The station reported that his most recent filing shows $220,500 from 33 labor union PACs. His campaign said most of his money comes from more than 80,000 small-dollar donors and said that while Husted fights for special interests, Brown fights the rigged system, pointing to nearly $700,000 Husted has taken from insurance companies. Brown outraised Husted by roughly two to one in the second quarter.

Wernet, for his part, spent years in the labor movement raising money for his national union to back political campaigns. Asked about that, he told the station it seems to be the only way workers can get a voice in a difficult time.

Husted and Brown meet on the ballot Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Board Chairman Edward J. Leonard, a Democrat, said he and fellow Democratic member MaryAnn Groot voted against certification because the Republican district committee that selected Stidham on Aug. 10 should have met in public, and because Stidham, who had applied for the vacancy himself, should have stepped away from the deliberations and the vote.

“After reviewing the circumstances of the Republican District Committee meeting at which Caleb Stidham was selected, I have concluded that the meeting was not conducted in accordance with Ohio law,” Leonard wrote in a position statement he read to the board before the vote and provided to TiffinOhio.net. “The meeting should have been an open public meeting. Additionally, because under Ohio law the committee members were public officials for this purpose, Caleb Stidham should have recused himself from deliberations and voting during the meeting.”

Stidham, the Erie County treasurer and chairman of the Erie County Republican Party, has publicly rejected the conflict-of-interest criticism. “There seems to be some confusion; there is no conflict of interest because I did not lead or chair the meeting that selected me as the candidate,” he told NBC4 in Columbus this week, before the board voted.

Stidham’s statement addressed who ran the meeting, not who voted in it. One of the six committee members, Ottawa County Republican Party Secretary Toni DeLuca, says he did both deliberate and vote.

“The Chair of Erie County, Caleb Stidham, was asked to leave when other candidates spoke,” DeLuca wrote in a letter released to the public. “However, he joined the committee for deliberations. I found it odd that a candidate for a position was given the right to deliberate on other candidates.” The committee took a voice vote, she wrote, and it was 4-2.

DeLuca wrote that Huron County Chairman Sven Stahl was chosen to chair the meeting because Stidham was a candidate, and that Stidham ran things until the session began. She described a process she found lopsided: “It is a flawed process that allows a candidate to vote for himself on a committee of 6 people.”

The board’s two Republican members, John C. Adams and Gary L. Smith, voted to certify. Leonard said in an interview that they took the position that the board’s job did not extend to the question he was raising — that the certificate had been notarized and filed on time, and that this was the limit of what the board should weigh.

Leonard said he put two questions to his colleagues before the vote. He asked whether it was correct that the committee meeting had not been an open public meeting, and he said Adams answered that it was not. He then asked whether the committee’s vote had been 4-2, and said Adams confirmed that as well.

What happens next

Ohio law gives the tie to the state’s chief elections officer. Under section 3501.11 of the Ohio Revised Code, when a county board splits and cannot reach a decision, the director or the chairperson must submit the matter to the secretary of state within 14 days. The secretary “shall summarily decide the question,” the statute says, “and the secretary of state’s decision shall be final.”

That puts the outside deadline at Aug. 28. Leonard said the board is moving faster than that. Director Alexander W. Jones asked at the meeting that the matter be expedited because of ballot preparation, Leonard said, and both sides agreed to have their written position statements to Jones by 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 21, so he can forward them to the secretary of state that day.

Under the state’s election official manual, Leonard said, the members on each side of a tie write their own statement, and those statements, any evidence, and the minutes of the meeting where the tie occurred go to the secretary of state together. Leonard said his submission will be longer than the statement he read Friday, with full case citations added.

He described the choice in front of LaRose as binary: side with the two Republican members and certify Stidham, or side with the two Democrats, in which case Stidham would not be certified to the ballot. Asked what remedy would follow if the certification fails, Leonard said he was not aware of one and that it would take more research on his part.

Leonard also said he is not aware of anyone having filed a complaint with the Ohio Ethics Commission over the committee vote, or planning to, and that he believes he may have been the first person to raise the issue. On the notice question, he said he is accepting the certification’s statement that the required notice was sent.

LaRose, a Republican, is not a neutral bystander in this year’s election. He is term-limited as secretary of state and is his party’s nominee for state auditor on the same Nov. 3 ballot the Erie board was voting on Friday.

How the seat came open

The vacancy dates to Aug. 4, when state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, delivered a letter to the Erie County board withdrawing from the November ballot after four terms, saying he was being considered for a new role and that continuing his campaign would not have been fair to voters.

Because House District 89 covers Erie, Ottawa and Huron counties — more than one county but fewer than all of them — state law handed the replacement decision to a six-member district committee made up of the chairperson and secretary of each county Republican central committee in the district. The statute requires the chairperson of the most populous county, which is Erie, to call the meeting and give members at least two days’ notice of its time, place and purpose. That chairperson is Stidham.

The committee met the afternoon of Aug. 10, hours before a 4 p.m. statutory deadline. Stidham was one of three applicants and one of six people entitled to vote. Republicans in the district, including Ron Coop and former state Rep. Steve Kraus, objected publicly before the committee met, calling the process rigged.

Leonard’s argument

Ohio’s Open Meetings Act generally does not reach political parties, which courts have described as voluntary associations governed by their own rules. Leonard’s statement turns on an exception: that a party committee performing a function assigned to it by statute is acting as a public body, and its members as public officials, for that purpose.

“Filling a vacancy created by the withdrawal of a candidate who has already been chosen by voters at a primary election is not a purely internal party matter, but is rather a public governmental function,” Leonard wrote. “The district committee is given the authority by statute to direct the board of elections who to put on the ballot in place of the withdrawn candidate.”

He pointed to the notice requirement in the vacancy statute as evidence that lawmakers intended an open meeting. “The fact that the statute dictates that notice of the time, place and purpose of the meeting be given is indicative of the fact that the meeting should be open,” he wrote. “The legislature would not require notice be given for a meeting that is not open to the public.”

Leonard drew a line between that and ordinary party housekeeping. “Examples of purely internal party matters include appointing members to central committee vacancies, selecting chairs, vice chairs and executive committee members, adopting by-laws, and endorsing candidates,” he wrote. He also noted that the same certification-under-oath process governs party central committees filling vacancies in countywide elected offices, which must be done in open session.

On the recusal question, Leonard wrote: “Based upon publicly reported accounts of the meeting, the vote on the certification of Caleb Stidham was 4-2 which would indicate that Caleb Stidham participated in the vote for his own certification in violation of Ohio Ethics rules.”

The tally was 4-2, and Stidham cast one of the votes. The breakdown was not available on Aug. 10, when the committee acted. Ohio’s vacancy statute contains no recusal requirement for a district committee member who is also an applicant, and it does not say who runs the meeting once it has been called.

DeLuca, who cast one of the two votes against, wrote that she is “confident the decision was made before we met, making the entire process meaningless,” and called for a new procedure. “This process was terribly flawed, and did not seem fair,” she wrote.

Leonard closed his statement to the board this way: “For these reasons, I will not be voting in favor of certifying Caleb Stidham to the ballot.”

The race

The Democratic nominee in House District 89 is Easton Retzke of Sandusky, who won his party’s nomination in the May 5 primary. Swearingen was unopposed for the Republican nomination in that primary and appeared on the ballot as DJ Swearingen.

The general election is Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The checkpoint is scheduled to run from 7 to 9 p.m., according to a news release the Patrol issued the same day. The Patrol placed the location on West Market Street near the intersection of South Shaffer Park Drive, on the city’s west side.

The operation is paid for with federal grant funds and is intended to deter and intercept impaired drivers, the Patrol said. Saturation patrols will run in the surrounding area at the same time, targeting impaired driving beyond the checkpoint itself.

Drivers who plan to drink should arrange a designated driver or another way home before they start, the Patrol said.

The agency has run joint traffic enforcement campaigns in Seneca County before, including a month-long effort with the Sheriff’s Office targeting failure-to-yield violations. The Patrol’s Norwalk Post also investigates fatal crashes across the county.

The Patrol typically releases checkpoint results, including the number of drivers screened and any arrests, after the operation concludes.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The vote came on Wednesday, June 28, 2017, when the Ohio House passed House Bill 49, the state’s two-year operating budget, by a margin of 59 to 40. Merrin, then a first-term Republican from Monclova Township, voted yes. Among the hundreds of statutes the bill amended was section 122.175, the provision that exempts data center equipment and construction materials from Ohio’s sales and use tax.

Four years later, in 2021, Merrin accepted $1,000 from the American Electric Power Ohio Committee for Responsible Government, according to Ohio Capital Journal’s review of state campaign finance records. As of September 2024, AEP had collected more than $6 million in Ohio data center tax breaks, per Policy Matters Ohio’s accounting of the exemption.

The next year, he accepted $500 from a Windstream Holdings PAC. Windstream that year advertised eight “key data center locations” in Ohio. Two of them, the Capital Journal reported, sat inside facilities operated by Cologix and CyrusOne — companies that had drawn more than $6 million and more than $5 million in the same state break.

The contributions total $1,500. They arrived four and five years after the vote, and nothing in the public record establishes that one had anything to do with the other. What the record shows is a lawmaker who helped widen a subsidy and then took money from the industry drawing it — a sequence voters in the 9th District are entitled to weigh as they decide whether to send him to Congress on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

What the break became

Ohio’s data centers collected $2.5 billion in state and local tax incentives between 2017 and 2024, according to a 2025 report by SRC EvalMetrics prepared for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. Then the AI buildout arrived and the numbers stopped resembling anything the state had budgeted for.

Signal Ohio reported in May that the sales tax exemption alone cost Ohio about $1.6 billion in 2025 — roughly 11 times the state’s own forecast. Six days later, on Wednesday, May 27, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine directed the Ohio Tax Credit Authority to stop accepting new data center exemption requests. The authority met one last time on Monday, June 1, and approved a $42.3 million exemption for two Cologix projects in Delaware and Licking counties — a deal DeWine carved out of his own moratorium. That approval pushed the running total of exemptions issued since 2025 to nearly $2.17 billion.

The Cologix deal is a useful measure of what Ohio buys. In exchange for $42.3 million in forgone revenue, the company committed to create 90 full-time jobs. That works out to about $111,000 per job.

Merrin was not the only northwest Ohio Republican in the yes column in 2017. Bill Reineke, then the state representative for the 88th District covering all of Sandusky County and most of Seneca County, also voted for HB 49. Reineke is now Ohio Senate president pro tempore and sits on the joint legislative committee reviewing whether the exemption should survive at all.

The bill Ohioans are paying

The case against the exemption is no longer theoretical. Grid operator PJM’s capacity prices, driven primarily by data center growth, jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024 to $329.17 — a 1,038% increase, Reuters reported in July. Average industrial electricity prices in Ohio rose 26% in the year ending December 2025, against a 7% national increase for industrial users. Residential customers absorbed 9%.

Ohio households were projected to spend about $745 on electricity this summer, up from $691 a year earlier, with the National Energy Assistance Directors Association pointing to data center demand as one driver.

AEP, which gave Merrin the larger of the two contributions, has been raising rates on Ohio customers through the same stretch.

His own township hit the brakes

The backlash in northwest Ohio has not come from the left. It has come from township trustees and small-city councils in some of the most Republican terrain in the state — including Merrin’s own.

On Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, the Monclova Township Board of Trustees voted unanimously — Barbara Lang, Deborah Stevens-Laux and Chuck Hoecherl, all yes — to impose a 12-month moratorium on the approval, establishment or construction of any data center in the township. Monclova Township is where Merrin lives.

Maumee City Council had passed its own 12-month moratorium on Feb. 2. Waterville Township trustees, next to the city Merrin served as mayor from 2008 to 2011, voted unanimously for one on Dec. 17, 2025. Richfield Township followed the same night as Monclova.

The same instinct reached Tiffin. On Monday, April 20, Tiffin City Council voted 6-0 to adopt Resolution 2026-42, freezing data center development inside city limits for up to a year. No data center had been proposed in Tiffin. Council wanted zoning tools in place first.

The position he holds now

At a VoteRPac debate in Toledo before the May 5 primary, the Capital Journal reported that Merrin said data centers do not need to be subsidized and don’t need tax breaks.

It is a defensible position. It is also the opposite of the policy his 2017 vote helped carry, and he has offered no account of the distance between the two — or of the contributions he accepted from the industry in between.

He has not been pressed on it. Merrin did not respond to the Capital Journal’s questions for its Aug. 10 story on the race. A local outlet covering his primary win noted he had not answered a single question or responded to a single inquiry during the campaign.

Silence may be a sound strategy in a district redrawn to favor him. The 9th was reconfigured in October 2025 into materially more Republican territory, though the Cook Political Report still rates the race a toss-up. Merrin took 44.1% in a five-way primary. He lost to U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in 2024 by about 2,400 votes.

Kaptur has taken the opposite tack, and loudly. “How much more will our citizens be forced to pay for power and water?” she asked on the House floor late last year. “They have a right to know.” Her campaign told the Capital Journal that data center companies “should pay their fair share — not force hardworking people and local municipalities to subsidize billions in tax breaks for wealthy CEOs and shareholders who can easily afford to pay their own way.”

Voters in Lucas, Erie, Ottawa, Fulton and Defiance counties settle it in November. They will do it while their electric bills climb, their township trustees hold the line, and the man asking for their vote declines to say a word about the subsidy he helped widen or the money he took from the companies collecting it.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Haitians in Springfield are getting letters telling them to report to the ICE office in either Blue Ash (near Cincinnati) or Westerville (near Columbus). 

“When they do, their passports are collected,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church. 

“They’re fitted with ankle (monitors); I call them ankle shackles.” 

This is happening after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that President Donald Trump can end temporary protected status for the 330,000 Haitians who’ve fled the violence in their home country.

TPS officially ended for Haitians on July 27 and a court lifted an injunction last week.

About 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, with a mixture of temporary protected status, citizenship, and other legal status.

Even though about 30,000 Haitians with temporary status live in central Ohio, only Haitians in Springfield are being asked to wear the ankle monitors as of now, Ruby said.

“What you’re seeing in Ohio is a Springfield focused effort,” he said.

He has gone down to ICE’s Blue Ash office with some Haitians to receive their ankle monitors, which can track where people are at any given moment and have about a 75 mile radius, Ruby said.

“The ICE officers indicated, ‘If you keep coming back every time we call you, that may help your immigration case,’ which I don’t believe,” he said. 

“I think it’s a means to round up people quickly, and that when they’re ready, they have the logistics in place to deport them. I think that’s what’s going to happen.” 

The Haitians are then told to report back to the ICE office when they are summoned, which is expected to be every three to four weeks, Ruby said. 

“It’s inciting a lot of fear,” Ruby said. “I think (ICE’s) real goal is for them to self-deport. … I think it boils down to they want to have complete control over them, so (ICE) can easily deport them as soon as they’re ready.”

Ruby is unaware of any Haitians from Springfield who have self-deported back to Haiti. 

The U.S. Department of State currently has a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care,” according to the state department. A top security official and chief of staff to the nation’s defense minister was kidnapped in June. 

“It just makes me sick thinking of the sexual violence that is the norm in Haiti,” Ruby said. “There there are kids who sat next to our kids in Springfield City Schools who are going to be raped if they’re sent back, and that’s just the truth.”

More than 1,000 children born in Springfield with American citizenship have Haitian parents. Springfield City Schools declined to comment for the story.

ICE detained 35 people — including four Haitians — in central Ohio between Aug. 5 through Aug. 10, said Maqueli Eldredge, a paralegal at Legal Immigration Services in Dublin. Ruby said he has not noticed an increased ICE presence in Springfield. 

“They say they would come for the Haitians on this special task force, but they take any collateral damage people,” Eldredge said in a text message. 

The ICE office in Westerville was full of Haitians coming out with ankle monitors when Eldredge was there last week.

Many of their Brazilian clients in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were asked to start wearing ankle monitors in July 2025. She said they have a 16-year-old client wearing an ankle monitor in Pittsburgh. 

“It is very embarrassing to wear them,” Eldredge said in a text message. “(The) devices cause lesions, rashes and blisters, bleeding on their ankles.” 

She said it can be hard for their clients to sleep with the ankle monitors. 

“It beeps in the middle of the night and (it’s) hard to get comfortable,” Eldredge said in a text message.

The ankle monitors will start beeping if the battery is not functioning well, Eldredge said. 

“They break all the time and batteries malfunction and get very hot, some caught on fire when charging,” she said in a text message. 

Some people are afraid of going back to the ICE office, so Eldredge knows folks who have cut off the ankle monitors and leave the state or self-deport. 

“(Officials) follow up where they leave that monitor and sometimes just take some collaterals,” she said. 

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The decision put an Ashville referendum, which would strike down the village council’s approval of a local data center project, back on track to make Ashville’s ballot. It also makes municipalities that pass future emergency resolutions — which waive a 30-day grace period for standard resolutions — explain why they need to take effect immediately.

Brian Meyers, a plaintiff supporting the referendum and a bus technician for over 20 years, said the court’s decision felt like a statement against those who have tried to block their efforts, even if the referendum fails in November.

“If it goes on the ballot, and folks vote for [the data center project], then so be it,” he said. “That’s the will of the people, and that’s how it’s supposed to play out.”

The case started in April, when the Ashville Village Council approved a term summary for Virginia-based developer EdgeConneX to build two data center buildings and an 800-megawatt natural gas plant.

Ashville allowed EdgeConneX to start plans immediately by declaring an emergency, stating it was necessary for “the public peace, health, and safety” and adding that the council “needs to accept these terms as soon as possible so that this project is not unnecessarily delayed.”

Meyers said he learned about the new data center from an announcement on the back of his water bill. Alongside other Ashville residents, he helped gather enough signatures to petition for a referendum overturning the emergency resolution.

State law bars referendums from overturning emergency resolutions, and Ashville’s fiscal auditor blocked the petition. The petition’s supporters appealed to the state’s highest court in July.

“This is blatantly not an emergency,” Meyers said, “and luckily, the Supreme Court felt the same way.”

In a near-unanimous decision, the court ruled that the village’s stated reasons were not enough to be a valid emergency. The first reason “merely parrots” state law on emergency resolutions, and the second reason could apply to almost any emergency measure, the court wrote.

“All emergency measures are presumably designated as such because commencement of the underlying matter should not be delayed,” the majority said. “But Resolution No. 06-2026 does not explain why waiting 30 days for the resolution to take effect … would unnecessarily delay the EdgeConneX project.”

The village resolution is still in effect, and EdgeConneX’s plans are in motion. The natural gas plant portion of the project sits in front of the Ohio Power Siting Board for approval.

Meanwhile, the Pickaway County Board of Elections will now decide whether to validate the petition. At the end of its opinion, the court cautioned that the board of elections could deny the petition if it finds that the resolution was an administrative action that cannot be struck down by referendum. The board of elections is consulting the county prosecutor’s office on the issue.

On deck: A large-scale data center ban in Trenton heads to the Ohio Supreme Court

Another group trying to get data centers on their local ballot is also appealing to the Ohio Supreme Court, this time out of Trenton.

Organizers for Woodsdale and Trenton Environmental Resistance gathered 336 valid signatures for a local ban on new data centers that use over 25 megawatts of power, largely in response to an 880,000 square foot data center project in the city proposed by California-based developer Prologis.

From Cleveland to Clearcreek Township, dozens of Ohio municipalities have passed temporary bans on new data centers. City councils in Pataskala, Sunbury, Hubbard, and Urbana have approved ballot initiatives for permanent bans similar to the one proposed in Trenton.

Plaintiff and Trenton resident Barry Blankenship said the ban is meant to address hyperscale data centers, which are increasingly being used to train and power artificial intelligence models. He referenced low water pressure near data centers in Georgia and extreme pollution from a massive xAI data center in Tennessee as test cases against them.

“That’s not what we need in our communities at all,” he said.

Trenton City Council rejected their petition at an Aug. 4 meeting and passed an ordinance that set 10% of the city’s registered voters, or 820 people, as the required threshold for petition signatures.

The resistance group organizers filed a lawsuit against the city in the Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday. They argue that the city’s ordinance is overruled by a 1996 Ohio Supreme Court case that set 10% of voters in the last general municipal election, or 128 people in Trenton’s case, as the bar to clear.

Blankenship said the fight against his city council has left him with little faith in his local government.

“We knew we were in an uphill battle with them, but you still have to at the end of the day stand for something,” he added. “You’ve got to try to protect your community, one way or the other.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Green, a Democratic state representative in Idaho, knew that breast cancer ran in her family and she “just had an inkling” that she should be tested.

She was two weeks shy of the day her last remaining embryo would be implanted through in vitro fertilization. It was the one shot she had left to give her firstborn son a sibling, since it took several rounds of in vitro fertilization to get pregnant the first time.

The mammogram confirmed her fears: There was in fact a lump in her breast, and a biopsy of the tumor confirmed it was cancer. Worse yet, it was a type of cancer fueled by estrogen and progesterone, two of the main hormones that skyrocket during pregnancy. She likely could not get pregnant and be treated for cancer at the same time.

“The doctor’s file said if you had gotten pregnant, this could have been a disaster,” Green said.

Several years earlier, Green had cosponsored bipartisan legislation, enacted in July 2023, codifying the best practices already in use by surrogacy agencies in Idaho, a state that has been called the unofficial capital of surrogacy in the United States. Last year, she found herself calling one of the agencies she’d worked with on the bill to ask for their help, this time as a client. She hired a surrogate to carry her second child, another boy, who was born in June.

But opposition to the two ways that Green had her children, IVF and surrogacy, is rising.

In the past two years, Republicans in Idaho and four other states have added specific anti-IVF language to their state party platforms, and some anti-abortion groups, including Students for Life of America and Live Action, have become increasingly outspoken in their opposition to both IVF and surrogacy.

One reason is that many same-sex couples use both methods to have children, and many conservatives believe children should be raised by heterosexual married couples. Conservative critics also connect surrogacy to immigration, saying it facilitates “birth tourism” and birthright citizenship. And they note that IVF can involve the discarding of some embryos, which they say is akin to abortion.

The latter is connected to the idea that a fetus or embryo is a person, with legal rights.

As of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year that would codify personhood rights for embryos or fetuses, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights advocacy group. Opponents were able to defeat them by arguing that they might limit IVF, which remains broadly popular.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Republicans in Congress have blocked legislation that would directly protect IVF as a fertility treatment.

Elizabeth Carr, the first IVF baby born 44 years ago in Virginia, said she has been advocating against so-called fetal personhood bills for the past 15 years, but the rhetoric opposing IVF in particular is getting louder and the threats are growing.

“As somebody who is a product of this technology, I always think of it in terms of, ‘Geez, I hope I’m not the last first of something,’” Carr told Stateline.

Political attention

IVF and surrogacy as fertility treatments make up a small percentage of total births nationwide, but the number is increasing gradually every year, and IVF is the most popular assisted fertility technology. In March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born with the help of IVF.

According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, babies born through surrogacy represented about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020.

President Donald Trump has discussed supporting policies that would lower the cost of IVF treatment, which typically costs tens of thousands of dollars per cycle, but so far, the actions taken by the administration on the topic have been limited.

In June, however, the Texas Republican Party adopted language in its 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF, and calls for regulation of the assisted reproduction industry as a whole, including mandatory reporting on embryo creation and storage. It also says in one section that the Texas Legislature must “protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy.”

“We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents,” another portion of the platform reads.

The Idaho Republican Party also added language to its 2026 platform saying it opposes “the destruction of human embryos.” Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025.

“Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Green, the Idaho legislator, has put significant time and effort into developing relationships with Republicans, including by sharing her stories of fertility struggles and bringing her firstborn son to the Idaho Capitol during the legislative session.

She tried to pass a bill protecting IVF access in Idaho in 2024, but it failed. But another bill that would have established personhood from the moment of conception also failed after Green’s fertility doctor told a legislative committee it would threaten her clinic’s ability to continue to offer IVF treatments.

But Green thinks surrogacy is next on the list for Idaho legislators to try to limit in the 2027 session.

“We’re going to see them, I have no doubt,” Green said.

International implications

Some advocates for IVF say conservative opposition is just as much about trying to prevent same-sex couples from accessing fertility treatments as it is about an objection to embryo destruction. Tipton thinks that extends to the objection to surrogacy as well, but goes further in his criticism of groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.

“For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once,” he said.

Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, refers to surrogacy as “baby selling.” She noted in a recent interview that people from countries that are enemies of the U.S. can hire a surrogate and obtain citizenship. She said the U.S. is in a cold war with China, and by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president. The group opposes allowing residents of other countries to hire U.S. surrogates.

“If (the American Society for Reproductive Medicine) spent less time lobbing insults and more time ensuring patients actually receive the care its own guidelines call for, American families would be better served,” Waters told Stateline, responding to Tipton.

Waters added that she thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea that ties back to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine, which also discourages the use of birth control.

“We also make no apologies for raising serious ethical and policy questions about commercial surrogacy — including the commodification of women and children and the documented use of U.S. surrogacy arrangements to obtain birthright citizenship,” Waters said.

In a blog post last month, Waters said in the past six months, she has received more requests for help drafting legislation to regulate surrogacy than any other topic.

In November, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, introduced a bill that would prevent “adversarial nations” from hiring Americans as surrogates. The list would include China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. It has 13 Republican cosponsors, but has not advanced in the Senate.

A recent study found that between 2014 and 2020, about 32% of surrogate pregnancies were for international couples. About 41% of those were from China, where surrogacy is illegal. The next-highest percentages were France and Spain, at about 9% and 8%, respectively.

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho resident who delivered Green’s newborn baby in June, doesn’t see it the same way. Green’s baby was her fourth surrogacy pregnancy. Her first was in 2019, for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel, and the third was for a same-sex couple from Israel.

“They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it’s not allowed,” Kirk-Robertson said.

Kirk-Robertson has two children of her own, but says her surrogate families — including Green’s — become extensions of her own family. She is currently pumping milk for Green’s newborn, because Green had a double mastectomy after discovering a second type of breast cancer shortly after her initial diagnosis in 2025.

“For people who I guess have never gone and walked through this experience, I have a hard time, because they sit here and try to say this is wrong or that is wrong, but until they’ve truly been in my shoes or those parents’ shoes, it’s just a whole different experience than what they see from the outside,” she said.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Those states — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — are among the states with the highest immunization rates, and they are among those that have been most successful in controlling the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. All allow exemptions for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Forty-six states plus the District of Columbia also allow exemptions for religious and/or personal beliefs.

Trump’s order, which he signed on Monday, says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

Some health officials said that Trump’s order, which has questionable legal authority, is unlikely to prompt the states without nonmedical exemptions to change course. And any legal action would take years to wend its way through the courts.

But they criticized the executive order, and its legal threats, for contributing to the misinformation and skepticism that have lowered vaccination rates nationwide.

“It puts a lot of misinformation and a lot of fear and doubt in parents’ minds,” said Dr. Thomas Lew, clinical assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “It clouds the conversation around vaccines and their importance and their safety.”

Dr. Molly O’Shea, a pediatrician who practices in suburban Detroit, warned that nonmedical exemptions “increase the number of parents who opt to forgo one or more vaccines for any list of reasons.”

“The learning environment is then more fragile because of the risk of disruption by infectious illness,” she said.

At the same time, O’Shea said, public health requires empathy with parents who are sincerely worried about their children’s well-being and may have been misinformed about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

“Families who are opting not to vaccinate are doing it from the same place that we’re recommending vaccines. They want their children healthy and well,” O’Shea said. “Just because we come to the opposite conclusion doesn’t mean we didn’t start with the same values.”

In response to Trump’s order, political leaders and health officials in many states, including California, Connecticut,  Maine and New York, vowed to maintain their vaccination rules.

California currently has 52 measles cases, Connecticut has two, Maine has five and New York has 10. All four states have vaccination rates higher than 95%, considered critical to “herd immunity” that can protect the unvaccinated to some degree.

“Maine will continue to follow the science and the facts, and our approach to vaccines remains unchanged by yesterday’s executive order,” Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said in a statement published Tuesday.

As of early August, measles cases were at their highest level since 1991. The states with the highest numbers were South Carolina (670), Utah (524), Pennsylvania (216), Texas (216) and Virginia (176). All of those states allow families to opt out of the school vaccine requirement for personal or religious reasons.

Of the five states with the most cases, only Virginia has a school vaccination rate of more than 95%.

Virginia’s statewide rate was 95.6% for 2024-25, but the measles outbreak was in two rural counties west of Richmond, where measles vaccination rates are less than 75%.

Deaths from another vaccine-preventable childhood illness, whooping cough, also are on the rise. Last year, there were 32 whooping cough deaths, the most since at least 1999. Before vaccines became available in the 1940s, as many as 200,000 children contracted whooping cough every year and 9,000 died.

Whooping cough death statistics for every state were not available, but Kentucky reported three whooping cough deaths last year, its first fatalities in five years, while Louisiana reported two deaths.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to spend between $10 million to $20 million on a device from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies, according to a recent notice. The Associated Press first reported about the upcoming no-bid contract. 

The devices the department is seeking are called “G.L.O.V.E,” which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. One review says the products “quickly and safely allow an officer to overcome the resistance of a non-compliant subject.” 

“While every situation presents its own unique challenges, the G.L.O.V.E has led to an exponential increase in safety outcomes,” another review says. “Notably, in several instances, its mere presence was enough to de-escalate conflict without the need for force.” 

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to the Lantern that ICE is “constantly assessing the needs of our officers in the field to ensure they have the tools and equipment necessary to safely arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from our country.”

“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” the spokesperson said. 

Representatives of another central Kentucky company that provides training for the G.L.O.V.E., APB Consulting Solutions, demonstrated the G.L.O.V.E. last week for Kentucky lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee. A presentation said the product is used by various law enforcement groups, including sheriff and police departments, hospital security, juvenile detention centers, and military and federal agencies

Rep. T.J. Roberts, R-Burlington, was shocked by a G.L.O.V.E. during the demonstration. He told the Lantern that it “didn’t hurt that bad,” and he’s felt more pain “from minor gunsmithing accidents.” 

“Realistically, what it did is it just redirected my mind to the sensation I was feeling in my arm, to where I wasn’t even thinking of not complying or resisting,” he said.  

Roberts added that he had “no problem with ICE using this,” and added that the company has said “they don’t sell it to agencies until they’ve done the training protocol on how to properly use the device.”

“I don’t think there would be much newsworthiness about this if it were any other government agency that has law enforcement capability,” he said. “This is a good tool that I don’t think anyone can really object to.” 

Erin Petrey, a former congressional candidate and progressive advocate from Lexington, said she loves “ supporting local businesses, but not like this.” She is also concerned about how ICE agents would use the device. 

“We’ve already seen that ICE agents are undertrained. They are trigger-happy,” she said. “We’re seeing a significant amount of abuses of power, and giving another way for these undertrained, overarmed agents to terrorize our communities is disturbing to say the least.”

Petrey said that while the device has been described as “not lethal,” she has concerns that “it will be deployed and utilized much more freely because they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’”

“Anyone who’s using this will just feel more emboldened as a way to control people and hurt people in our community,” she added. 

The DHS spokesperson said its “officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” and referred to the latest use of force policy for ICE, which was issued in 2023. 

Eric King, a spokesperson for the ACLU 0f Kentucky, said in a statement the organization is “deeply concerned” about the plans to “provide ICE agents with another tool capable of inflicting pain on people in their custody or during enforcement encounters.”

“Before expanding ICE’s arsenal, the federal government should be demonstrating that existing safeguards, use-of-force policies and accountability mechanisms are meaningful and effective. We have seen little reason for the public to have that confidence,” King said. “Our concern is not where this product is manufactured or what other Kentucky companies may choose to do in the future. Our concern is whether an agency exercising extraordinary power over people’s freedom and safety should be given increasingly coercive tools without corresponding transparency, oversight and accountability.”

A representative for Compliant Technologies declined to comment Wednesday. 

This story has been updated with additional comments. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Justin Salsburey, 44, admitted in federal court in Columbus that he took part in a narcotics conspiracy involving bulk shipments of both drugs, WOSU reported, citing the U.S. Attorney’s Office. His wife, 39-year-old Ruthann Rankin, pleaded guilty to drug charges last week.

Each pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute and possess with intent to distribute at least 500 grams of methamphetamine and at least 40 grams of fentanyl. The offense carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life.

Salsburey worked for ARK Protection Group, the private firm that ran security for Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor. He was on the family’s detail until his arrest on December 30, 2025. Rankin taught in the Urbana City Schools; the district removed her from her job after the arrests.

The investigation started with a tip. Court documents state that in November 2025, the Logan County Sheriff’s Office told the Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force that packages containing drugs were arriving at the couple’s Bellefontaine home. Authorities said roughly 260 packages came through the mail between August 2024 and December 2025.

Officers watching the house saw the pair collect the packages and stash the drugs in a cooler on the porch for customers to pick up, according to authorities. Salsburey also drove to a post office in Dublin to mail fentanyl and methamphetamine pills to buyers.

A search of the home turned up fentanyl and methamphetamine pills, suspected steroid vials and a dozen guns.

The quantities were substantial. Investigators who executed the search warrant on December 30 catalogued approximately 264 grams of blue pills that field tested positive for fentanyl, roughly 938 grams of orange pills that tested positive for methamphetamine, and about 19 grams of triangular orange pills that tested positive for MDMA, along with steroids and other suspected controlled substances, according to court documents described by WSYX.

The Drug Enforcement Administration considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl a potentially lethal dose — an amount that fits on the tip of a pencil. Measured against that standard, the 264 grams of fentanyl-positive pills seized from the Bellefontaine house amounts to roughly 132,000 potentially lethal doses, more than the combined populations of Seneca and Sandusky counties. That figure counts the full weight of the pills; field tests confirm fentanyl is present, not how much of each pill is fentanyl.

Rankin told investigators she helped Salsburey sell steroids and Adderall pills, and that her husband started with steroids before moving into other drugs.

What the campaign said — and what it did

Ramaswamy’s campaign has said it had no way to know. Spokesperson Connie Luck said in January that Salsburey had cleared multiple background checks — by the security company, the FBI and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation — before he was hired, according to the Associated Press. She said the most recent check was conducted by Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center in September, that Salsburey passed a pre-employment drug test, and that he never failed a random screening. Luck said in January that ARK Protection would be relieved of its responsibilities and the campaign would move to a new security provider.

Campaign finance records tell a more complicated story about the timing. As TiffinOhio.net reported in June, the campaign kept paying ARK Protection Group in the weeks after the arrest — $14,000 in all, including a final $2,000 payment that cleared four days after the campaign publicly announced it was cutting ties with the firm. ARK closed on January 21, 2026, one day after that last payment went through.

ARK founder Ron Gazboda said in a statement that he was sorry to have disappointed the Ramaswamy family.

A candidate running on the drug crisis

The pleas land less than three months before Ohioans vote. Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton on November 3 in a contest Cook Political Report moved to Toss Up in July, the first time the race has carried that rating since 2018.

The drugs did not stay in Logan County. Authorities said Salsburey mailed fentanyl and methamphetamine pills to a customer in Middleburg Heights, a Cleveland suburb, and that buyers collected packages from the cooler on the couple’s porch.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Tuesday order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani that blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order from taking effect anywhere in the country makes the administration’s request to the Supreme Court more urgent, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. 

“The district court’s new order confirms the urgent need for this Court to grant the stay of the permanent injunction and to explain its rationale for doing so,” Sauer wrote. 

Election Day is Nov. 3, less than three months away.

Decisions in two cases at district and circuit courts have reached different conclusions about whether the rulemaking could continue in the lead-up to this fall’s elections. 

That means the Supreme Court’s decision, now on its emergency docket, will likely determine whether the executive order can move forward. A decision could come any day.

The Trump executive order would limit vote-by-mail, the primary method of voting in several states, especially in the West. 

It would require states to send the federal government lists of voters who intend to vote by mail ahead of the election and restrict the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to or from people not on the list, among other things.

The administration has sought to focus arguments on the narrow legal question of whether an executive order can be challenged before an agency, in this case the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security, issues a final rule. The government argues that the executive order only instructs the agencies to issue rules, and those rules are not yet final, and therefore cannot be challenged.

Trial court order

Talwani’s memorandum and order on Tuesday rejected that argument, and she expanded a previous injunction from just the 23 states and the District of Columbia that brought the suit to be effective nationwide. 

Talwani said — in her order published just 12 weeks before Election Day — she was only blocking the order with respect to the “fast-approaching” midterms. Further arguments over the merits of federal voting regulations could still happen, but federal law requires the status quo to be preserved this close to an election, she said. 

Because of the tight timeline and the assumption that a final rule will be similar to a June 2 notice of proposed rulemaking, Talwani said she could rule simply on the constitutionality of the executive order. It was an easy call, she said.

“The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections,” she wrote, citing the Constitution.

The administration has not shown how blocking the executive order would harm the public, as it has not documented any “illegal or fraudulent absentee voting,” while the voting rights organizations challenging the order have shown that voters with disabilities, in rural areas, who need translation help, attend college outside their home states and in other circumstances would be harmed, she said.

In fact, the organizations showed their members in states across the country are already being harmed by the uncertainty around what rules will govern the midterm elections, said Talwani.

“Where the (executive order) is presently causing confusion and threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy, the court finds that enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation,” Talwani wrote. The proximity to Election Day “underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election.”

The Federal Voter Registration Act also prohibits states from purging voter rolls within 90 days of an election, Talwani wrote.

DOJ’s double bind

The nature of the argument puts Sauer and the U.S. Department of Justice in a seemingly difficult legal position, arguing both that the executive order cannot be challenged because it is not enforceable and that the administration must be allowed to put an enforceable rule in place before Election Day.

Sauer asked the court Wednesday to rule for the government and “make clear” that it was doing so “based on the uncertainty concerning the government’s future actions.”

But in the next paragraph, he said implementing the executive order was crucial to the public interest.

“In all events, it is critical that the Court act promptly on the pending stay,” Sauer said. “Otherwise, the district court’s erroneous orders will effectively run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement Section 3 of the Executive Order for the federal elections in November, thereby causing irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

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 post on Truth Social, the president praised Leavitt, the youngest person to serve in the role, as one of his closest aides in the White House and said she will move to an adviser role outside of government.

“Our wonderful White House Press Secretary, and one of my most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt, will be departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!” Trump wrote.

“Karoline will now be one of my top outside advisors, and an influential voice within the Republican Party, as we work to defy History, and conclusively win the Midterm Elections,” he added.

When asked whether the White House had chosen the next press secretary, a spokesperson pointed States Newsroom to Trump’s and Leavitt’s social media posts and did not provide additional comment. 

In a nearly 500-word statement on the social media platform X, Leavitt thanked the president “for granting me so many extraordinary opportunities,” which she said included spending “countless hours” in the Oval Office and meeting foreign leaders and Americans “from all walks of life.” 

“Most of all, I am thankful to the President for entrusting me with the distinct privilege of speaking on his behalf at the White House podium. I have spoken with great pride about the many historic accomplishments of this Administration, and I have relished holding the liberal media accountable and ensuring the American people hear the truth about President Trump’s successes,” said Leavitt, who was at times combative with journalists during routine press briefings.

Leavitt gave birth to her second child on May 1, and held her first briefing following parental leave less than a month ago. She described her decision to leave “one of the most demanding jobs in the world” as “bittersweet.”

Leavitt said she will “always remain a vocal advocate for MAGA and the Republican Party” and suggested she’d continue antagonizing the president’s political opponents.

“Our country is facing an existential threat from an increasingly extremist Democrat Party that seeks to destroy everything great about America, and I believe it is incumbent upon all of us who care about this country to fight back against that threat,” she wrote.

Leavitt credited White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who co-managed Trump’s 2024 re-election bid, for initially hiring her during the campaign.

Leavitt was 27 years old when she assumed the role of press secretary in January 2025.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a new rule to reduce the “federal burden” for Head Start programs.

In an announcement by the agency, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that with the change, “we are removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands of children.”

The agency estimates the change would save the federal government $2.2 billion, with caps to “administrative overhead” and reductions in “compliance-driven activities.”

Under the proposed rule, which is still in its public comment period, the states would be given the responsibility of overseeing education requirements, background checks, transportation matters, and class sizes and ratios.

“The goal is to modernize safety standards by replacing rigid federal mandates with state flexibility and practical, competency-based alternatives,” the HHS release stated.

Head Start began six decades ago as part of a “war on poverty” launched by President Lyndon Johnson, aimed at helping children from low-income households obtain the education needed to start their development.

In 2023 data released by child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, 5,900 of Ohio’s infants and toddlers were enrolled in Early Head Start, which serves children up to three years old.

Through Early Head Start, more than 128,000 home visits were conducted in that year, according to the data. The Ohio Head Start Association said programs across the state serve more than 26,000 children up to age five.

The proposed changes would eliminate federal requirements regarding “curriculum implementation, parent committees, family engagement procedures, and service delivery structures,” according to the language of the draft rule.

Julie Stone, executive director of the Ohio Head Start Association, said eliminating the federal standards mentioned in the rule would mean taking away developmental screenings, teacher qualifications, and mental health services, among other things.

“If the way we serve more children is by putting more infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with each teacher, we have to ask honestly what those children are losing,” Stone said in a statement.

“Young children need individual attention, qualified teachers, and the comprehensive supports that prepare them to succeed in school and life.”

Currently, Head Start requires teacher-to-child ratios of 1-to-4 for classrooms with children under the age of three, 1-to-8 for three-year-olds, and 1-to-10 for four-year-olds.

Those ratios are based on evidence and an expert consensus that “pre-K quality is higher, and children are safer, and develop more when there are reasonable limits to the number of young children per staffer in the classroom,” according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

“Substantial research demonstrates that maintaining low child-to-teacher ratios is critical for positive interactions and learning gains, meaning any weakening of Head Start ratio standards poses direct threats to child safety, development, and overall program effectiveness,” the institute said in a recent brief.

Moving the requirements to match state-by-state standards would mean Ohio Head Start classrooms would have one educator for every five children up to age one, and a 1-to-6 ratio for children aged one year to 18 months.

For children 18 months to 2.5 years, the teacher-to-child ratio in Ohio is 1-to-7, and 1-to-8 for students aged 2.5 to three years.

Classes with three-year-olds can have one teacher for every 12 children, and those with four and five-year-olds can have a ratio of one teacher for every 14 kids, based on data from the federal Administration for Children and Families.

National organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and others, signed on to a letter urging the Trump administration to rescind the proposed changes, and for Congress to reject them as well.

The letter said the changes would “gut the Head Start program” and remove the “high-quality standards” that exist within the program, such as small class sizes, teachers trained in multiple languages, and medical screenings for school readiness.

“These quality standards are the hallmark of the Head Start program that ensure every child receives an early education and services that promote health child development,” the letter stated.

“Without them, Head Start will exist in name only, offering unequal services based on where the child lives.”

The organizations also said the proposal would make it more difficult for children with disabilities, and those experiencing homelessness to enroll in the program, along with disproportionately affecting minority children.

Stone said the Ohio Head Start Association will be working with its Head Start and Early Head Start network “to ensure Ohio’s experience and Ohio’s voice are heard.”

“Head Start has spent 60 years building a model around what young children and their families actually need,” Stone said. “We shouldn’t call it cutting red tape when what we’re really cutting is quality.”

The public comment period for the proposed rule-change ends Oct. 6.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.