Agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a subagency of DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reported an “all hands-on deck” environment toward immigration enforcement began in January 2025, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General report.

“With ICE dedicating more staff hours to immigration investigations, staffing hours for fentanyl investigations declined,” the report said.

The report found that the hours dedicated to fentanyl investigations for fiscal 2025 declined by more than 250,000 hours, or 31%, compared to fiscal 2024.

“At the same time, immigration enforcement saw the largest increase across all investigative categories, rising more than 1.7 million hours (over 800 percent),” according to the report.

Inspectors interviewed more than 100 agents from 11 HSI field offices for the report.

At one HSI office, approximately 99% of work was dedicated to immigration, leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations, the watchdog found. A drug investigation team of seven agents was reduced to about three and the rest of the personnel was reassigned to work on immigration cases, according to the report.  

Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid that is the main driver of overdose deaths in the United States. HSI plays a key role in countering fentanyl smuggling in the U.S. by targeting routes, laboratories and collaborating with law enforcement to investigate smuggling operations.    

ICE agrees

The inspector general recommended that HSI review staffing levels “to ensure an appropriate level of coverage commensurate with the relative priority of fentanyl investigations.”

Inspector general reports are presented to the affected agency for comment ahead of publication. ICE agreed with the recommendations in the DHS OIG report.

“Homeland Security Investigations will review staffing levels, and determine and implement next steps, as needed, to ensure an appropriate level of coverage commensurate with the relative priority of fentanyl investigations,” ICE’s comments in the report read.

ICE estimated that recommendation would be completed by June 2027.

The report also found that the technology HSI agents and analysts used had limitations during fentanyl investigations and their missions were “hindered by delays in agents obtaining funds to purchase information and evidence (i.e., drugs) during an investigation; a lack of independent authority to investigate fentanyl-related offenses; and low, inconsistent referral of fentanyl cases from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to HSI.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The one-page order from Chief Justice John Roberts allows the justices more time to consider the legal arguments as to whether the president can continue with construction. 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a nonprofit Congress created to protect public buildings, sued to block construction late last year. The group charged that Trump violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law when he demolished part of the White House last July without approval from Congress. 

The trust wrote in its brief to the high court that the trial court’s pause should remain in place because any progress on the project could not easily be undone.

“We are grateful for the Decision of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote on social media after the order. “The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND! Construction is under budget and ahead of schedule.”

Trump has argued the 90,000-square-foot ballroom — which the administration said this month will cost $400 million, double the initial estimate — is needed to reinforce security features and provide a larger space to host foreign dignitaries. Trump has said the project is being funded with private donations.

The East Wing of the White House was built in 1942. Workers last October demolished it, even after Trump said the ballroom construction would not impact the building. 

A federal appeals court this month upheld the lower court order that barred further construction of the ballroom above ground, but allowed for below-ground construction. The appeals court stayed its decision for 14 days to give the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Theresa Hice-Fromille, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, confirmed that 29 Haitian people had been detained by ICE as of Friday.

Haitian Support Center Executive Director Viles Dorsainvil issued a statement on the increased ICE activity in the city.

“Behind every number is a human being,” Dorsainvil said. “Behind every detention is a family. Behind every deportation is a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a child, a friend, a church member, a coworker, or a neighbor whose life may be changed forever.”

This is happening after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled at the end of June that President Donald Trump could end temporary protected status for the 330,000 Haitians who’ve fled the violence in their home country. Legal protected status officially ended for Haitians on July 27. 

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue acknowledged immigration enforcement now happening in the city.

“The City is aware of federal immigration enforcement activity occurring in Springfield, including arrests made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Rue said in a statement. 

About 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, with a mixture of temporary protected status, citizenship, and other legal status.

“ICE has also indicated that targeted enforcement activity will continue throughout Ohio,” Rue said.

“The City does not direct or control ICE enforcement activity. We are focused on the safety and well-being of everyone in our community.”

ICE agents are detaining people in Springfield in shopping plazas and apartment complexes, Hice-Fromille said. A recent video circulating online shows ICE officers detaining people at a Springfield car wash. 

“We had somebody asking this morning if it was safe for her to run out to Walmart and get food,” Hice-Fromille said. 

Springfield Pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien and another Haitian man were detained by ICE Thursday morning at a gas station. 

“It’s caused a flurry of concern,” Hice-Fromill said. “He has a wife and children, and they’re all extremely scared.” 

“Pastor Joubert Adrien left Haiti because his life was in danger, served Christ and his congregation faithfully and his arrest shows how far ICE will stoop to incite panic among people who came here peacefully, came here legally and offered nothing but good to our community,” Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, said in a statement. 

Haitians in Springfield who are detained by ICE are being sent to Butler County Jail in Hamilton, which had 1,105 people as of Friday morning.

The general housing capacity for Butler County Jail is 844, even though the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction recommends 756 as the housing capacity, according to a 2025 ODRC inspection report.  

There are six Ohio detention facilities that contract with ICE to hold people who have been detained: Butler County Jail in Hamilton, the Seneca County Jail in Tiffin, the Geauga County Safety Center in Chardon, the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio in Stryker, the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, and the Mahoning County Justice Center in Youngstown.

“This becomes an economic driver for these local communities and these jails because they get paid by the feds,” said Richard Herman, a Cleveland-based immigration lawyer. 

“The goal of the policy is to inflict maximum pain, on the immigrant and people that love them and employ them, and inflict pain and try to crank up the numbers for deportations. … The system is trying to encourage them to sign the deportation order yourself.”

Haitians living in Springfield are being required to report to ICE offices in Blue Ash or Westervillve and wear ankle monitors. 

“There’s a lot of anxiety over what the ankle monitors could be leading to,” Hice-Fromille said.

“When (the ankle monitors) started happening, people really started retreating and isolating.” 

It’s unclear if Haitians with ankle monitors are being detained by ICE, she said. 

“I don’t have any information that people with ankle monitors have been detained,” Hice-Fromille said.

“What we did see last week was somebody being detained off of the street, given an ankle monitor, and released.”

Hice-Fromille is hearing that Haitians who previously lived in Springfield but have since moved away are also being asked to wear ankle monitors. 

“We’ve even had people who had to come in out of state because they no longer live in Ohio, but they had lived in Springfield at some point,” she said. 

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. 

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.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Acton told reporters at a Columbus event. “But I think walking in the door and saying, ‘Look, there is a cost that we are all paying for corruption. We all know it. We’re famous for it.”

“We’re tired of watching (a) docuseries on it,” she went on, alluding to an HBO film about the House Bill 6 scandal. “And we know there’s more than enough good young public servants, older public servants, who want to do this work.”

Acton’s plan

Acton’s central argument is that corruption carries a cost borne by every Ohioan.

“I don’t know about everyone else here, but my electric bill went up 140 bucks this summer,” she offered as an example.

Her agenda includes three planks. First, she intends to create a task force to review state government and make recommendations within her first hundred days in office. That group will identify fraud and abuse, as well as opportunities to stricter oversight.

Acton also wants to eliminate the revolving door between state regulators and the industries they oversee. As governor, she won’t appoint people how have lobbied or worked in a given industry in the past three years, and she’ll require applicants disclose industry relationships and payments. Acton will also demand her appointees sign an ethics pledge committing to a three-year cooling off period before taking a job in the industry they previously regulated.

To limit the influence of dark money in politics, Acton would require state contractors spending money in political campaigns to disclose their donors. She’d also require companies bidding on lucrative contracts to disclose their ownership and political contributions.

In addition, Acton promised a state database detailing information about companies bidding for state contracts.

She spoke alongside Tiffany Muller from group End Citizens United Wednesday in Columbus. And Muller thinks Acton’s disclosure requirements could make a difference in the Ohio.

“This is something we’ve seen enacted in other states,” she said. “And what we have seen is that it works, right? It actually starts to get some of that dark money, that big special interest money, out of our system.”

A few grains of salt

While governors have substantial tools at their disposal to set state policy, their powers aren’t unlimited. Catherine Turcer from the government watchdog group Common Cause Ohio gave Acton credit for identifying and prioritizing a serious problem.

“One of the things that is really clear is that we have a corruption problem in Ohio,” Turcer said, “and that the state legislature has not taken the appropriate steps to create greater accountability (and) transparency.”

“I can’t imagine applying for the job of governor and not thinking about ways to improve the system,” she added.

But she warned Acton’s executive actions alone won’t be enough to fix the problem. Committing to appoint regulators who aren’t coming directly from a post in the industry they’re regulating is a good idea, but there’s little Acton can do on her own to restrict where her appointees go when they step down.

“When the state establishes good laws, there’s an enforcement mechanism,” Turcer said. “There’s not an enforcement mechanism in in this executive order.”

“For some people shame is really effective,” she added about Acton’s proposed ethics pledge. “But for others, it has no meaning whatsoever.”

Similarly, Turcer said Acton’s campaign finance disclosures for state contractors is a good first step, but not a panacea.

In an email, End Citizens United defended the disclosure requirements. The restrictions might only apply to contractors, but leveraging their interest in state money to get the full picture of their political spending, is a big deal.

Spokesperson Alysa James insisted “Dr. Acton’s plan is a real set of policies to turn this ship around and a pragmatic way to start fighting the pay-to-play culture that has taken over Columbus. Dr. Acton is the only candidate in this race we trust to ensure Ohioans are not paying for the cost of corruption.”

Turcer allowed that “reining in the folks that have contracts with the state of Ohio reins in corruption.

“But there are all sorts of other ways that the very wealthy and corporations influence the process,” she went on, “and it doesn’t address that,”

Hanging over any conversation of Ohio corruption is the House Bill 6 scandal, in which energy companies bribed the future PUCO chairman and funneled millions to political groups that don’t have to disclose their donors. That dark money helped get the law over the finish line and then beat back a referendum effort. But those companies weren’t state contractors. Acton’s disclosure proposals wouldn’t touch those transactions.

Still, Turcer said Acton’s appointment power could make a significant difference in Ohioans’ lives.

“These proposals do not get at the core of what went wrong with the House Bill 6 scandal. You can’t get there without the legislature,” Turcer said. “But she can appoint a more consumer-friendly person to the Public Utilities Commission. That is a very concrete thing that she could do that could change things.”

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A certification form called a Declaration of Gender Change no longer qualifies as a method to update the gender marker on BMV documents, something advocates say transgender Ohioans have used for years.

The form used documented proof of a gender transition attested by a physician, psychologist, or therapist to allow the change.

“Changing a policy this consequential overnight, without warning or transparency, is not an accident – it’s a choice,” said Dwayne Steward, CEO and executive director of LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Ohio.

Steward also called the move a “deliberate attempt at voter suppression and an intentional decision to make life harder for transgender Ohioans.”

The Ohio Secretary of State requires photo identification to vote, such as a passport, or a state drivers license, ID card, or interim ID issued by the BMV.

A spokesperson for the Ohio BMV said the bureau determined that the form “is not compatible” with state law, particularly a law that defines gender identity and sex.

“The BMV will record the sex that is stated on an individual’s birth certificate or passport as the sex that will be reflected on the Ohio drivers license or ID card,” a statement from the spokesperson said.

The BMV did not respond to questions from the Capital Journal about whether public notice was required or provided to make the change.

In the most recent state operating budget, the Ohio General Assembly implemented a “sex recognition policy” to apply to state laws. In the provision, effective as of 2025, gender identity is defined as “an individual’s internal and subjective self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”

“Sex” is defined as the “biological indication” of male and female, “without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.”

“It is the policy of the state of Ohio to recognize two sexes, male and female,” the code states. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The measure comes alongside Trump administration policies that compel the federal government not to recognize transgender, nonbinary, and intersex identities, including in federal data collection.

It also comes after a 2024 Ohio Supreme Court decision in which a transgender woman appealed a decision by the Clark County Probate Court. The court approved her 2021 application for a name change on her birth certificate, but denied her request to correct the sex marker. Supreme court justices said they couldn’t “reach a consensus on how this case should be resolved,” but said the General Assembly has final say on whether further changes can be made to birth certificates. As it stands now, the court said state laws do not allow transgender individuals to correct their birth certificate based on their gender identity.

The Republican supermajority in the General Assembly has indicated they don’t plan to create more openings for transgender individuals, having passed laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, and barring transgender students from playing on sports teams based on their gender identity.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

High school students who want to represent their school are increasingly required to pay to play, with multiple Ohio districts charging fees that reach $500 for each sport a student pursues. According to the Ohio High School Athletic Association, the majority of high schools in Ohio now impose sports participation fees.

More schools are charging higher fees as districts grapple with inadequate state funding and rising costs.

Ohio’s approach to athletic participation fees is essentially the Wild West. There are no applicable state laws or limits on what school districts can charge student athletes and their families. While some districts offer fee waivers, there are no requirements that schools consider a family’s income or their ability to pay.

In the span of a few miles there is a staggering difference in costs and opportunity.

Columbus City Schools, the largest district in the state, does not charge a pay to play fee. But neighboring district Pickerington charges students $345 if they want to represent their community on the playing field.

Next door in Reynoldsburg, students and families are on the hook for a $500 fee per child, per season in order to participate in school sports.

Despite Ohio’s long standing embrace of high school sports, there is no cap across the state on what a large, athletic family might be required to pay.

Affirming a commitment to scholastic sports, state Rep. Gary Click has said that “No student athlete should be limited by their zip code.” But the reality is your zip code and the size of your wallet determine if you can play high school sports in Ohio.

For families in the Reynoldsburg school district, Click’s lofty words are overshadowed by a harsh reality. The $500 fee puts sports out of reach for many students. The district’s only publicized assistance is a payment plan; parents can pay the fee in two installments of $250. This in a school where the state labels more than 65% of the students economically disadvantaged.

Ohio is putting fees in the way of educational opportunity. Research studies have found students who participate in high school sports get better grades, are more likely to graduate high school and more likely to pursue education after high school.

Parents recognize the benefits sports provide. In a recent nationwide survey, 84% of parents in the U.S. agreed that participation in sports positively affects students’ performance in school.

Not only do parents see sports as beneficial, but so do the very school officials raising the cost to play. The entire school board in Mentor signed onto a statement declaring access to extracurriculars including athletics “another necessary component to producing well-rounded, successful young people, who are prepared for life after graduation.” Necessary or not, the Mentor school board raised their sports participation fee by 20% this year.

The survey of parents shows their support for their children participating in high school sports is nearly unanimous when there is no fee. When fees reach the levels charged by Reynoldsburg, however, most parents say they would discourage their children from pursuing a sport.

In fact, only in households making over $100,000 per year was there still a majority willing to encourage sports participation. Notable too, 87% of all parents said school-sponsored athletics should be funded through a district’s general budget rather than through imposing participation fees.

Ohio has a law requiring financial literacy be taught to every high school student, and a new law requires teaching something called the “success steps.” It is long past time for Ohio lawmakers to recognize that the financially sound path to student success is to fund scholastic athletics and put an end to pay to play.

Katie Niven is a Benton Scholar and Division 1 student athlete (softball) at Colgate University and is a 2025 graduate of Thomas Worthington High School.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled earlier this month that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides a narrow right for a pregnant patient to obtain an abortion if the pregnancy could be a risk to their health, including their mental health. It’s the first ruling since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in 2022 to find that the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion access in certain situations.  

Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said Winmill’s ruling could be the beginning of a “slow erosion” of the Dobbs decision, similar to the way that anti-abortion advocates used lawsuits and legislation to chip away at the law established by Roe v. Wade after it was decided in 1973.

“They kind of worked over the course of decades to do a death by a thousand cuts, chipping away at its breadth,” Ziegler said. “This may be kind of a funhouse mirror version of that.”

For years, anti-abortion state officials and advocacy groups used various legal tactics to diminish access to abortion nationwide after Roe v. Wade determined that the procedure was a constitutional right. Over time, state legislatures passed procedural laws that made it more difficult for providers to offer abortion services, as well as so-called “fetal pain” laws, and worked up to passing the six-week and 15-week abortion bans that eventually led to Dobbs. 

Two years ago, U.S. Supreme Court justices were asked to consider whether Idaho could set aside federal law mandating stabilizing care in an emergency if that stabilizing care, in a doctor’s opinion, was to terminate a pregnancy. Now the question could be whether any pregnancy scenario where a patient’s physical or mental health is threatened is something that all states can regulate under Dobbs.

Health exceptions

Out of the 13 states that have near-total abortion bans, five have no exception for preserving a pregnant patient’s health, including Idaho, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Dakota. 

All 13 have an exception to save a pregnant woman’s life, but doctors say there most often is no clear moment when they can easily say a person will die without an immediate abortion. Instead, doctors are left to guess whether terminating a pregnancy to save a patient would cost them their license to practice or land them in prison.

Even in states with health exceptions, some doctors hesitate to act because of the ban,  opting for delays that can cause medical complications such as organ damage or fertility loss. An Arkansas woman said she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage in 2024, resulting in a days-long ordeal that eventually led to her being transferred out of state to Kansas, where abortion is legal.

A pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim. The Fourteenth Amendment exists precisely to prevent subjugation like this.

– U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill

Winmill’s legal decision blocks enforcement of Idaho’s near-total abortion ban when a pregnancy is terminated under those circumstances. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, a Republican, appealed the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, and also asked Winmill to pause that injunction while the decision is appealed.

“The state’s interest in protecting unborn children from unjustified abortion is irreparably harmed by the order, and public interest and equity support a stay for that same reason,” Idaho Assistant Solicitor General Aaron Green wrote in the request for a stay.

The attorney general and leadership at the Idaho Family Policy Center, a religious organization that helped craft the legislation that established the state’s ban, have expressed confidence that Winmill’s decision will be reversed quickly.

“The Fourteenth Amendment protects the basic rights that are part of the historical fabric of our nation, not a right to take the life of an innocent child in the womb, an act that was a crime at the time that the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified,” said Caleb Pirc, general counsel for the Idaho Family Policy Center, in a statement. “We fully expect Judge Winmill’s attempt to shoehorn a right to abortion into the Constitution to be swiftly rejected on appeal.” 

Supreme Court watch

Dr. Stacy Seyb, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist  for Idaho’s largest health system, St. Luke’s, sued state officials and the Idaho Board of Medicine in 2024, arguing that the state’s near-total ban prevented him from providing appropriate care to all of his patients. Maternal-fetal medicine specialists handle the most high-risk pregnancies, including patients carrying multiples and those with conditions such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes.  

In his ruling, Winmill wrote that although Dobbs allowed states to regulate abortion access, that case was about elective abortions, and that his ruling was about a pregnant woman’s ability to seek care under “the most difficult and tragic circumstances,” almost always when the woman wanted the pregnancy.

“By banning health-preserving abortion, Idaho attempts to deny this fundamental right on the basis that the threat of harm comes from a fetus, which depends on the woman for survival,” Winmill wrote. “But a pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim. The Fourteenth Amendment exists precisely to prevent subjugation like this.”

Winmill discussed the history of abortion bans in his opinion, writing that when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the states and territories that restricted abortion also included exceptions for therapeutic purposes when a doctor was acting in good faith.

But Winmill went further than many judges have gone by including a pregnancy’s threats to mental health, something that only Alabama has recognized as an explicit healthcare exception for abortions among states with bans, according to KFF. There, a psychiatrist is required to diagnose a pregnant patient with a serious mental illness that could result in their death or the death of the fetus in order to qualify for that exception.

“The brain is an organ of the body, and healthcare providers use empirical tools to reliably assess the risk of suicidality and the most effective treatments,” Winmill wrote. “It is an affront to human dignity to bar pregnant women from receiving life-saving care on the basis that the threat comes from a mental health condition rather than a physical health condition.”

Idaho’s role

Idaho has been at the center of the national debate about when health conditions take priority over an abortion ban since the first year after the Dobbs decision. 

The U.S. Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden sued Idaho to require that it acknowledge a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act — better known as EMTALA — in the context of patients who come to the emergency room with pregnancies that may need to be terminated to prevent infection or other adverse health outcomes.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard that case in late April 2024, but sent it back to the lower appellate court in June, saying it was too early in the process for justices to have considered ruling on it. The case was later dropped by the DOJ under President Donald Trump, but St. Luke’s filed its own lawsuit against the state that is still ongoing. That case is also before Winmill in federal court.

At the time of the EMTALA arguments, Idaho officials had argued that if it allowed women to get a legal abortion in an emergency room, anyone could come to a hospital’s emergency department  and threaten to harm themselves.  

Tanya Pellegrini, co-director of litigation at The Lawyering Project and one of the attorneys who represented Seyb in this month’s case, said that wasn’t true under EMTALA, and it won’t be true following Winmill’s ruling. 

“I think the order really speaks for itself in terms of why mental health should not be treated differently from physical health,” Pellegrini said.

Ziegler said she won’t be surprised if Seyb’s case ends up before the Supreme Court in the near future, because it strikes at the heart of questions about the Dobbs decision that have yet to be fully resolved.

“It’s a really important question that they’ll have to address sooner or later,” Ziegler 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.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development counted 32,495 veterans experiencing homelessness, 387, or 1.2%, fewer than the previous year. HUD counted 18,877 veterans in shelters, and 13,518 living unsheltered in places not meant for habitation.

Twenty-five states recorded increases in veteran homelessness from 2024 to 2025, and 23 recorded decreases. Just two states — Alaska and Massachusetts —  saw no change.

The state with the largest increase, by raw numbers, was Oregon, which saw 228 added veterans, a 16% increase. Pennsylvania saw an increase of 98 veterans, a 14% increase, while New York, with an additional 93 homeless veterans, had a nearly 8% increase.

Mississippi had the largest percentage increase, rising 88%, going from 40 homeless veterans in 2024 to 75 a year later. Utah and Wyoming saw increases of 36% and 30%, respectively.

California recorded the largest numerical decline, with 624 fewer veterans experiencing homelessness, a 7% dip to 8,686. Florida declined by 192, while Indiana and Illinois each recorded 79 fewer homeless veterans. North Dakota’s numbers dropped 36% to 28 homeless veterans.

Since 2010, veteran homelessness has fallen by more than 56%, reaching an all-time low in 2025, and it’s been one of the few sustained decreases in any subset of homelessness during that time span. Details from this past January’s point-in-time count have not been released.

Adam Ruege, principal of policy and evaluation at Community Solutions, a national nonprofit that works with cities, counties and states to reduce homelessness, said the long-term decline resulted from sustained federal investments in housing and mental health services dating back to 2009. 

States have taken a bigger role in addressing veteran homelessness, with programs ranging from incentives for landlords, to coordinated services.

“Twenty years ago, being a veteran increased your likelihood of being homeless,” said Ruege, who previously worked for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “What we’re seeing states do now, is that they are filling the gap between what the federal response isn’t doing and what localities can’t do because of funding constraints. 

In July, New Jersey announced that its Bringing Veterans Home initiative saw more veterans finding housing than entering homelessness. According to state officials, since the initiative launched in November 2024, it has permanently housed more than 2,500 veterans, backed by more than $30 million in state and federal money. There’s pending legislation to codify the program.

In March, the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs had a statewide by-name registry that allows agencies and service providers to coordinate individual cases instead of making veterans navigate programs independently. The registry, at last update, showed 150 veterans experiencing homelessness, dropping 25% in a year and 41% in two years.

States making efforts to incent or spur landlord participation in voucher and other housing programs, Ruege said, is one of the biggest steps toward getting veterans into permanent housing.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved a statewide measure in June that created a pilot program getting landlords to participate in a federal voucher program that compensates landlords for holding a vacant unit for up to 45 days while a veteran prepares to move in and reimburse up to $2,000 in qualifying property losses beyond the security deposit.

Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed a law in April that establishes an incentive program that can give grants to nonprofits for landlord and housing provider incentives, risk-mitigation payments and veterans’ past due rent.

“I think a big factor in their success has been recruitment of landlords,” said Ruege. “It’s just a matter of political and private will, and in some ways, the will of a landlord, to make strides in cutting down homelessness on the local level.” 

California announced $109.6 million in July for 278 permanent supportive homes across four communities, including 103 units reserved for veterans.

In March, Pennsylvania awarded about $805,000 from its Veterans’ Trust Fund to county agencies and nonprofits, including programs providing emergency housing assistance, residences, for veterans leaving homelessness and services for veterans exiting homelessness.

Erin Healy, a principal for large-scale change at Community Solutions, said veterans have often been treated differently from other groups experiencing homelessness.

“So, there is a sense of urgency around veteran homelessness, which doesn’t necessarily exist, even though it should, for all homelessness,” Healy said. “But we know these solutions and more empathy can still work for these other groups that are experiencing homelessness.”

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling gave governments greater latitude to enforce public camping restrictions, at least 14 states and more than 350 cities have adopted tougher laws targeting camping, sleeping or other activities associated with unsheltered homelessness. 

Indiana, for example, enacted a statewide public camping ban that took effect in July, while Georgia and Oklahoma have adopted laws that can hold local governments accountable for failing to enforce restrictions on public camping and related conduct.

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

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The woman went to the Tiffin Police Department shortly after 8 a.m. and reported that the man had been following her, would not leave her alone and had put the tracking device on her car. She also told police that he had been threatening her.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/tiffin-man-arrested-airtag-tracking-threats/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The drug did nothing.

By the time those patients delivered the answer, the money had already been made — by Ramaswamy, by his mother and brother on the company payroll, and by the small circle of funds that controlled roughly 90% of the stock. The people who lost were the ones who bought the story late: retail investors, and a pension fund for California’s public school teachers.

That sequence, not the failure itself, is the accountability question.

The record he bought for $5 million

GlaxoSmithKline did not quietly shelve intepirdine. It tested the compound in 13 clinical trials and dosed more than 1,250 people, including four Phase 2 studies in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s. Then it stopped. Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences acquired the rights in December 2014 for $5 million upfront, plus milestones and a royalty.

Axovant’s own prospectus lays out what he was buying. Given by itself, the drug produced no statistically significant improvement in cognition or function compared with placebo. In the one trial that showed something — 684 patients already taking donepezil — GSK had set two primary endpoints. The drug hit one and missed the other: on the CDR-SB dementia-severity scale, the high dose came in at p=0.418 at week 24. Two secondary cognitive measures, MMSE and RBANS, showed nothing.

Federal regulators noticed. In an April 20, 2015 comment letter addressed to Ramaswamy by name, SEC staff instructed the company to disclose, if true, that the drug had failed to show a statistically significant improvement on MMSE or RBANS at any dose. Axovant complied.

The failures were on the table. Ramaswamy sold around them.

The family on the payroll

In 2015, Ramaswamy hired his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, as Axovant’s vice president of medical and scientific strategy, according to an Aug. 12 investigation by Caleb Ecarma’s Oligarch Watch. The company’s prospectus confirms she was on the payroll at $250,000 a year, with a March 2015 option grant of 262,500 shares at 90 cents apiece. Ramaswamy’s brother, Shankar, was also an employee at $250,000, with an option on 750,000 shares at the same price.

Within weeks of the IPO, Oligarch Watch reported, Geetha Ramaswamy had co-published two reanalyses of GSK’s failed 684-patient trial — despite, the outlet found, having never run a clinical trial. One sorted patients into responders and non-responders instead of measuring how much they actually changed. The other, a completer analysis, dropped the more than 30% of patients who left the 48-week study. Axovant put completer-analysis data in a June 2015 filing days before the offering and used it in July to announce statistically significant benefits.

Those methods are criticized for exactly the reason they were useful here: throwing out the patients who quit breaks the balance randomization is supposed to create, and it can make a drug look better than it is. Oligarch Watch cited medical researchers who have warned as much for years. TiffinOhio.net has previously reported on that investigation and on the $260 million Forbes estimates Ramaswamy made during his time at Roivant.

The criticism was not invented after the drug failed. In July 2015, weeks after the IPO, Chardan Capital Markets analyst Gbola Amusa called the completer analysis “less robust scientifically” and less useful to regulators, said the IPO had overpriced a drug with a mixed Phase 2 history, and rated the stock a sell.

$5 million in, $315 million out

Axovant did not exist until October 2014. On June 11, 2015, it sold 21 million shares at $15 and raised $315 million at a $1.4 billion valuation — then the largest biotech IPO in U.S. history. The stock closed up about 90%, pushing the company toward $2.8 billion.

The prospectus for that offering states the company had never been profitable, had no approved products and had generated no product revenue. Its accumulated deficit was $21 million. It had not recruited a single patient for the trial that would decide everything.

Ramaswamy told Forbes the company had “a great drug candidate” that could make a huge difference for patients. On CNBC he described a drug that could help millions and said the company believed it was one Phase 3 study from approval. Roivant kept 75% of the equity. Two funds took 13%. The public float was about 10%.

Paid before the answer

Ramaswamy never held Axovant stock directly. He held Roivant, and Roivant is where the money moved.

He sold part of that stake in 2015 — the year of the IPO, two years before the trial — and reported $37 million in capital gains on returns he later released as a presidential candidate. Forbes reported he made at least $38 million in income that year. He has said he was forced to sell to make room for a new institutional investor.

Then came an extraordinary piece of timing. In August 2017, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a $1.1 billion investment in Roivant. A Schedule 13D subsequently reported that SoftBank entities could be deemed to share dispositive power over the 75 million Axovant shares held by Roivant — 69.8% of Axovant.

Twenty days after that arrangement became effective, the Phase 3 results came in.

Oligarch Watch describes the transaction as a way for Ramaswamy to monetize the value tied up in Axovant without dumping Roivant’s enormous block onto the public market. The filings establish the timing and the ownership structure.

1,315 patients

On Sept. 26, 2017, Axovant announced that MINDSET had missed both primary endpoints. On cognition, the gap versus placebo was 0.36 points, p=0.22. On daily functioning, 0.09 points, p=0.83 — nothing. One secondary measure, a clinician impression scale, reached significance at p=0.02. The drug was well tolerated. It simply did not work.

The stock fell more than 70% in a day. Axovant shares held by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System went from about $1.23 million to $68,000, according to the fund’s SEC filings. Ramaswamy told Forbes it was the “single greatest failure” of his career and said he felt accountable to people who had bet on something he believed in.

The company tried the drug in Lewy body dementia. That failed too. On Jan. 8, 2018, Axovant killed the program. The company was later renamed Sio Gene Therapies and wound down.

Months after the collapse, Ramaswamy said he would do it again. There was probably nothing meaningful the company could have done differently, he told a 2018 conference, with the stock trading near $1.

“That is what’s most important”

There is one more exchange in the record.

In a 2023 Forbes profile, pharmaceutical scientist Raymond Schinazi recalled asking Ramaswamy years earlier about a different company, Inhibitex, whose experimental hepatitis C medicine Schinazi considered garbage. Schinazi’s recollection of the answer: “But we are making money. That is what’s most important.”

Ramaswamy denies saying it and notes that Schinazi’s own company, Pharmasset, competed with Inhibitex.

Different drug, years earlier — and the same question Axovant poses. Is the investment a success when the medicine fails?

David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political scientist, put the structure to Oligarch Watch bluntly: “heads I win and tails I also win.”

What survived

Roivant did not go down with Axovant. In 2019 it sold five subsidiaries and a 10% stake to Japan’s Sumitomo for $3 billion; Ramaswamy reported $174.5 million in capital gains for 2020. In 2023 Roivant sold its Telavant unit to Roche for $7.1 billion. Late last year, positive Phase 3 results for an autoimmune drug sent the stock up again. Forbes, which credits Roivant with helping bring multiple drug candidates to market, now puts Ramaswamy’s real-time net worth at $3 billion — and describes the 2015 IPO of a speculative Alzheimer’s drug that later failed as the thing that formed the basis of the company.

No regulator has charged Ramaswamy with anything, and he is not running on his innocence. He is running on his judgment. What the Axovant record documents is a version of capitalism in which the founder’s payout is settled before the product is tested — and he is asking to bring it to state government.

He is now campaigning to eliminate Ohio’s tax on capital gains — the same category of income through which he made much of his fortune.

Ramaswamy asks Ohio voters to judge him by his record as a businessman. Axovant belongs at the center of that judgment.

The drug failed its test.

The business model had already passed its own.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He has good reason not to. The arithmetic of the next presidential cycle is brutal for a first-term Ohio governor, and he knows the numbers better than anyone — he ran them himself in 2023.

What he promised

In February 2025, days before launching his campaign at a Butler County aerospace plant, Ramaswamy told NBC News that if elected governor he was “fully committed to serving a full term.”

Then he went further. Asked about his plans by the Wall Street Journal, he said he intended to be a two-term governor. “Those eight years will go by quickly,” he said.

Eight years is a claim on two full Ohio election cycles, made by a man who had spent the previous 24 months running for president, angling for a Cabinet post, lobbying for a Senate appointment, and taking — then abandoning — the co-leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency. Dave Yost built his primary campaign on that pattern. Yost is gone. The line stuck.

Forty-three days

Ramaswamy declared for president on Feb. 21, 2023 — 623 days before the 2024 election. Run that same interval back from Election Day 2028, which falls Nov. 7, and the launch date is Feb. 23, 2027.

Ohio’s next governor is sworn in Monday, Jan. 11, 2027. Feb. 23 is 43 days later.

Not one budget. Not one legislative session. Six weeks. A campaign built at the pace of his last one would be hiring in Des Moines and Manchester while the new administration in Columbus was still filling agency directorships.

Ohio law won’t stop him

Five states force an officeholder to quit before running for something else: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas. Florida exempted presidential candidates in 2023, in a bill signed by a governor who was about to become one. Ohio has no such law at all. A sitting Ohio governor can run for president and keep the job while he does it.

The only hard limit sits at the far end. Article III, Section 2 caps a governor at two successive four-year terms. It says nothing about ambition.

2028 is occupied

JD Vance leads the Pollsmax average of national 2028 Republican primary polling at 40.0%, with Marco Rubio at 19.3%. Ramaswamy sits at 2.2%. Trump has called Vance “most likely” his heir apparent.

Vance is also from Ohio. And Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor was assembled out of Vance’s own political shop — strategist Jai Chabria, adviser Andy Surabian, ally Arthur Schwartz and pollster Tony Fabrizio all moved over in early 2025. Challenging Vance in 2028 would mean running against the operatives who built the operation, at 2%, against a sitting vice president with the president’s blessing, having just broken a promise to the state that elected him.

That isn’t a lane. It’s a cliff.

2032 is the cycle that fits

Run the numbers four years out and everything that blocks him disappears.

Ramaswamy turned 41 this month. He would be 47 on Inauguration Day 2033 — younger then than Vance is today. A single completed term as governor runs Jan. 11, 2027 to Jan. 13, 2031: promise kept, record built, term limit untouched, campaign launched from private life with a national donor file already in hand. Win a second term in 2030 and the timing tightens, but the constitutional clock still doesn’t bind until January 2035.

The one variable he can’t control is whether Vance wins. An incumbent Republican president fills the 2032 cycle. A defeated Vance empties it — and a two-time presidential candidate fresh off four years running a large industrial state stops being an asterisk and starts being a front-runner.

The machine is already federal

V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the outside group spending on Ramaswamy’s behalf, is not an Ohio committee. It is registered with the Federal Election Commission as an independent-expenditure-only super PAC, FEC ID C00892919, first filed in November 2024 — three months before he entered the governor’s race.

It reports $41.8 million raised this cycle and $25.9 million in cash on hand as of June 30. Federal committees aren’t built for one contest; they keep filing with the FEC until they terminate. Four billionaires supplied 98% of its second-quarter money, including $5 million from Elon Musk. A national fundraising apparatus, run by national operatives, aimed at Ohio for now.

What the ballot actually asks

The eight-year promise was made in February 2025. Since then the New York Times has listed him among Republicans who could make a quick leap from a governor’s race to a national campaign, he has spent 79 days of an election year outside Ohio including 14 international travel legs, and Steve Bannon has told his audience to write the state off.

The race is tight. The Pollsmax average of Ohio governor polling has Ramaswamy up less than a point, and an Aug. 13 Wedgewood survey had Amy Acton ahead 47-46. Acton has outraised him from actual donors three filings running.

Ohioans aren’t just choosing a governor for four years. They’re choosing whether to hand the office to a man whose answer to “will you run for president again” is yes, and whose only open question is which cycle. On the calendar, 2028 costs him everything. On the calendar, 2032 costs him nothing.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Disability Candidates Forum ran from noon to 4 p.m. on Aug. 20 at the Fawcett Center in Columbus. Organized by the Ohio Olmstead Task Force and billed as nonpartisan and cross-disability, it paired the Republican and Democratic nominees for every statewide office on the November ballot — governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer and U.S. Senate. Questions were set ahead of time so each candidate could lay out a disability policy platform. Organizers provided ASL interpreters, CART transcription and a universal changing station, and asked attendees to come fragrance-free.

Husted was listed. So was his opponent, Democrat Sherrod Brown.

At 3:10 p.m., according to a screenshot of the event’s question-and-answer channel reviewed by TiffinOhio.net, an attendee asked whether Husted and Republican governor nominee Vivek Ramaswamy were joining the program. Event staff answered that they were not, and that both “were unable to participate.”

At 8:19 p.m., Husted’s verified account posted: “It’s National Shooting Sports Month! It was great to be at the Black Wing Shooting Center in Columbus today with fellow Ohio sportsmen and hear about the issues that matter most to them.” The Black Wing Shooting Center is at 3722 Marysville Road in Delaware, Ohio, north of Columbus.

The vote behind the empty chair

The forum mattered because of a vote Husted cast last year.

Husted voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republican reconciliation law that carries the largest Medicaid reduction in the program’s history. KFF estimates the law strips roughly $33 billion in federal Medicaid funding from Ohio over the next decade, about a 13% cut against the state’s current spending baseline, according to analysts who briefed the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. An Urban Institute analysis projects that new work-verification rules could cost as many as 356,000 Ohioans their coverage by 2028, on top of roughly 113,000 who already dropped Affordable Care Act plans after premium tax credits expired.

The requirements take effect Jan. 1, 2027. Roughly 769,000 Ohioans will have to document 80 hours a month of work, school or community service, and advocates say the state still has not resolved basic questions about how people will prove it.

More than 45,000 Ohioans with disabilities receive Medicaid waivers, the mechanism that lets people be cared for at home instead of in an institution. Those waiver services are optional under federal law, which is why disability advocates have spent the past year warning that squeezed state budgets will reach for them first. Nationally, families are already bracing for a return to institutional care. In Ohio, a Public Citizen analysis identified nine hospitals at heightened risk of closing or cutting services.

‘Nothing in this bill that would impact them’

Husted has repeatedly told Ohioans the cuts will not reach disabled people.

In July 2025, as the bill moved through Congress, he told News 5 Cleveland that people with disabilities would not be affected. “There’s nothing in this bill that would impact them,” he said. A spokesperson told NBC4 the same week: “Disabled Americans, children, and their caretakers are at no risk for losing benefits because of this bill.”

Later that month, in a statement posted on his Senate website, Husted said there were “whoppers of a lie” circulating about Medicaid, and said the law would leave Ohioans with more health care resources than ever.

The work requirements he defends are the specific provision disability groups flag as the risk. The Center for American Progress found that the 80-hour rule reaches at least 2.6 million adults nationally who have difficulty working because of disability or illness but do not receive Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance, and therefore do not qualify for an automatic exemption. People in that group keep coverage only if they navigate the paperwork correctly.

On a Columbus radio show in November, Husted called the Medicaid changes purposeful and said, according to Heartland Signal: “So I love fighting for those things. I love doing that kind of stuff.”

The pattern predates Washington

Husted’s record on disability benefits did not start with last year’s vote. It started when he ran the Ohio House.

In April 2005, three months into his speakership, Husted led the House budget proposal that eliminated the Disability Medical Assistance program. The program paid for prescription drugs and doctor visits for 15,000 very low-income adults, described at the time as destitute and chronically ill. The same proposal cut off Medicaid coverage for 25,000 working-poor parents — families earning between 90% and 100% of the federal poverty line.

The following March, Husted voted for Senate Bill 7, an overhaul of Ohio’s workers’ compensation system that made it harder for injured workers to qualify for benefits and shortened how long they could collect them.

The law required objective medical evidence that a workplace injury had substantially aggravated a pre-existing condition, rather than a worker’s report of increased pain, and limited treatment for that aggravation to whatever it took to return the condition to its prior state. It narrowed the standard for permanent total disability, overturning an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that had counted the loss of a single limb as the loss of two body parts. And it capped nonworking wage-loss compensation at 52 weeks; under the previous system, a worker could draw on a 200-week allowance whether or not they had returned to work. The House passed the bill 58 to 37, and it became law.

The hug and the vote

In June 2025, Columbus attorney Sarah Bloom Anderson brought her 14-year-old daughter Audrey to Husted’s Washington office to ask him to protect Medicaid. Audrey has PURA Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder, and relies on a waiver that pays for a full-time caregiver at home. Husted hugged her. His office posted the photo. Not long after, he voted for the bill.

Bloom Anderson recounted the meeting four months later at a Brown campaign roundtable in Columbus, one of the screened, small-group events the Democrat has built his campaign around. Signal Ohio reported her words: “You can’t hug my daughter, look her in the eyes and tell her Medicaid won’t be cut,” she said, “and then sign that bill.”

Brown has run much of his campaign on that terrain, including a December meeting in Toledo with residents who said they could no longer afford their premiums.

An award, and a sponsor

Three years ago, Husted stood in front of a camera as lieutenant governor and handed CareSource the 2023 Governor’s Inclusive Employer Award for its record of hiring people with disabilities.

“Governor DeWine and I have made working with Ohioans with disabilities an important priority in our administration,” he said in the ceremony video. “We want to connect employers with Ohioans with disabilities in a way that helps everyone.”

CareSource is a listed fiscal sponsor of Thursday’s forum. Its logo sits on the event page, a few inches above the roster of candidates that included Husted’s name.

Ohio votes Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Windsor is the founder and editor-in-chief of a right-wing news website, hosts a weekday program on 98.9 FM The Answer in Columbus and works as an Ohio Statehouse correspondent for WHK AM 1420 in Cleveland. His station biography traces his start in broadcast journalism to WMFD-TV in Mansfield, where he pressed Gov. Mike DeWine, then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and then-Health Director Amy Acton over the state’s pandemic response. Two of those three are on Ohio’s ballot in November. Windsor lives in Richland County.

Asked this week about the 2018 case, Windsor said the allegations against him were “proven untrue in court or later retracted.” The Delaware County court file records no such finding. It records the opposite outcome: an agreed order restricting his contact with his former wife that ran until March 1, 2020.

The protection order was first reported in August 2024 by The Rooster, the progressive Ohio newsletter written by D.J. Byrnes, which obtained and published portions of the petition. TiffinOhio.net independently obtained the filing and reviewed the full court dockets in both the protection order case and the divorce.

What the record shows

Windsor’s then-wife filed a petition for a domestic violence civil protection order in the domestic relations division of Delaware County Common Pleas Court on March 1, 2018. A magistrate granted an ex parte order the same day, and the court transmitted notice of it to the national law enforcement database used to flag active protection orders.

The Richland County sheriff’s office served Windsor with the packet on March 5. That same day, an attorney entered an appearance for him and moved to continue the hearing — and Windsor filed for divorce, listing himself as plaintiff in a separate case before the same judge.

The protection order case then stretched across four months. Windsor moved a second time to continue in late April. Each time the hearing slipped, the court’s orders kept the ex parte protection in force. On May 30, a magistrate granted Windsor permission to serve discovery on his wife and, in the same order, directed that he have no contact with her or with anyone else the order protected.

The divorce moved faster. A separation agreement was filed May 21, a hearing was held May 22, and the court entered a decree of divorce on May 24, 2018. The marriage was over.

The protection order case was not. A full hearing went forward on June 27. Two days later, on June 29, 2018, the court entered a consent agreement and domestic violence civil protection order with terms effective until March 1, 2020. The court sent an updated notice to the national database and logged acknowledgments from two sheriff’s offices in July.

The order was entered five weeks after the divorce was final. Windsor was represented by counsel from the first week of the case through its resolution.

What the petition alleged

The petition and its attached narrative describe a marriage that began with an engagement in November 2015 and a wedding in March 2016 — dates confirmed by Delaware County probate records — and that his wife wrote turned controlling within weeks.

She alleged Windsor cut her off from friends and family, required joint email and social media accounts, monitored where she went and whom she spoke to, would not permit her to work, and drained her savings and her 401(k). She wrote that he blocked doorways and confined her to rooms during arguments, sometimes for hours.

A handwritten notation on the narrative reads: “He hit my daughter in the face and lied about it when she told me what happened.” The note is dated to November 2016.

The narrative alleges he threw a dishwasher across a kitchen, punched and damaged her car outside a work Christmas party, and shoved her from behind into a kitchen on Dec. 26, after which she wrote that she called 911 and deputies responded and documented a domestic dispute. She described a January incident in a bedroom, in front of two 5-year-old children, in which she said her hand was cut in two places after she took his phone off a dresser because he was recording. On Feb. 1, 2018, she wrote, officers came to her home and escorted him inside to collect belongings, and wrote up a domestic disturbance.

She alleged that in one three-day stretch he called her 48 times, left eight voicemails and sent 15 emails, and that the contact continued after her attorney asked his to stop. Attached phone records list dozens of calls across February 2018, and a handwritten tally counts daily contacts through January running as high as 51 in a day.

She alleged he contacted her workplace and tried to get her fired by telling a manager the company employed a drug addict. She alleged he told her, “You will be mine forever,” and said more than once that he would kill any man who came between them. She alleged he used a slur to describe her autistic daughter. She wrote that she miscarried during the marriage and that he left her at home alone while it happened and went to watch a football game at a bar.

None of this was adjudicated. A consent agreement resolves a protection order case by agreement rather than by a ruling on the evidence, and the docket contains no findings of fact on any individual allegation. It also contains no dismissal, no withdrawal of the petition and no filing that retracts anything.

Byrnes, who published the petition in 2024, is a frequent target of Windsor’s coverage and criticism, including over Byrnes’ 2024 prank on Vivek Ramaswamy.

Windsor’s response

TiffinOhio.net sent Windsor a detailed list of the allegations and asked him to address each one, along with the disposition of the case, whether he disputed specific claims, whether any criminal charges followed the incidents described, and whether he had disclosed the matter to his employers. He responded with the following statement: “I’ve never been charged or convicted of a crime beyond traffic violations. Like so many people, I went through a difficult divorce where each of us said things out of frustration. Many things said were proven untrue in court or later retracted. This happened many years ago and it’s unfortunate that this is now the grotesque obsession of online trolls who desperately want to stop me from shining a light on the actual crimes and misdeeds of those who are steadily undermining America and Ohio.”

His account of his criminal history is consistent with the records reviewed for this story. A protection order of this kind is a civil matter, not a criminal charge. Searches of Franklin County Municipal Court and Mansfield Municipal Court, both matching his date of birth, turned up four traffic cases resolved without contest and two old debt-collection suits. No criminal case appeared in either court.

His account of the outcome does not match the file. The court did not find the allegations untrue, and nothing in either docket shows a retraction. The case ended with Windsor agreeing to an order that restricted his contact with his former wife for nearly two more years, entered after the divorce that he says explains it had already concluded.

This is the second time this year that court records have complicated Windsor’s public account of himself. TiffinOhio.net reported in August that his media company owes a former county elections board member $150,000, and that his proposed bankruptcy repayment plan would return roughly five cents on the dollar.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Before the ceremony, members of the Class of 2030 will walk in a procession down Miami Street beginning at 1:45 p.m. Faculty, staff and returning students will line the route to cheer on the incoming Dragons as they make their way to Convocation.

During the ceremony, students will hear from university leadership as they are officially welcomed to the university and begin the 2026-27 academic year. Convocation marks the start of the school year and the opportunities, experiences and connections ahead of the incoming class.

The ceremony falls in the middle of RISE Week, Tiffin University’s welcome program for new and returning students, which runs from Aug. 20 through Aug. 28. First-year students moved into campus housing on Thursday, Aug. 20, and the week’s schedule includes academic sessions, a downtown walk, a student organization fair and a closing rally. The university lists Convocation as a required event for all new students.

Those unable to attend in person can watch on Tiffin University’s YouTube channel, where the ceremony will be livestreamed.

The private university sits along Miami Street and enrolls students in undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs. In May, Tiffin University and Heidelberg University announced five new academic partnership pathways taking effect this fall, covering counseling, criminal justice, teacher education and nursing. The university also unveiled an updated dragon mascot in 2024.

For more information, contact Deborah Roszman, executive director of communications and public relations, at 419-448-3513 or roszmandl@tiffin.edu.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He got about a day.

The former state representative, who is running a write-in campaign for Ohio House District 89, challenged Erie County Treasurer Caleb Stidham to a debate in a Facebook post Thursday, attaching two conditions.

“I challenge Calab [sic] to a debate,” Kraus wrote. “SOS Frank LaRose has until August 28th to decide, so let’s have a debate. I’ll debate Calab Stidham anytime/anywhere about who is the better candidate. Qualifier - it must be open to the public and allowed to be video taped. If Calab is so qualified, this should be easy for him.”

LaRose did not take until Aug. 28. He ruled the same day, certifying Stidham to the Nov. 3 ballot and rejecting the argument from the Erie County elections board’s two Democrats that the closed party meeting that produced the nomination was unlawful.

Stidham did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

“The Ham”

Kraus has settled on a nickname. In the debate post he referred to Stidham three times as “the Ham.”

“We all know the story. The Ham will not debate because he doesn’t know what the establishment wants him to say,” Kraus wrote.

“The fact of the matter is that I am the only candidate running that supports……. Ending property tax, you keep more of your hard-earned money because the government doesn’t deserve it… let’s end the theft! If you want to pay more and get less - vote for the Ham,” he wrote.

“Remember…an establishment conservative is just a big government tax and spend liberal in disguise - vote Kraus for less taxes and less government spending.”

He closed: “Write in Steve Kraus!”

No public statement from Stidham declining a debate could be located. Kraus’s assertion that Stidham will not debate is his own characterization.

“Columbus Mafia”

After the certification, Kraus issued a statement.

“It’s not unexpected that the Columbus Mafia would be able to keep their pick in place,” he wrote. “I don’t begrudge Secretary of State Frank LaRose for maintaining a practice that has plagued both parties for the last 30 years. If you want true representation, write in Steve Kraus on your ballot in November.”

How the ballot fight got here

The seat opened Aug. 4, when Rep. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, delivered a letter to the Erie County Board of Elections withdrawing from the November ballot after four terms, saying he was under consideration for another role.

Because House District 89 spans 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. Stidham, who chairs the Erie County Republican Party, was one of three applicants. He was also one of the six people entitled to vote. The committee met the afternoon of Aug. 10 and picked him, 4-2.

Four days later the Erie County board deadlocked 2-2 on certifying him. Democrats Edward Leonard and MaryAnn Groot said the committee meeting should have been open to the public and that Stidham should have stepped away from the deliberation and the vote. Republicans John Adams and Gary Smith voted to certify. Under state law, a tie at a county board goes to the secretary of state, whose decision is final.

In a letter to the board explaining Thursday’s ruling, LaRose wrote that Stidham’s application appeared to follow the law and that the Erie County prosecutor’s office had agreed. He rejected the open meetings argument, writing that the Democratic members had not cited any relevant law.

“Respectfully, this certification vote is not the proper forum for an extra-judicial expansion of Ohio’s open meetings laws beyond their established statutory application,” LaRose wrote.

LaRose had headlined an Erie County Republican fundraiser at the Sandusky Yacht Club the previous evening, at an event the invitation said was held in support of Erie County candidates. He is term-limited as secretary of state and is his party’s nominee for state auditor on the same Nov. 3 ballot.

Kraus’s own deadline

Stidham’s name is now settled. Kraus’s is not.

Write-in candidates must file a declaration of intent by 4 p.m. on the 72nd day before the election, under Ohio Revised Code 3513.041. For the Nov. 3 general election, that is 4 p.m. Monday, Aug. 24. Write-in votes are not counted for anyone who has not filed.

The property tax claim

Kraus is running on eliminating property taxes outright, a position he says separates him from everyone else in the race.

The statewide push to do that is not on this year’s ballot. The Committee to Abolish Ohio Property Taxes, which spent more than a year gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment banning taxes on real property, announced in June that it had fallen short of its signature goal and would not file by the July 1 deadline. Organizers said they are aiming for 2027.

The seat Kraus lost

Kraus held House District 89 for seven months in 2015. A jury convicted him of theft from an elderly person, a fifth-degree felony, on July 27, 2015, and he vacated the seat that day.

A court later sealed the conviction. When an Erie County resident sued to keep him off the 2024 primary ballot, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously in January 2024 that he could run, sidestepping the question of whether a sealed conviction counts as an expunged one 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. Swearingen beat him in that primary.

The rest of the field

Kraus is not the only Republican in the district objecting to how the nomination was handled. GOP consultant Jon Paul Morrow, who worked on Kraus’s 2014 campaign, has said Stidham should have abstained and warned publicly that the nomination could cost Republicans the seat. Statehouse Speaker Matt Huffman and state Sen. Bill Reineke were privately working to secure the nomination for Stidham before the committee met, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Stidham has defended the process, telling NBC4 there was no conflict of interest because he did not lead or chair the meeting that selected him, and that Huron County Chairman Sven Stahl chaired it.

The Democratic nominee is Easton Retzke of Sandusky, a lifelong resident and Ohio State political science graduate who won his party’s nomination on May 5 and has spent the summer campaigning while Republicans argued over who would face him.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Republican candidate spent nearly $560,000 leasing a private jet from V Leasing LLC, whose address listed for the company is a house owned by Ramaswamy, according to campaign finance reports from July 2025, January 2026, April 2026, and June 2026. 

He has also spent nearly $130,000 leasing a private jet from TVPX Aircraft Solutions in Salt Lake City, Utah, according to campaign finance reports.. 

Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to questions sent multiple times by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

“I love long drives,” Ramaswamy said in May when talking to a Youngstown news station.

“You think about the time we spend in Trumbull County, and you think about the time we even spend just going for a nice jog. You think about Cuyahoga National Park, not far from where we are. I’m a nature guy.”

Ramaswamy has loaned his campaign more than $25 million, according to campaign finance reports. The Ohio Capital Journal reported earlier this year that Ramaswamy’s campaign has put more than a half of million dollars on credit cards.

“If he is basically fronting money to rent a plane from himself, and then if he does not forgive the loans but reimburses himself, he’ll essentially be using donor funds to pay himself,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president in communications for the nonprofit watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 

Ohio Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton often talks about how she drives a Jeep. 

“As life becomes even more expensive for Ohio families, Vivek Ramaswamy is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars flying around the world to luxury destinations on his private jet, treating Ohio like a flyover state,” said Addie Bullock, spokeswoman for the Acton campaign. “Ohioans know they can’t trust a billionaire who looks down at us from 30,000 feet to understand the challenges we’re facing or to fight for us.” 

David Cohen, political science professor and director of the Applied Politics Program at University of Akron’s Bliss Institute, said he can’t think of another candidate running for Ohio office that has used a private jet as their main mode of transportation for campaign events. 

“The fact that Ramaswamy has spent two years flying around on his own private jet is really a bad look,” he said. “I mean, let’s face it: Ohio is not California or Texas. You can drive from border to border in Ohio in a few hours.”

Ramaswamy flights

Federal flight records show Ramaswamy flew his private jet, operated by Talon Air LLC, to at least six campaign events in Ohio, Washington D.C., and Salt Lake City in April and May. The flights within Ohio lasted about 30 minutes. 

Ramaswamy flew to a campaign event in Lakeside on April 7, taking his private jet from Ohio State University’s airport in Columbus to Port Clinton. 

The next day, Ramaswamy used his private jet to fly from Columbus to Cleveland for a campaign event for the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association.

Ramaswamy took his private jet from Columbus to Youngstown for an April 15 meeting with the Fraternal Order of Police at the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office. 

After winning the primary, Ramaswamy took his private jet from Columbus to Cleveland for an event in Brecksville in Cuyahoga County on May 21. 

“He’s flying between Columbus and Akron for crying out loud, and Columbus and Cleveland,” Cohen said. “That’s a two hour drive. Get in the car.” 

Ramaswamy flew on his private jet from Columbus to Washington, D.C. for a campaign event with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz on May 13. 

Ramaswamy took his private jet from Columbus to Salt Lake City for a data center energy conference on May 22 and flew back to Columbus on his private jet on May 25. 

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 vast majority of the accused worked for Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agencies tasked with President Donald Trump’s controversial mass deportations.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance started searching court records after it was revealed last year that an ICE supervisor in Cincinnati had a lengthy history of violence against a woman with whom he lived. His history included 23 police visits to his house. 

A year earlier, a federal jury convicted an ICE deportation officer in Cincinnati of extorting sex from women over whom he held power.

An earlier version of the report listed 59 Homeland Security employees who had been charged or convicted. The newest version lists 152.

Some of the cases stretch back to the 1980s. But Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, pointed out that criminality appears to be accelerating as Trump rapidly adds agents to his border-enforcement operation.

Just under one-fourth of the charges and convictions Tramonte and her team found happened since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Fifty-six percent of those on the updated list have been sentenced for their offenses.

About 90% of all cases involve allegations of sexual abuse or gender-based violence, Tramonte said, adding that just over half involved sexual abuse of children. In just under 45% of cases, agents were alleged to have abused their official authority as they committed crimes, she said.

Questions about agents’ vetting and training grew intense last winter when ICE agents in Minneapolis shot two U.S. citizens to death under questionable circumstances.

In July another ICE officer, David Brouillette, shot and killed a Columbian man in Maine. His ex-wife and some former friends told NPR that Brouillette had a long history of racism and violence. 

In an email, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said it vets new agents adequately and holds them accountable when they commit abuses.

“The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors,” the spokesperson said.

“We take allegations regarding misconduct seriously and cherish the public’s trust. We work tirelessly to uphold the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable.”

Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said the list published by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance proves otherwise.

“One of the things that really stood out to me in this report is how plainly it exposed the hypocrisy of the federal immigration authorities,” he said during a virtual press conference. “We’re hearing the claims over and over again from ICE, from the White House about how they’re going after the worst of the worst. 

“But we’ve known for a while that the data just doesn’t match the rhetoric. The most recent data is that about 2% of the most recent immigration court filings involve any criminality at all. Meanwhile, this report is documenting that some of the worst of the worst are in fact employed by ICE. I don’t think this is going to come as a huge surprise to the American public because we’re seeing daily the brutality on our social media feeds.”

Markowitz and Tramonte said that an obvious reform would be to acknowledge that the government is seeking to deport less than 2% of the 66,000 people detained by ICE and Border Patrol based on allegations of criminality. In other words, the overwhelming majority are being held under civil and not criminal law.

Markowitz said “cooperative enforcement strategies” should be employed with documented immigrants.

“ICE is a federal agency that enforces civil law, just like the IRS, the” Securities and Exchange Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he said. “All these other agencies enforce their laws without using handcuffs and putting people behind bars.”

Those agencies can start a process that leads to criminal charges, “but their first instinct is not to initiate punitive enforcement actions to bring the harshest penalty possible. Instead they try to help the regulated entity to come into compliance.”

Markowitz said immigration authorities have pathways to do something similar.

“Unfortunately, ICE is doing exactly the opposite,” he said. “They’re creating enforcement problems instead of solving enforcement problems.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Six wind farms in the Midwest were certified to sell wind energy in the state in a supreme court decision that upheld a ruling by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

The PUCO decision was challenged by Carbon Solutions Group, who has renewable energy clients in Ohio. The group argued that the energy company Avangrid did not meet the criteria to be certified for sales in Ohio, and that the commission didn’t act appropriately in the process of certifying the entities.

The challenge related to wind farms in four different states, each being certified as “a qualifying renewable-energy resource,” as is required in state law for the farms to be able to sell energy in Ohio.

The farms are located in states that don’t connect directly to Ohio, including Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa.

In order to qualify as an energy resource, out-of-state facilities have to prove the energy can be delivered to the state, via a commission-adopted test that determines if energy coming from a noncontiguous state can be sent here.

The commission uses certain power-flow studies to determine whether energy sources sent from other states “have an impact on power flows over transmission lines within Ohio,” according to the supreme court decision.

The company challenging the certifications didn’t argue that the test was unreasonable, but instead that the test was “erroneously applied.”

While the utilities commission approved the certifications for three different reasons, the only reason challenged by the Carbon Solutions Group was whether Avangrid had proven they could deliver the wind energy to Ohio.

The group challenging the certifications argued to the supreme court that the commission “erred” in finding that the energy was deliverable, and that the wind farms had “failed to provide sufficient evidence demonstrating” that fact.

The Ohio Supreme Court reviewed reports and multiple pieces of testimony by members of the commission who determined the deliverability requirement had been met, and the majority decision noted a previous decision in which the justices ruled that “if the commission finds that a staff recommendation contains sufficient factual findings and conclusions of law, it may adopt the same.”

“In light of (the staff testimony and analysis) … we find no merit in CSG’s contention that the evidence does not support the staff’s deliverability findings and recommendations,” the majority wrote in the Tuesday decision.

Judge Julia Dorrian of the Tenth District Court of Appeals sat in for Justice Jennifer Brunner on the case, and wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy and justices Patrick DeWine, Dan Hawkins, and Megan Shanahan.

Dorrian and the majority also said the evidence in the record of the PUCO decision didn’t show “misapprehension, mistake, or willful disregard of duty.”

“Although the commission in its order could have articulated its reasons in a more methodical manner, the commission did address its reasoning as well as the facts on which it relied…,” Dorrian wrote for the majority.

While the court sided with PUCO in saying the commission had the authority to determine if the tests proved the energy could be delivered, justices held back from setting a precedent for future cases that might ask for further study of electricity load, “or other evidence as it determines may be necessary when considering whether the deliverability standard is met.”

Justice Patrick Fischer agreed with part of the majority’s decision, but disagreed with his colleagues in siding with the commission’s decision that the energy could be delivered to the state. Fischer went so far as to say the majority opinion “ignores the commission’s clear violation” of state law as it pertains to record-keeping in contested cases.

“Furthermore, the majority errs in determining that sufficient evidence exists in the record to support the commission’s decision,” Fischer wrote. “In affirming the commission’s order, the majority has acted far beyond the scope of our appellate authority in reviewing commission orders.”

Fischer was joined in his opinion by Judge John Williamowski, a Third District Court of Appeals judge sitting in for Justice Joe Deters.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

At a moment when voters deserve clear, accurate information about how to participate in our democracy, they are instead being met with efforts to intimidate and confuse them.

Recent actions by state and federal officials have cast an unwarranted shadow over decades of nonpartisan voter registration work, in an attempt to create a climate that risks discouraging eligible Ohioans from exercising one of their most fundamental rights.

Just weeks ago, more than 100 FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), a nonprofit that has spent nearly two decades helping register eligible Ohioans. Agents searched employees’ homes and questioned staff for hours, with insufficient public explanation for the raid.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose recently warned voters to be suspicious of voter registration groups like OOC — and mine, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and Center for Voter Information (CVI). He falsely claimed these organizations don’t actually help unregistered voters and urged Ohioans to ignore our mailers.

Not all outside mail is the same. Legitimate voter registration groups, including VPC and CVI, use the same official forms as state election officials. We also share our materials with election officials in advance.

We’ve worked closely over the years with Ohio election administrators who are entrusted to run free and fair elections. Bad actors don’t do that.

There’s a broader context for Ohioans: the same secretary of state who’s raising alarms about voter registration groups is the one who handed the personal information of eight million Ohio voters over to the Trump administration’s Justice Department.

The state official warning Ohioans not to trust groups that help them register is also cooperating with a federal government building lists of voters and intimidating the organizations that reach them.

With the midterms just months away, Ohioans are being hit with misinformation from multiple directions. No matter the source, the message lands the same way — don’t trust the mail, don’t answer the door, don’t bother casting a ballot.

This confusion is designed to do one thing: keep eligible voters from turning out.

That’s exactly why nonpartisan civic organizations matter. Groups like VPC and CVI help fill the gap left by under-resourced election offices, giving eligible voters official registration applications and accurate information about upcoming elections.

Since 2003, VPC and CVI have helped more than 7 million Americans register to vote nationwide. This year alone, we sent more than 350,000 registration applications directly to unregistered Ohioans.

Helping eligible voters register isn’t a partisan act. It’s a partnership with the state and local officials responsible for elections, built on a simple principle: voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around.

This campaign of confusion succeeds only if Ohioans get discouraged, tune out, or decide it isn’t worth the hassle to vote. Democracy is weakened every time an eligible citizen stays home because they no longer know who to trust.

The answer isn’t to sit out. It’s to show up anyway.

If you’re eligible to vote, confirm you’re registered. If you’ve moved, update your registration. When Election Day arrives, cast your ballot — and help your neighbors to do the same.

The most powerful response to confusion and intimidation is participation.

Democracy doesn’t depend on the people trying to discourage engagement. It depends on the people who show up anyway.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

An invitation obtained by TiffinOhio.net shows the Browns owners hosting a fundraiser for Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday, Sept. 1. Tickets start at $1,000 a person. Patrons pay $5,000, sponsors $10,000. Hosts are asked for $25,000. Co-chairs are asked to raise $50,000, and event chairs $100,000. The 4:30 p.m. private reception is reserved for chairs, co-chairs and hosts; a photo reception for the leadership committee follows at 5; the general reception and program begin at 6.

Ramaswamy’s running mate, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, is listed on the invitation, which carries the campaign slogan “Lower costs. Bigger paychecks.” RSVPs are due Thursday, Aug. 27. The invitation notes the host committee was still forming when it went to print.

Ohio caps individual contributions to a joint governor and lieutenant governor ticket at $16,615.67 per election, which means a $100,000 event chair is not writing one check. That figure is a bundling target — a commitment to gather money from other donors on the campaign’s behalf.

The $600 million

The grant at the center of this is the largest single subsidy Ohio has ever committed to a professional sports franchise, and it does not come out of the general fund. It comes out of the Division of Unclaimed Funds — the roughly $4.8 billion pool of dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, forgotten utility deposits and unclaimed insurance payouts the state holds in trust for its residents, including thousands of people in Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Gov. Mike DeWine had proposed paying for stadium projects by doubling the tax on sports gambling operators. The Ohio House preferred state-backed bonds. Senate Republicans produced a third option: redefine unclaimed property that has sat with the state for a decade as abandoned, sweep it into a new sports and culture facilities fund, and award the Browns $600 million of it as a performance grant. That version won. DeWine signed it into law minutes before the June 30, 2025 budget deadline.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, who fought the Brook Park move and lost, called the provision “a $600 million public subsidy for a domed stadium in Brook Park.”

The money has not moved. Former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann and former state Rep. Jeff Crossman sued on behalf of Ohioans whose property is in the fund, and in March a Franklin County magistrate granted a preliminary injunction halting the transfer, finding the challengers likely to prevail on claims that the law is an unconstitutional taking. The Sixth Circuit, on a separate federal track, declined to order similar relief. Dann said the legislature “tried to permanently confiscate this money for a private sports project.”

Ohioans noticed. Claims paid out of the fund nearly tripled in fiscal year 2026, to $182.57 million, as residents rushed to pull their money out before the state could take title to it. Construction in Brook Park is underway anyway.

The running mate

McColley is not incidental to this story. In January 2025, before any bill existed, the Napoleon Republican told the Statehouse News Bureau: “I’m not in favor of something that would just simply be a handout.”

Five months later, his chamber wrote the unclaimed-funds mechanism, and McColley became its most prominent defender, telling constituents in his newsletter that it “saves the state $400 million in debt service.” He argued the state would be repaid through taxes captured at the stadium site, dismissed the constitutional objections, and predicted the plaintiffs would struggle to show any damages.

During 2024, the year before that plan surfaced, McColley’s campaign accepted $30,999 from Jimmy and Dee Haslam, according to a review of state campaign finance reports by the Ohio Capital Journal. His Senate seat was not on the ballot that year. The same review found Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman took $60,999 from the couple between January 2024 and March 2025, and that Senate Finance Chair Jerry Cirino took $15,000 in August 2024. Huffman’s office said campaign contributions do not influence policy decisions.

NBC4 in Columbus, reviewing the same records, reported DeWine has received $116,908.40 from the Haslams since 2017 and that the family gave more than $500,000 to Ohio political action committees in the year before the stadium request. News5 Cleveland put the family’s total Ohio political giving since 2020 at at least $1,145,000.

The check that is already in

Jimmy and Dee Haslam do not appear in Ramaswamy’s 2026 state campaign finance filings. Nor did TiffinOhio.net find either of them, another member of the Haslam family or a Haslam-controlled entity among the FEC-reported receipts of V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC backing Ramaswamy.

The man who negotiated the $600 million on their behalf does appear, however.

David Jenkins, president of Haslam Sports Group, gave the Ramaswamy-McColley campaign $10,000 on May 20 and another $16,615.50 on July 31, state records show. He listed his employer as Haslam Sports Group both times. That second figure is 17 cents below Ohio’s maximum contribution to a statewide ticket for a single election. His wife, Ada Jenkins, gave $16,615.50 on the same day from the same Strongsville address, bringing the household total to $43,231. The couple are listed as hosts on the Sept. 1 invitation.

Jenkins is not a peripheral figure in the stadium deal. Haslam Sports Group’s own description of his role puts government relations in his portfolio and credits him with leading the stadium planning process that produced what the company calls a public-private partnership. He was promoted to president in August 2025, five weeks after DeWine signed the grant into law.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, put it this way to the Capital Journal: “Ohioans aren’t naive. It’s not hard to connect the dots.”

The Haslams have also spent heavily against the kind of reform that would loosen the legislature’s grip on Ohio’s maps. In 2024 they gave $50,000 each — $100,000 combined — to Ohio Works, the committee formed to defeat the citizen redistricting amendment, putting them among its largest individual donors. The amendment failed. They have previously hosted fundraisers for J.D. Vance and for U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

What the Haslam name carries

The family fortune that will underwrite the Sept. 1 event was built on Pilot, the truck-stop chain Jim Haslam founded in 1958 and Jimmy Haslam ran as CEO. In 2014, that company entered into a criminal enforcement agreement with federal prosecutors in Tennessee, accepting legal responsibility for a scheme in which employees deceptively withheld promised diesel discounts from hundreds of trucking customers. Prosecutors put the loss at more than $56 million. Pilot paid a $92 million penalty, agreed to full restitution, and separately settled customer claims for roughly $85 million. The agreement explicitly protected no individual from prosecution.

Nineteen former employees were ultimately implicated: 14 pleaded guilty, three were convicted at trial, and two received immunity, according to Trucking Info. Former company president Mark Hazelwood was sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison. Jimmy Haslam has consistently denied knowing about the scheme, and he was never charged.

Nine years later, the Haslams and Warren Buffett went to war over the sale of Pilot. The family sued Berkshire Hathaway, alleging it had adopted an accounting method that would slash the price Berkshire owed for their remaining 20 percent stake. Berkshire countersued, alleging Jimmy Haslam had promised millions in payments to Pilot executives to inflate the company’s short-term earnings. At a Delaware hearing in December 2023, attorneys disclosed that federal prosecutors in Manhattan were examining Berkshire’s allegations. The two sides settled on the eve of trial in January 2024 on undisclosed terms, with neither admitting wrongdoing, and the Haslams sold the rest of Pilot to Berkshire days later. No charges have been reported against Haslam.

In football, the Haslams’ defining decision was the 2022 pursuit of quarterback Deshaun Watson, who was then facing more than 20 civil lawsuits from women accusing him of sexual assault or harassment during massage appointments. Two Texas grand juries had declined to indict him, and he denied wrongdoing. Cleveland traded three first-round picks for him and gave him a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract — then the largest guarantee in NFL history. Women suing Watson publicly condemned the deal as a reward for his conduct. The NFL suspended him 11 games for violating its personal conduct policy. Three years later, Jimmy Haslam told reporters the franchise took “a big swing and miss with Deshaun.”

And in Cleveland, the same legislature that awarded the $600 million also amended the state’s Modell Law — written after Art Modell moved the original Browns to Baltimore — so that it applies only to teams leaving Ohio, clearing the path to Brook Park. The city and the Haslams then settled their dueling lawsuits for roughly $100 million paid to Cleveland over 15 years, part of it earmarked to demolish the stadium the team is leaving behind.

Billionaires backing a billionaire

Ramaswamy does not need the Haslams’ money to be competitive. He has already put $25 million of his own fortune into the race and, by campaign finance reports filed Aug. 6, had raised roughly $14.4 million more from donors this year, according to NBC4. Democrat Amy Acton reported $16.5 million over the same period.

The outside money is more lopsided. V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC whose stated purpose is electing Ramaswamy, has raised roughly $42 million, with about $37 million of it coming from five billionaires who do not live in Ohio — including a $5 million check from Elon Musk in May. The committee has also taken corporate money, including $250,000 from Scotts Miracle-Gro, which pleaded guilty to federal pesticide crimes in 2012.

Ramaswamy has campaigned on cutting government waste and shrinking what the state spends. He has also disclosed a stake in the venture firm 8VC, an investor in defense contractor Anduril, which is collecting an Ohio incentive package worth more than $830 million for its Arsenal-1 plant outside Columbus.

The timing of the Bratenahl event is its own complication. On Wednesday, Acton stood in a Columbus coffee shop and rolled out an anti-corruption platform, pledging three day-one executive orders creating an anti-corruption task force, restricting industry insiders from serving on the boards that regulate them, and building a public database of state contracts. She said it is time to put working families ahead of “billionaires, corporations and special interests.” Ramaswamy’s campaign dismissed the plan as hypocrisy, pointing to dark-money support behind Acton.

Thirteen days later, a family whose $600 million award is still frozen in a Franklin County courtroom will gather Ohio’s donor class in their living room to raise money for the ticket that would inherit the fight.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Seneca County Sheriff’s Office deputies were dispatched around 8:28 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 19, to the area of 1525 W. County Road 42 after receiving a report of a train striking a pedestrian.

Deputies arriving at the scene reported evidence of the collision on the locomotive. The man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/man-killed-train-strike-seneca-county/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The case centered on 25-year-old Owen Schumm of Tiffin, whom the Division of Wildlife identified as the main suspect. It began with a call to the state’s Turn-in-a-Poacher hotline reporting a possible wildlife violation to State Wildlife Officer Brock Williamson, who is assigned to Seneca County. Investigators later identified additional suspects accused of breaking various wildlife laws.

Schumm was convicted of eight state charges and the case’s only federal charge. According to the Division of Wildlife, the state charges were aiding a wildlife offender in hunting from a motor vehicle, two counts of killing migratory geese with a rifle, killing a killdeer, killing a woodpecker, littering, and two counts of possessing untagged deer parts. The federal charge was exceeding the daily possession limit for doves.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/tiffin-man-owen-schumm-convicted-seneca-county-poaching/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The ruling was announced in a news release from the Erie County Board of Elections issued over the name of Director Alex Jones. It says LaRose “ruled in favor of certifying Caleb Stidham’s name to the November 3 ballot.”

In a letter to the board explaining his reasoning, LaRose wrote that Stidham’s application appeared to follow the law and that the Erie County prosecutor’s office had agreed. He rejected the argument that the Republican meeting that nominated Stidham violated Ohio’s Open Meetings Act, writing that the Democratic members had not cited any relevant law.

“Respectfully, this certification vote is not the proper forum for an extra-judicial expansion of Ohio’s open meetings laws beyond their established statutory application,” LaRose wrote.

LaRose had until Friday, Aug. 28, to decide. He ruled eight days early, and roughly 24 hours after the two sides of the deadlocked board sent him their written arguments.

Both the Democratic and Republican members submitted their memos on Wednesday, Aug. 19. The Erie County release says the board also forwarded draft minutes of the meeting and the recorded audio.

That same evening, LaRose appeared at a Republican fundraiser in Stidham’s home county. TiffinOhio.net reported Wednesday that LaRose was advertised as the featured guest at the Erie County Republican Women’s Club event at the Sandusky Yacht Club, held, according to the invitation, “in support of our Erie County candidates.” Admission was $50, with sponsorships running from $250 to $1,000. LaRose is himself on the Nov. 3 ballot as the Republican nominee for state auditor. He ruled the next day.

How the tie got to LaRose

The Erie County board split 2-2 on Friday, Aug. 14, on whether to certify Stidham as the Republican nominee in Ohio House District 89. Republicans John Adams and Gary Smith voted to certify. Democrats Edward Leonard and MaryAnn Groot voted against.

Under Ohio law, a tie at a county board of elections goes to the secretary of state, who decides the question summarily. That decision is final.

The two Republicans who voted to certify Stidham are both listed as members of the Erie County Republican Party’s executive committee on the party’s own website, under the heading “Board of Elections Member.” The same page lists Stidham as the committee’s chairman.

Leonard, who read a position statement into the record, wrote that the party meeting that produced the nomination was defective. “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. He and Groot argued the meeting should have been open to the public and that Stidham should not have deliberated and voted on his own nomination.

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. “The district selection committee meeting was chaired by Huron County Chairman Sven Stahl.”

The seat, and how it opened

House District 89 covers Erie and Ottawa counties and part of Huron County. The seat came open Aug. 4, when 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 another role.

That left the nomination to a six-member district committee made up of the Republican chairs and secretaries of the three counties. Stidham was one of three applicants. He was also one of the six people entitled to vote. The committee met the afternoon of Aug. 10 and picked him, 4-2.

Swearingen carried the district with 58% of the vote in 2024.

What happens next

Former state Rep. Steve Kraus, who announced a write-in campaign against Stidham this week, faces a 4 p.m. Monday, Aug. 24, deadline to file a declaration of intent to be a write-in candidate. Protests against write-in candidacies are due 67 days before the election. Official ballots for the Nov. 3 general must be certified by Aug. 25.

Kraus said in a statement that the outcome was no surprise.

“It’s not unexpected that the Columbus Mafia would be able to keep their pick in place,” he said. “I don’t begrudge Secretary of State Frank LaRose for maintaining a practice that has plagued both parties for the last 30 years. If you want true representation, write in Steve Kraus on your ballot in November.”

The Democratic nominee is Easton Retzke, a Sandusky resident and Ohio State political science graduate who won the party’s nomination in the May 5 primary and has been campaigning as a nominee all summer.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Acton, a physician and former director of the Ohio Department of Health, presented the plan to reporters at a Columbus-area coffee shop and released it the same day, on her campaign website. She faces Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in the Nov. 3 general election.

“When I am governor, hard-working Ohioans will stop footing the bill for the cost of corruption in our state,” Acton said in the release. “It is time to put the needs of working families over the wants of billionaires, corporations and special interests.”

What the three orders would do

The first would create an anti-corruption task force to take public input, conduct audits and interview stakeholders, with recommendations due within her first 100 days.

The second targets what the campaign calls a broken appointment process. It would bar lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who have represented, been employed by or been paid by any organization regulated by an Ohio regulatory entity in the previous three years from serving on that same regulatory entity. Anyone seeking such a post would have to disclose the related relationships and payments. Appointees would sign an ethics pledge committing to a three-year cooling-off period barring them from working for an organization they regulated, and would face conflict-of-interest rules requiring public recusal.

“We believe that you can’t be sitting regulating something, and then flip over to the industry side, and then flip back over into the regulating side,” Acton told the Dayton Daily News at the event.

The third would require state contractors and advocacy organizations that spend on political campaigns to disclose their donors publicly, require any company bidding on a contract above $50,000 to disclose beneficial ownership, shareholders holding 10% or more equity and political contributions including gifts to PACs, and create a public database listing state contracts, winning bidders, bid windows and award amounts.

The reach of all three is bounded. The release states the directives apply to activity within the constitutional and statutory authority of the governor’s office, and says Acton would “encourage” other officeholders with appointment authority to adopt the same standards. Broader change would require the legislature. Anti-corruption bills introduced by Ohio Democrats since the scandal broke have not advanced in the Republican-controlled General Assembly, the Associated Press reported last year; GOP legislative leaders have said amending federal campaign finance law is outside their authority.

Why the appointment power matters

The governor appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, the body that sets the electric rates paid in Tiffin, Fostoria, Fremont and every other Ohio community, and that sets terms for the data centers now moving into the state. Both candidates have released competing data center plans ahead of that appointment power.

The last time that power drew national attention, it produced Sam Randazzo. Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Randazzo — a Columbus energy lawyer who had represented Industrial Energy Users-Ohio since 1992 and previously worked as a PUCO staff attorney and an assistant attorney general — as PUCO chairman in February 2019. He resigned in November 2020, days after federal agents searched his home. FirstEnergy later admitted paying Randazzo a $4.3 million bribe in exchange for regulatory favors. He was charged federally and by the state, pleaded not guilty and died before he could stand trial.

House Bill 6, the 2019 nuclear bailout law at the center of the scheme, was passed after FirstEnergy funneled roughly $60 million through dark money groups to install Larry Householder as House speaker and defeat a repeal effort. Householder, a Republican, is serving 20 years in federal prison. Former Ohio Republican Party chair Matt Borges was also convicted. FirstEnergy agreed to pay $230 million to avoid prosecution and a separate $100 million civil penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Two former executives have been reindicted on state charges after their first trial ended in a hung jury.

Acton said the scandal has cost Ohio ratepayers more than $2 billion. The AP has described the scheme’s prospective price tag to consumers as exceeding $2 billion, calling it the largest infrastructure scandal in U.S. history. Ohio electric customers paid more than $500 million in coal plant subsidies added to the bill before that provision’s repeal took effect in August 2025, at a rate of $445,679 a day. In November 2025, state regulators ordered FirstEnergy to pay roughly $250 million for violations tied to the scandal, most of it refunded or credited to customers.

Her opponent

Ramaswamy has directed most of his own comments about corruption in state government toward Medicaid fraud, the Statehouse News Bureau reported. In May he pledged to target waste and abuse in the program, focusing on home health care providers.

Federal filings show five billionaires supplied roughly $37 million — more than 88% of the total — to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC backing Ramaswamy.

Acton has built the rest of her campaign around household costs and tax credits. On Wednesday she tied the two together.

“We need a good statehouse,” Acton said. “We need good elected officials who want to work on the problems of our everyday lives. 95% of what I hear about no one disagrees on—no one disagrees on it. They just want us to get to work solving it. And so it is time for this corruption and this power and this stuff to end. And good people on both sides of the aisle who want to do this work. I welcome that work.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Those changes align with provisions in the Save America Act and the Make Elections Great Again Act — White House priorities that have so far stalled out in Congress.

If states and local governments don’t comply with the administration’s demands, the Department of Homeland Security is threatening to withhold 20% of a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant helping agencies prevent or respond to terrorism.

In a press release announcing the changes, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin drew a straight line from election security to national security.

“Under President Trump’s leadership,” he said, “we are taking decisive action to protect election systems from threats like foreign interference, insider threats, and cyberattacks.”

Mullin added the new requirement will “preserve election integrity and ensure that Americans can trust the results.”

Those changes aren’t simple tweaks. Requiring documentary proof of citizenship could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who simply don’t have their documents on hand. What’s more, the database federal officials want local officials to use is unreliable. The complaint cites an unrelated agreement with the State of California in which the Department of Homeland Security itself acknowledges an estimated 5-10% error rate in its database.

The complaint also notes in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the parties to the case, the “entire fleet” of ballot scanners would need to be reconfigured for hand-marked ballots, and they’d likely need more of them because it takes longer to scan the ballots. In Texas’ El Paso County, new printers alone could cost $3 million, and in Harris County, which includes Houston, officials warned it would not be possible to comply with a state law requiring ballot counting conclude within 24 hours.

The cities and counties challenging the new DHS policy insist Congress authorized the agency to protect critical infrastructure, not determine “who may vote, how ballots must be counted, or how states maintain their voter rolls.”

“The power to administer elections belongs to the states, subject only to conditions imposed by Congress — not the President, not the Secretary of Homeland Security, and not FEMA.”

The grant

Every year since 2002, Congress has set aside one or two billion dollars for the Homeland Security Grant Program. Some of that funding goes to states and some goes to specific urban areas. In the 2026 fiscal year, Ohio is set to receive $5.2 million, and the city of Columbus has a roughly $3.6 million allocation.

Absent election changes, Columbus would miss out on more than $700,000 under the new DHS policy.

The complaint details how past grants in Columbus have funded a bomb robot, hazmat equipment for SWAT teams, and chemical detection systems. The city is planning to use part of its upcoming allocation to cover anti-drone equipment and to make preparations for Columbus’ role as a soccer host city in the 2028 Olympics.

“That money has been authorized by Congress,” Klein said in an interview. “It is for a very specific purpose, and the Trump administration can’t come in and then say, ‘Well, you can’t have this money, or at least all of this money.’”

Other local leaders made similar arguments.

Harris County, Texas is the third most populous in the country; if it was a state, the complaint noted, Harris would be the 25th largest by population.

In a press release, Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin said, “This is the kind of federal overreach we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration.”

The county is expecting to use grant funding to bolster its radio network for first responders and maintain a public emergency alert system.

In Tennessee, Nashville and Davidson County Director of Law Tyler Yarbro criticized the Trump administration for attempting to withhold funds “unless we implement wholly unnecessary and costly changes to our election procedures.”

Nashville is counting on grant funding to purchase an armored vehicle and ballistic vests, as well as bomb sniffing dogs, and equipment for helicopter rescues.

Federal response

Often federal agencies decline to speak about ongoing court cases, but in this instance, FEMA was willing to oblige.

In an email, a FEMA spokesperson wrote, “Election security is national security, and protecting our critical infrastructure remains a top priority for the Trump Administration. Concerns over voting processes, data security, and registration practices have made it clear that action is required.”

“This partisan pushback is nothing new,” the statement said. “We fully expected opposition to common-sense measures designed to protect election security and safeguard the integrity of American democracy.”

Klein isn’t surprised either. This isn’t the first time, he said, that the Trump administration has attempted to link two unrelated programs to gain political leverage. He pointed to a previous lawsuit in which federal officials tried to condition Department of Transportation funding on local DEI policies and sanctuary city status.

“What does paving streets in Linden or the Hilltop have to do with that analysis?” Klein said. “Nothing. And this is really no different.”

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.

More than a dozen people recently protested outside Carey’s Columbus office as part of the Center for Popular Democracy’s national “Care Over Cruelty” August Recess Month of Action. 

The event was also hosted by Progress Grove City, Parents United for Public Schools, and the Ohio Organizing Campaign.

“We’re here today to demand that Rep. Carey chose priorities that put people first,” said Kate Terenzi with the Center for Popular Democracy. 

“Health care, education, and food must come before tax cuts for billionaires, ICE, data centers, and another endless war. We need care over cruelty.” 

More than 100,000 Ohioans — including more than 50,000 children — have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” made the largest cuts to food stamps in the history of the program. 

Carey voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and represents Ohio’s 15th Congressional district.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act offers momentous tax relief that will help workers, families, seniors, farmers, and small businesses live the American Dream,” Carey said in May 2025.

Carey’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

Medicaid work requirements part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could cause 356,000 Ohioans to lose their healthcare coverage and about 113,000 Ohioans have already lost their coverage after tax credits expired. 

In Ohio’s 15th district, 220,200 residents rely on Medicaid, 12% of households receive SNAP, an estimated 33,000 people could lose health coverage by 2034, and $40.4 million in special education funding is at risk, according to event organizers. 

“We are calling on him to restore funding to the critical services like Medicaid, SNAP, fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and end all funding to ICE, war, and his support to data centers,” Terenzi said. 

Ohio’s 15th district includes Madison county and parts of Franklin, Fayette, Clark, Shelby, and Miami counties. 

Susan Cavendish, a mom of four, shared how her children rely on services and therapies through Medicaid through public schools and publicly funded childcare. 

“My five-year-old son is autistic. There was a time when he was considered nonverbal … but in large part, due to the services and support he has received, he has made progress that at one time seemed unobtainable,” she said. 

“The slashing of public assistance and access to these critical services robs the opportunities, the skills, and the voices of the marginalized and underprivileged.”

As a mom of a daughter with special needs, Michelle Bolzenius has learned how to advocate for her daughter. 

“Public schools are asked to educate every child who comes through their doors,” she said. 

“That promise matters tremendously to families of children with disabilities. But we cannot expect schools to fulfill that responsibility without giving them the resources to do so.”

Cavendish’s family has seen cuts to their SNAP benefits. 

“It has become increasingly difficult to make up the differences and make sure my children are getting the nutrition they need,” she said. 

“When you cut SNAP, people do not suddenly need less food. Children do not suddenly become less hungry. The grocery bill does not suddenly become smaller as a suffering economy and rising food costs run rampant.”

Jen Belt, an organizer with Protect Grove City, had a question for Carey: At what cost?

“We hear about jobs,” she said. “We hear about economic development, we hear about winning the race for artificial intelligence, and yes, economic growth matters, jobs matter, investment matters, but Congressman Carey, our people matter too.” 

Mid-term election

Carey will face Democratic candidate Don Leonard in the November election.

Leonard defeated former Ohio state rep. Adam Miller in the Democratic primary with nearly 53% of the votes. Miller lost to Carey in the 2024 election. 

Leonard, who previously taught regional and city planning at Ohio State University, was arrested during a March “No Kings” protest and was charged with obstructing official business.

“I’m a Medicaid kid,” Leonard said in an email.

“Those programs gave me a shot at the American Dream. Why would he take that same opportunity away from kids today?”

Carey first won his congressional seat in a 2021 special election and won the 2022 and 2024 elections. 

The Cook Political Report rates Ohio’s 15th Congressional District as “Likely Republican.” 

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.

BLUE ASH, OHIO — The first Haitian immigrant reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office at 7:42 a.m. on Sunday. From the corner, the Catholic sisters watched, their positions on immigration stamped on banners and signs.

Sister Alice Gerdeman’s sign noted that her order, the Sisters of Divine Providence, supports “challenging systems that exclude.”  Sister Sandy Howe’s sign read, “Love Your Neighbor, no exceptions.” Sister Patricia Wittberg’s took a more direct approach: “It’s so bad even the NUNS are mad!”

“Where has our conscience gone as a society?” Sister Carren Herring asked as the Haitian man walked toward the field office, where he would reemerge from hours later with a GPS tracker clamped around an ankle.

There would be a dozen or so more like him that day, mostly Springfield-area Haitian residents summoned to report to ICE after the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for the country. The program has allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to live and work legally in the United States due to violence and political instability back home.

The man paused before entering the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations office. At the door, Springfield pastors were offering communion and prayer. He waved to the crowd of nearly 700 lining the street in support.

“ICE does not speak for the people! No neighbor of ours is illegal!” they chanted in early-morning humidity that portended an oppressively hot August day.

The group of sisters positioned on the corner in front of the office were from different orders: Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of the Precious Blood, Sisters of Charity and Sisters of Divine Providence. They are united by their faith and shared ministry, the Ohio Sisters Justice Network, whose banner described the network’s use of “gospel justice” to protect democracy, end human trafficking and support immigrants.

That included advocating that the Trump administration extend TPS for Haitians. Now, it means showing up to support them as immigration enforcement tightens its grip.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Sister, they need to come here legally.’ Well, they came here legally,” said Sister Sally Duffy, a Sister of Charity and active participant in the network. She held a handwritten orange sign that read: “Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters have God given DIGNITY.”

“We are changing the rules,” she continued. “If it was a Bengals football game, and it was the last second on the clock, and the field goal kicker was going to make a 30-yard field goal, and all of a sudden, no, we moved him back, so now it became a 70-yard field goal, there’d be an uproar, an outrage over changing the rules.”

Late last month, ICE started sending letters to Haitians in Springfield, informing them that the Trump administration would begin to enforce the end of TPS for Haiti, a plan greenlit by the Supreme Court. Haitian immigrants have been reporting to the ICE office in this Cincinnati suburb since.

In Springfield, a city of 60,000 about an hour’s drive north of the ICE office, roughly one in four residents are Haitian — and many of them were on TPS. For months, faith-based and secular groups there have marshalled thousands of volunteers to prepare for a potential mass deportation event they fear could result in a humanitarian crisis. Many have wondered what will happen when families are separated: Who will care for the U.S.-born, citizen children who may be left behind?

Now, these volunteers have expanded their efforts to Blue Ash, which has one of the closest ICE offices.

President Donald Trump pledged during his 2024 campaign to undertake the “largest deportation of criminals in the history of America.” He and Vice President JD Vance, who was then a U.S. senator representing Ohio, specifically targeted Haitians living in Springfield, spreading the lie that the legal immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets. White nationalist groups descended on the city; bomb threats closed area public schools.

The Springfield community watched with trepidation as Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge” wrought havoc on much-larger Minneapolis earlier this year, leading to the deaths of two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. Organizations working with Haitians in Springfield started stockpiling supplies and forming ICE patrols to prepare for a similar enforcement surge as in Minneapolis — but the surge never arrived.

Gregory Bovino, the commander-at-large of Trump’s Customs and Border Protection, was removed from his position in January after the deaths. Two months later, Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Federal immigration agents dialed down their street presence in Minneapolis amid intense public backlash against the administration’s tactics, prompting a shift in enforcement strategy.

The sisters paid attention.

“They don’t want another Minneapolis … but they’d love for all the Haitians to be deported in secret,” Sister Wittberg said. “I don’t know that we can do anything but witness that this is not a Christian thing to do.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson reiterated in an email that TPS was supposed to be temporary, writing: “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations.”

Catholic sisters are playing a key role among clergy and other religious leaders who have been organizing demonstrations and vigils at ICE field offices and processing centers in places like Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Religious leaders present in Blue Ash on Sunday also included women serving as a Jewish rabbi, a Baptist minister and a Muslim chaplain.

When Cincinnati-based Ignite Peace, a group founded by Catholic sisters that has since become an interfaith organization, planned the “ICE: We See You” response for Sunday, they encouraged participants to wear “religious garments.” After all, the action would happen on a day and time when many would otherwise be attending religious services.

Sisters Anita Marie and Maria Francine, biological twins with the Sisters of Notre Dame, stood at the door to the ICE office wearing their traditional habits. Pastor Carl Ruby of Springfield’s Central Christian Church and Viles Dorsainvil, a Moravian pastor and founder of Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, offered Haitian immigrants the sacrament before their appointments.

The sisters both said they would typically be praying quietly in their rooms early on a Sunday, ahead of attending Mass.

“And this,” Sister Anita Marie said, “is a type of prayer.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Brooke Rollins, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on Tuesday filed a rule to rescind “in its entirety” the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits road construction, logging and mining on about 30% of lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, mostly in forested areas of the West. Rollins had last year filed a notice of intent that the agency was considering “rolling back” some protections under the rule.

A draft environmental impact statement will be posted Wednesday, and the public will have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time/8:59 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 21 to comment before changes are finalized.

Comment on the Roadless Rule termination and environmental impact statement here.

The Roadless Rule prohibitions are intended to protect wildlife, watersheds and old-growth forests from human development and human-caused wildfires. But in her announcement, Rollins said she was rescinding the rules on nearly 45 million acres under the banner of wildfire prevention, saying the protections instead have led to “overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease” turning “healthy landscapes into tinderboxes.”

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” she said.

Rollins’ assertions are not borne out by research, including from Oregon State University Professor Chris Dunn, a forest ecologist and wildfire expert. Dunn and his colleagues found that most wildfires in Western national forests between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, showing an increased likelihood of wildfires where roads exist because the No. 1 cause of wildfires is people.

The U.S. Forest Service’s own research also shows the majority of human-caused ignitions occur on roadsides, and 20 years of monitoring data does not support assertions that repealing road prohibitions will improve forest health, researchers found.

No public meetings

Rollins first proposed rolling back the rule in August 2025, saying at the time the move would support President Donald Trump’s executive orders meant to increase logging and energy development on federal lands.

That notice of intent set off a 21-day public comment period that brought in more than 600,000 comments, most of which expressed opposition to any changes that would erode the Roadless Rules prohibitions on development. Federal officials have not held a single public meeting since then.

In the two years leading up to final passage of the 2001 rule, Forest Service officials held 600 public meetings across Western states and received more than 1.6 million public comments.

Roughly 96% of the Forest Service’s inventoried roadless areas are located in 12 western states, including 2 million acres in Oregon within places like Iron Mountain in the Willamette National Forest, Joseph Canyon in Wallowa County, Tumalo Mountain in central Oregon and Lookout Mountain in the Ochoco National Forest.

Last year, U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 6th Congressional District based in the Willamette Valley, introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act to enshrine the rule in federal law, but it does not yet have enough support to pass. In the House, 88 of her Democratic colleagues have signed on as co-sponsors, including Oregon Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, Janelle Bynum and Maxine Dexter, as have 25 U.S. senators. The state’s two other representatives, Democrat Val Hoyle and Republican Cliff Bentz, have not signed on as sponsors.

No state would be more affected by the rule termination than Alaska, which has almost a third of the 45 million acres affected by the pending change.

Alaska is home to the Tongass National Forest, a West Virginia-sized stretch of islands and waterways in the Southeast Alaska panhandle that make up the largest surviving temperate rainforest in the world.

Idaho and Colorado would not be impacted by the rule changes because the two states negotiated their own agreements with the federal government more than a decade ago to permit projects that would “reduce hazardous fuels” near wildfire prone communities and to allow some local and state decisions about development on the federal acres.

Different takes on the past 25 years

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who previously worked for one of the country’s largest lumber producers in Idaho, said in a statement last year that the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers for years and served as a barrier to commercial logging.

“More than 40% of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the West, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5% of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014,” he said.

Rollins’ announcement included praise from the Republican governors of Montana, Utah and Wyoming, who said rescinding the federal protections would give their states flexibility to manage land locally. Democratic governors and other elected officials in states including Oregon, Washington and New Mexico have criticized the administration’s efforts and blame a century of largely unrestricted logging on federal lands, climate change and recent losses to Forest Service staff for worsening fires and declining forest conditions in the West.

Statements following Rollins’ announcement made clear conservation and logging groups have seen the last 25 years of the Roadless Rule quite differently.

Abigail Dillen, president of the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, said in a statement that the group will likely sue to stop the rule changes from moving forward.

“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has kept our wildest forests intact. The benefits have been incalculable for people, for water, for wildlife, and for the climate,” she said. “Earthjustice has successfully defended the Roadless Rule for a quarter century, and we are not going to stop now.”

Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing the timber industry, said in a statement that the Roadless Rule is among “failed policies” meant to protect forests.

“The Forest Service is right to take a hard look at a policy that was written for forest conditions that looked very different 25 years ago,” he said. “Our national forests are experiencing severe wildfire, drought, insects and disease on a scale that few anticipated when the Roadless Rule was adopted.”

This story was originally produced by Oregon Capital Chronicle, 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.

One part of that family story creates a problem he has never seriously resolved. Ramaswamy’s father never became a U.S. citizen. He never took the naturalization civics test. Ramaswamy’s mother did not become a citizen until after Vivek was born. Yet while campaigning for president, Ramaswamy explicitly told voters that young Americans should have to pass the same test that an immigrant “like my parents” had to pass before becoming a citizen.

When NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns later asked Ramaswamy whether his father had actually taken that test, the answer was no. Asked why his father had chosen not to become an American citizen, Ramaswamy gave a three-word explanation: “for familial reasons.”

That answer has followed him because it cuts directly into a standard Ramaswamy created himself. He did not merely advocate legal immigration. He used the naturalization test as evidence of civic readiness, tied his voting-age proposal to what he described as an “absence of national pride,” and repeatedly inserted his own parents into the argument. Then it emerged that only one of those parents had actually gone through the process he was holding up as a model.

The obvious question is what “familial reasons” actually means. There is an equally obvious place to start looking for the answer: India does not permit its citizens to simultaneously hold Indian citizenship and citizenship of another country.

The obvious issue behind “familial reasons”

Ramaswamy’s explanation is vague, but the legal backdrop is not. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs states that Indian law does not allow a person to hold Indian citizenship and foreign citizenship simultaneously. An Indian citizen who naturalizes as an American cannot simply remain an Indian citizen as well.

India created Overseas Citizenship of India status to preserve significant connections for former Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, but OCI is not dual citizenship. OCI cardholders receive benefits including a lifelong multiple-entry visa and certain economic and educational privileges, but they do not have Indian voting rights and cannot hold constitutional offices.

Ramaswamy has said his father chose to retain Indian citizenship. Put those facts together and the most obvious meaning of “familial reasons” is not difficult to understand: becoming an American citizen would have meant surrendering his Indian citizenship and replacing it with a more limited legal relationship to India.

That explanation does not make Ramaswamy’s political problem disappear. It makes the problem sharper.

If family connections, identity, legal ties to another country and the consequences of giving up another citizenship can reasonably outweigh naturalization for his father, then Ramaswamy’s own family demonstrates that the decision to become a U.S. citizen is not a clean measure of civic knowledge, patriotism or commitment to American life. Yet those are precisely the concepts Ramaswamy attached to the naturalization test when he proposed using it as a gatekeeper for young Americans’ voting rights.

The father does not undermine the test because he failed it. He never took it. He chose not to enter the process at all because citizenship carried consequences beyond memorizing the branches of government or identifying a constitutional right.

That distinction goes to the heart of Ramaswamy’s argument.

Ramaswamy said “like my parents.” Only his mother had taken the test.

The most damaging part of the record is not simply that Ramaswamy’s father remained an Indian citizen. It is how Ramaswamy described his own family while selling the citizenship test as public policy.

At the Iowa State Fair in 2023, Ramaswamy told Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds that there was no reason every high school graduate should not have to pass “the same civics test that an immigrant, like my parents, had to pass in order to become a citizen of this country.”

But his parents had not both passed it.

His father had never taken it.

When Burns confronted him with that fact, Ramaswamy acknowledged it immediately. His mother had taken the test and naturalized after he was born, he said. His father had made a different choice.

That exchange matters because Ramaswamy had already converted his family’s experience into political evidence. “Like my parents” was not an incidental biographical aside. It was part of the justification for asking American citizens to meet a new civic threshold before voting.

Ramaswamy’s formal presidential proposal would have raised the voting age to 25 while allowing adults ages 18 through 24 to vote earlier if they completed at least six months of military or first-responder service or passed the civics test used in naturalization. Implementing it would have required a constitutional amendment because the 26th Amendment guarantees the vote to citizens 18 and older.

Ramaswamy did not present the test merely as an administrative requirement. He argued that his proposal would restore civic duty and national pride. That is what turns the discrepancy in his family story from trivia into a consistency problem.

His father was apparently capable of living for decades in the United States, building a career and raising American children while deciding that maintaining Indian citizenship mattered more than naturalizing. Ramaswamy accepts that choice as rooted in family considerations. At the same time, he wanted an American-born 18-year-old to use that same naturalization exam to prove sufficient civic readiness to vote.

Those two positions can coexist only if the test means something very different depending on who is being judged.

Millions of permanent residents make the same basic choice

The broader data makes that distinction even more important. Ramaswamy’s father is not an anomaly simply because he remained a permanent resident rather than becoming a citizen.

According to the federal Office of Homeland Security Statistics, the United States had an estimated 13 million lawful permanent residents as of Jan. 1, 2025, including about 8.5 million who were potentially eligible to naturalize. In other words, millions of people who had reached the point where citizenship could potentially be available to them had not become citizens.

Naturalization is also common. Federal statistics show that 818,570 people naturalized in fiscal year 2024, including approximately 49,700 people born in India. Census data has likewise found comparatively high naturalization rates among Asian-born immigrants.

Those numbers matter because they expose the weakness in treating the naturalization process as a proxy for civic virtue. Millions pursue citizenship. Millions of people who may be eligible do not. The dividing line can involve family, nationality law, personal circumstances, finances, language, age, future plans or the value someone places on retaining another citizenship.

Ramaswamy’s own explanation for his father concedes exactly that complexity: “familial reasons.”

He nevertheless selected the naturalization test as a mechanism for separating young American citizens who had sufficiently demonstrated civic responsibility from those who had not.

That is the consistency question his father puts squarely in front of him.

The consistency test is separate from whether Ramaswamy’s policies are good policy

There are two different debates here, and collapsing them would make the analysis weaker.

One is whether Ramaswamy’s voting-age proposal was defensible policy. Supporters could argue that citizenship should come with greater civic knowledge and that military service, first-responder work or passing a basic government test demonstrates investment in the country. Opponents could argue that the proposal would strip an existing constitutional right from adult citizens and condition voting on government-approved demonstrations of civic worth.

That policy argument does not have to be settled to evaluate Ramaswamy’s consistency.

The narrower test is whether Ramaswamy applies the meaning he assigned to naturalization consistently. He chose the citizenship test because he said America needed more civic duty and national pride. He invoked immigrants “like my parents” as the people who had already met that standard. Then he acknowledged that his father had not met it because his father had made a deliberate choice not to naturalize.

Ramaswamy could argue that his father does not vote in U.S. elections and therefore has no need to meet a voting qualification. That answers the legal mechanics. It does not answer the rationale Ramaswamy used to defend the qualification.

If passing the naturalization test demonstrates the civic knowledge and national commitment necessary for an 18-year-old American citizen to vote, what does deliberately declining naturalization say about an adult immigrant who has lived in the country for decades?

Ramaswamy’s treatment of his father supplies his own answer: apparently, very little. His father’s decision can be explained by family circumstances and competing national ties without being treated as evidence of deficient civic character.

Once that is accepted, the naturalization test stops functioning as the straightforward measure of civic commitment Ramaswamy presented to voters.

His mother complicates the story in a different way

Ramaswamy’s mother creates a second tension, but it is important to define it accurately.

Vivek Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati in 1985. Neither parent was a U.S. citizen at the time. His mother later naturalized; his father did not. During the 2026 governor’s race, his campaign told The Toledo Blade that both parents were lawful permanent residents — green-card holders — when he was born.

That status matters. Ramaswamy has advocated denying birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who entered the country illegally. His parents were not in that category. A proposal limited to children of undocumented parents therefore would not describe the circumstances of Ramaswamy’s own birth.

That is the actual distinction, and it should not be blurred.

But once the distinction is made, another fact remains: Ramaswamy himself became an American citizen before either parent had naturalized. His family therefore illustrates that citizenship at birth and parental naturalization are separate questions. His mother could wait until after her son’s birth to become an American; his father could decline U.S. citizenship altogether; their Cincinnati-born son was still an American from birth.

That makes Ramaswamy’s own biography relevant to his broader effort to redefine citizenship, even though his parents’ green-card status places him outside the specific group he has targeted.

TiffinOhio.net examined that distinction in July when U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno introduced legislation restricting birthright citizenship. Moreno’s bill expressly preserved citizenship for children with a U.S.-citizen or lawful-permanent-resident parent — a line that would preserve citizenship under the circumstances Ramaswamy’s campaign says existed when he was born.

The relevant contradiction is therefore not the simplistic claim that Ramaswamy is trying to abolish the exact rule that made him a citizen. His own parents’ legal status makes that inaccurate.

The stronger contradiction is what his family history says about the political meaning he assigns to citizenship. Neither parent had naturalized when he became an American. One parent never would. Yet Ramaswamy later made naturalization, civic testing and parental immigration status central tools for deciding which rights other people should receive and when they should receive them.

Ramaswamy cannot use half of his parents’ story

The father question would carry far less political significance if Ramaswamy had not repeatedly introduced his parents into his own arguments.

He did. He used them to explain legal immigration. He used them while advocating the civics test. He described the test as something an immigrant “like my parents” had to pass. His family’s path became evidence supporting his view that newcomers should follow a legal, merit-based process and that Americans should take citizenship more seriously.

That makes the missing half of the story unavoidable.

His mother followed the naturalization path Ramaswamy celebrates, but only after he was born. His father did not follow it at all. And the most obvious explanation for the father’s choice points directly to a complexity Ramaswamy’s rhetoric tends to erase: citizenship can involve competing family obligations and competing national attachments that have nothing to do with whether someone knows the answers on a civics exam.

Ramaswamy knows that because it is his explanation for his father.

That is why “for familial reasons” is simultaneously understandable and politically devastating. The phrase gives his father a reason for declining citizenship that Ramaswamy plainly considers legitimate. But once Ramaswamy accepts that naturalization can turn on considerations unrelated to civic commitment, his decision to turn the naturalization test into a measure of civic fitness for American voters becomes much harder to defend on the terms he originally used.

Ramaswamy can argue for a higher voting age. He can argue for a citizenship test. He can argue for restricting birthright citizenship based on a parent’s immigration status. Each of those policies has its own legal and political debate.

What he cannot do coherently is keep presenting his parents as the clean proof of his theory while refusing to grapple with the part of their story that breaks the theory open.

Three words still leave the central question unanswered

The most revealing aspect of the NBC exchange is not simply that Ramaswamy’s father is an Indian citizen. It is how quickly Ramaswamy moved from a sweeping political claim about immigrants “like my parents” to a narrow personal explanation once the factual premise was tested.

His father had not taken the test.

“That’s a choice that he has made for familial reasons,” Ramaswamy said.

His mother had taken it, he added, after Vivek was born.

That clarification fixed the factual record. It did not fix the argument.

Ramaswamy had already told voters that the naturalization test could serve as a measure of civic readiness for American citizens under 25. His own father demonstrated why the decision to naturalize can have little to do with civic knowledge at all. His explanation for that decision points to family ties and a citizenship system in India that forced a real choice between nationalities. Federal data shows millions of other permanent residents who are potentially eligible to naturalize have likewise not done so.

The question is therefore not why V.G. Ramaswamy chose India’s citizenship over U.S. naturalization. The legal and family context makes that choice easier to understand.

The question is why Vivek Ramaswamy took a process that his own father declined for reasons unrelated to civic knowledge, turned its exam into a test of “national pride” for American-born voters, and then invoked “my parents” as proof that the standard made sense.

He has had nearly three years since the NBC interview to square those positions.

His answer is still three words.

“For familial reasons.”

Those words may explain his father. They do not explain Vivek Ramaswamy.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Many food items are produced domestically, but those that are not entirely made in the United States, were or are subject to Trump’s tariffs.

“A lot of produce is subject to tariffs — you know, essentially everything sort of a little bit more exotic that we don’t produce ourselves,” Tibor Besedes, an economics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the American Independent.

Coffee and bananas are perhaps the best example. Neither can be grown anywhere in the U.S. That didn’t stop the White House from slapping tariffs on those products with the initial “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. Those tariffs targeted various countries and ranged from 10% to as high as 145% for some Chinese products.

The Trump administration ultimately exempted those products in November 2025, but that hasn’t eliminated price increases that took place after tariffs were implemented. Coffee was 16% more expensive in July 2026, the latest month for which data is available, than it was in April 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bananas were 3% more expensive in that same timeframe, per BLS data.

Besedes said coffee in particular has experienced supply shocks due to droughts and other weather-related issues; tariffs didn’t help with the price, and the price spikes have remained sticky.

“Those supply shocks haven’t abated, and so the price of coffee, even once the tariffs removed, probably went down a little bit. It wasn’t really a noticeable impact,” Besedes said.

Olive oil is another example. While some domestic production exists in California, it only meets about 4% of demand, so more than 95% of olive oil sold in the United States is imported, according to Forbes. European Union countries like Spain and Italy that are producers of olive oil have been repeatedly hit with tariffs.

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s original “Liberation Day” tariffs in February. Shortly after that ruling, he announced a new tariff of 10% on most countries other than Canada and Mexico under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Trump’s powers under that law only allowed him to put those new tariffs into place for up to 150 days, and they expired at the end of July.

Just ahead of the expiration of the Section 122 tariffs, the administration announced another round of tariffs of 10%-12.5% on products from 59 countries and the European Union under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which covers countries that engage in forced labor. A coalition of 25 U.S. states is now suing the Trump administration over these new tariffs, demanding they be canceled and refunded. The new tariffs, according to the lawsuit, affect more than 99% of imports to the U.S.

While the federal government does not track pricing for olive oil or other vegetable oils specifically, imported olive oil from the European Union would have been subject to tariffs every step of the way, despite the lack of large-scale U.S. production.

Besedes said these sorts of tariffs, on products that don’t even have American production to support, have little benefit.

“I think the nice way of putting it is it’s misguided,” he said. “The classic rationale for putting a tariff on is you want to protect domestic industry, but if you’re not making that good yourself, there’s not anything to protect, right? And so in that case, it becomes just a classic sales tax that just increases the price to the consumer without really generating anything.”

“If one of the rationales that was stated was to bring back manufacturing and increase domestic employment, well, you can’t do that with tariffs on goods we never produced to begin with,” he said.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The average cost of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in the United States was more than $4.07 per gallon, as of Aug. 14, according to the AAA Fuel Prices tracker. That is nearly a dollar higher than the average price of $3.13 on Jan. 20, 2025, when Trump began his second term.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to curb inflation and lower prices for American consumers. In a September 2024 speech, he promised to cut energy prices in half within a year and to get gasoline prices down to under $2 a gallon.  

On Feb. 28, he launched U.S. military attacks on Iran. In response, Iran began blocking oil tankers and other ships from traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, a key passageway used to export goods from the Middle East. The U.S. saw its supplies reduced and its fuel prices increase. Despite Trump’s repeated false claims that the straight is open, Iran attacks commercial ships trying to move through the strait.

As the average American household has paid $477 more for gasoline since the start of the Iran war, according to an analysis by Congress’ Joint Economic Committee minority staff, Trump has said on multiple occasions that a huge price drop was imminent.

On June 14, Trump posted on his Truth Social site: “the Hormuz Strait will be opening shortly. Gas prices will plummet, and Affordability will be far better than the numbers from the Record Inflation Driven Biden Administration years.” 

“GAS PRICES COMING DOWN, FAST!” he posted on June 29.

“Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas,” he said on July 12. “Thank you! President DJT.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution on July 23, by a vote of 214-208,  directing Trump “to remove the United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.” Four Republicans joined with all 210 Democrats present in favor. Similar efforts have been defeated in the GOP-led U.S. Senate.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“The system is rigged against workers in this country and it has been for years,” Brown said back in August of last year, as he launched his Senate campaign. 

“I spent my career taking on that rigged system and I have seen in the last few months that the system is more rigged against workers than it has been.” Brown, 73, who was born and raised in Mansfield, lost his seat to Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno in the 2024 election. He’s facing off against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, whom Gov. Mike DeWine appointed last year to fill the seat J.D. Vance vacated when he became vice president. If elected by Ohioans in the Nov. 3 special election, Brown would serve the last two years of Vance’s term.

He has a long list of bona fides when it comes to advocating for workers’ health and well-being. In 2015, Brown introduced the Stabilize Medicaid and CHIP Coverage Act of 2015, which would have guaranteed 12 months of continuous Medicaid and CHIP coverage for eligible individuals, so families wouldn’t lose insurance over short-term income changes or paperwork snags. He’s reintroduced versions of the bill nearly every Congress since, but the legislation still hasn’t passed.

He backed the GAIN Act (Grow American Incomes Now) in 2017, which would have roughly doubled the earned income tax credit for working families and increased it nearly sixfold for childless workers. “Americans are working longer hours, but too many aren’t seeing that hard work reflected in their pay. And worse — our tax system can actually tax workers into poverty,” Brown said in a statement at the time. “Updating the EITC will make sure all workers can keep more of the money they earned for their work.” The legislation failed to advance, however, in the Republican-controlled Congress.

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown voted for the 2021 American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion relief package that sent out stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and funded vaccines, schools, and state governments.

In 2023, he co-sponsored the Comprehensive Paid Leave for Federal Employees Act, which would have given federal workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. 

And in 2024, Brown co-sponsored Sen. Bob Casey’s Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit Enhancement Act of 2024. Casey, who also lost reelection in 2024, and other Democrats have reintroduced that legislation repeatedly over the years, which would make the existing child care tax credit fully refundable and worth up to $4,000 per child for middle- and lower-income families trying to keep up with child care costs.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Now it’s a nightmare. 

Over the past year, Kidd’s view of the green pastures that surrounded her Middleton Township home has been replaced with construction, dust and fumes as workers build a 715,000-square-foot data center campus for Meta, the Silicon Valley-based company that owns social media giants Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

“We moved to the country to give our kids that quiet life, and we love our sunrises from our home. We can see the sunrise; we can see the sunset. We love seeing the stars,” Kidd said. “And now this data center has taken all of that from us.

“We can no longer see the stars because the security lights over there are so bright,” Kidd continued.

As companies rush to power artificial intelligence, there has been a surge in the number of data centers in the United States — especially in rural communities in the Midwest and South, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Ohio had 166 operating and 57 planned data centers at the time that analysis came out in April 2026, making the state home to the fourth-highest number of operating data centers in the country. Data Center Map, a website that tracks data centers in the United States, reports there are 240 data centers in Ohio.

While the companies that build data centers often tout them as job creators and draws for other economic investment, public polling in much of Ohio and the country at large show that they are unpopular. About 70% of Ohioans favor a temporary ban on the construction of new data centers until there is more information about their effects, while 60% believe the centers are bad for home energy costs and 57% think they’re bad for the environment, according to an April survey from Bowling Green State University. 

Opponents cite the centers’ vast consumption of water and electricity, which can drive up energy bills; the noise and light pollution they emit; fears of artificial intelligence taking people’s jobs; and the centers’ impact on the environment and public health. Researchers have found that data centers increase the surrounding air and ground temperatures and could contribute to higher rates of asthma.

“I could literally talk hours about data centers and how they’re set up and how they’re completely horrible for people’s health,” said Joe Fuller, a thermal engineer who lives close to Sunbury, where Amazon is trying to build a data center. Fuller has worked at data center construction sites in Ohio and other states.

Fuller said he started having health issues within a matter of months of beginning work at data centers. Now, he has asthma and colds at least once every other week. He regularly suffers from sinus headaches and said, “Coughing up stuff from my lungs is an ongoing daily occurrence.”

Residents also criticize state tax breaks given to data center companies. 

From 2017 to 2024, Ohio provided about $2.5 billion in tax incentives for data center development, according to a report prepared for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Foundation. 

“There’s deals being done that don’t necessarily benefit the people of the state, and they’re benefitting the large companies,” said Linda Moodie, a county leader for Conserve Ohio, an all-volunteer group working to collect petition signatures with the goal of banning large-scale data centers. “And I think we’re definitely hitting a point in the political climate where people are very tired of being ignored and tired of the large corporations taking [precedence] over the benefit of the citizens themselves.”

Ohio politicians have taken varying stances on data centers. As Ohio’s lieutenant governor from 2019 through 2025, current Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted championed bringing projects to Ohio and supported tax breaks for companies building data centers. Husted backed Google’s plan to build a $600 million data center in New Albany, which is now up and running.

Google received a 15-year property tax abatement and a 15-year sales tax exemption that were expected to total $43.5 million, according to a 2019 report from Ideastream Public Media.

In July of this year Husted introduced legislation in the Senate that would, according to a press release, “require states to consider establishing standards for states and Public Utility Commissions when connecting large electricity users—such as data centers—to the grid.”

Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate nominee running to unseat Husted, said in a campaign ad that he would ensure data centers cover the full cost of their electricity use. Brown has also advocated for local residents having more of a say over data center development.

Previously, Brown, like Husted, praised tech companies for investing in Ohio. In an archived 2015 press release, Brown, then a U.S. senator, said he welcomed Amazon’s announcement that it would open a data center in New Albany.

Asked for comment about concerns over the Middletown Township data center, a Meta spokesperson detailed in an email the financial investment the company is making in the area, noting the center will create tax revenue for the local area and support more than 1,000 temporary jobs during the construction phase and at least 100 jobs when the site is operational. 

Meta said it has provided funding for 20 community projects totaling more than $460,000 in the Bowling Green area and committed to $28 million in road and water infrastructure projects.

“We are committed to being good neighbors, and that includes listening to concerns and, when necessary, taking action,” Rachel Holland, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement prepared for the Ohio Independent. “We communicate regularly with residents and officials, and take proactive steps alongside our general contractors to minimize impacts from our data center projects — including answering questions, sharing updates, and ensuring our construction and operations meet community expectations and applicable laws, regulations, and permit requirements.”

Kidd said she wants her life to return to what she once knew: watching the sun rise from her dream home.

Instead, she and her family are contemplating moving.

“I love the petitions, and I love how we’re all fighting against it, including myself,” Kidd said. “But I really feel like it’s bigger. It’s bigger than all of us, and it’s just this big, powerful, greedy machine that just cannot be stopped. And that’s what’s heart-wrenching. We can put up our fists, and we can rally, and we can say no, and they’re just going to come in and say, ‘Too bad; we’re here.’”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ramaswamy, a billionaire biotechnology entrepreneur and former 2024 Republican presidential candidate, will face Democratic former Ohio Department of Health director Amy Acton in the November election. His campaign slogan is “lower costs, bigger paychecks.”

During his unsuccessful presidential campaign, Ramaswamy said he favored privatizing Social Security, replacing it with a system that would allow the government or individuals to invest retirement funds in stocks and bonds.  He said he would keep Social Security and Medicare as-is for current beneficiaries, but consider major changes for those currently contributing to the programs but not yet receiving benefits. 

One such reform he brought up during a New Hampshire town hall event in August 2023 was investing Social Security funds. “If we had just allowed that money to be invested by Social Security in the same way that your financial advisor would recommend that you invest your money, in a diversified portfolio, we would be swimming in surplus today,” he said.

Ramaswamy made similar comments in February 2024 interview with AARP, telling the nonprofit group, “I think we have to be honest about learning from a prior mistake: 20 years ago we should have allowed people to actually invest their Social Security money or the government to invest Social Security money in the same way that we would have allowed and private citizen to do in the stock market and in bonds and otherwise.” 

Experts say investing Social Security money in the stock market could leave future beneficiaries with much less money in retirement if the investments go downhill or the stock market crashes. Instead of a fixed monthly payment, benefits would depend on whether the investments gain or lose value.

In 2023 interviews with both CNN and NewsNation, Ramaswamy said that Social Security and Medicare should be reformed after the country meets a set economic growth goal.

“I am up for [reform of Medicare and Social Security], after we have delivered economic growth … After that, people have more money in their pockets, then we can have the conversation about how, for the next generation, not touching the benefits of seniors now, but for the next generation how we rationalize, by first taking aim at the bureaucracy,” he said in the August 2023 NewsNation appearance.

In an October 2024 interview on the “Ezra Klein Show,” Ramaswamy was asked whether Medicare and Medicaid were mistakes. “I believe they were, with the benefit of retrospect, particularly Medicaid, particularly the welfare state, without work attachments required attached to it,” he replied. “What I think of as the welfare state, my principal issue with it is that it actually, I think the evidence would show, in my opinion, that it has harmed the very people that it was created to actually help.”

More than 2 million Ohioans receive Social Security benefits, about 2.5 million get health insurance through Medicare, and another 3 million are covered by Ohio Medicaid. An estimated 65,000 of those Medicaid subscribers are veterans and 44% of Ohio’s kids are covered by the program.

Ramaswamy’s current campaign website says little about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, aside from a May press release promising to “crush Medicaid waste, fraud and abuse.” A campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

An invitation obtained by TiffinOhio.net advertises LaRose as the featured guest at the Erie County Republican Women’s Club’s “America’s 250th Birthday Bash” Wednesday evening at the Sandusky Yacht Club.

The invitation says the event is being held “in support of our Erie County candidates.” Admission is $50 per person, with sponsorship packages ranging from $250 to $1,000.

One of Erie County’s most prominent Republican candidates is Caleb Stidham — the Erie County treasurer, chairman of the Erie County Republican Party and the man a six-member GOP committee selected Aug. 10 to replace outgoing state Rep. D.J. Swearingen as the Republican candidate for Ohio House District 89.

Whether Stidham actually makes the November ballot is now up to LaRose.

The Erie County Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 Friday over whether to certify Stidham, after Democratic members Edward J. Leonard and MaryAnn Groot argued that the closed-door meeting that selected him violated Ohio’s Open Meetings Act and that Stidham should not have been permitted to deliberate and vote on his own nomination.

Republican board members John C. Adams and Gary L. Smith voted to certify him.

Under Ohio Revised Code 3501.11(X), unresolved ties at county boards of elections are submitted to the secretary of state, who “shall summarily decide the question.” The secretary’s decision is final.

That places LaRose in the position of appearing Wednesday night as the featured guest at a Republican political fundraiser in Stidham’s home county while his office is actively considering whether Stidham will appear on the ballot.

LaRose’s office asked for the memos Wednesday

Leonard told TiffinOhio.net that LaRose’s general counsel contacted Erie County Board of Elections Director Alexander W. Jones earlier this week and asked the board members to submit their written position statements by the end of Wednesday.

The board had initially agreed after Friday’s deadlock to have the arguments submitted by 9 a.m. Aug. 21.

The Republican members submitted a two-page letter dated Aug. 18 asking LaRose to certify Stidham.

Leonard and Groot responded Wednesday with an 11-page memorandum asking LaRose to do the opposite.

The result is that the competing arguments in one of the most contentious Republican nomination fights in Ohio are arriving at LaRose’s office the same day he is scheduled to appear at a political fundraiser in the county at the center of the dispute.

LaRose is himself the Republican nominee for Ohio auditor this November. He is seeking another statewide office after two terms as secretary of state.

Fundraiser explicitly supports Erie County candidates

The fundraiser invitation does not identify individual candidates who will receive proceeds or explain how the money raised will be distributed.

But its stated political purpose is explicit: the event is being held “in support of our Erie County candidates.”

Stidham is both chairman of the county Republican organization and the party committee’s selected House District 89 candidate. The Erie County Republican Party’s own website currently lists him as its chairman and as chairman of its executive committee.

The organizational ties extend to the fundraiser’s host. Public promotion for the event identifies Melissa Pelletier as president of the Erie County Republican Women’s Club. The county Republican Party lists Pelletier as its secretary.

The Women’s Club and the Erie County Republican Party are separate Republican organizations, but the fundraiser is expressly promoting Erie County candidates and is led by a county party officer.

Stidham therefore stands to benefit politically from an event organized to support the county’s Republican candidates while the featured guest — LaRose — holds the final statutory authority over whether Stidham can become the certified Republican candidate for House District 89.

Republicans: Certify Stidham

Adams and Smith’s memo asks LaRose to reject the objections raised by Leonard and Groot and resolve the tie in favor of Stidham.

The Republican members argue that Ohio’s Open Meetings Act does not apply to a political party committee replacing a candidate under R.C. 3513.31.

Ohio courts have held that political party committees can become public bodies when state law authorizes them to fill an actual vacancy in public office. Adams and Smith argue that replacing a candidate on the ballot is fundamentally different because the committee is not appointing anyone to public office.

“Candidate replacement is fundamentally different,” they wrote.

Their memo also argues that the elections board is not the proper forum to adjudicate an alleged Open Meetings Act violation and says any such dispute should instead be brought in court.

Adams and Smith separately reject the argument that Stidham was prohibited from voting for himself.

“There is no legal foundation for the claim that a member of a district committee is conflicted from voting for him or herself,” they wrote.

The Republicans asked LaRose to reject what they called “dubious allegations of violations of laws that do not apply to this candidate-selection process” and certify Stidham.

Democrats: A secret vote to put a candidate on the ballot

Leonard and Groot’s filing presents the dispute very differently.

They tell LaRose that the question before him is whether to certify “a replacement nominee who voted for himself in a 4-2 vote at a secret, closed door meeting of the selection committee.”

The Democratic members argue that replacing a nominee already selected by voters in a primary is not merely an internal Republican Party matter.

State law dictated who sat on the six-member committee, who called it, how much notice members received, the vote required to select a replacement and the requirement that the result be certified in writing and under oath to election officials.

Leonard and Groot argue that those statutory powers transformed the committee into a public body for that limited purpose, just as Ohio courts have done when political committees exercise state-granted authority to fill vacancies in elected offices.

“Filling a vacancy on the ballot is not a ‘purely internal party affair,’” they wrote.

If the committee was acting as a public body, Leonard and Groot argue, the meeting should have been open and Stidham should have recused himself from deliberations and voting on his own candidacy.

Groot says she was turned away

Groot also submitted an affidavit describing what happened when she tried to attend the Aug. 10 meeting.

She said she arrived at the county administrative building that houses the elections board at the scheduled meeting time and told the two Republican elections board members present that she believed the district committee meeting was required to be open.

“I was told by the two Republican board members that the meeting was a closed meeting, not an open meeting,” Groot wrote.

She said she was directed to a nearby room to wait for the result.

There is no dispute in the competing filings that the meeting was closed. The legal disagreement is over whether Ohio law required it to be open.

Stidham voted in the meeting that selected him

Stidham was one of three Republicans seeking the nomination — and one of the six people given the power to decide who received it.

As TiffinOhio.net reported after the Aug. 10 selection meeting, Stidham left the room while the other candidates made their cases but returned for the committee’s deliberations and participated in the vote.

Stidham won 4-2.

Republicans have since openly fractured over the result. GOP consultant Jon Paul Morrow said Stidham should have abstained and warned the nomination could cost Republicans the district.

Former state Rep. Steve Kraus escalated that fight Tuesday, launching a write-in campaign against Stidham and urging Republicans to ask LaRose not to certify him.

Stidham has defended the process, arguing previously that he did not chair or lead the committee meeting because he was a candidate. Huron County Republican Chairman Sven Stahl presided instead.

Leonard and Groot say that does not resolve the conflict question. Their memo argues that if the committee was a public body, Stidham’s status as an ordinary voting member rather than chairman would not permit him to participate in a decision involving his own candidacy.

One decision, two roles

The legal question now belongs to LaRose.

Adams and Smith say the Republican committee was entitled to meet privately, Stidham was entitled to vote and the elections board had no authority to reject the nomination over the objections raised.

Leonard and Groot say the committee exercised a state-created public function, illegally closed its doors and allowed Stidham to participate in selecting himself.

Ohio law makes LaRose the final decision-maker on that dispute.

And Wednesday evening, while those arguments are being submitted to his office, LaRose is scheduled to take the stage at the Sandusky Yacht Club as the featured guest of a Republican fundraiser whose invitation says exactly who the night is intended to support:

“Our Erie County candidates.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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, according to court records, 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.