The jury is still out in the corruption trial of two former FirstEnergy executives. The utility company's former CEO Chuck Jones and former lobbyist Michael Dowling are accused of bribing a top utility regulator.
How many taxes can we propose getting rid of? Turns out, quite a few.
Joining proposals to ditch property taxes and income taxes, comes this one from an Ohio Republican: capital gains taxes.
Reverse an abortion? A new bill would require providers to tell patients about an experimental process to “give your baby a second chance at life.” Two previous attempts to pass similar legislation failed.
Drag shows aren’t entertaining, they’re obscene. That's according to a new House bill.
One of the few monuments in the country honoring women is dedicated at the Ohio Statehouse.
We're talking about all of it on this week's Reporter Roundtable.
Guests:
- Jo Ingles, senior reporter, Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau
- Jessie Balmert, state government and politics reporter, Columbus Dispatch
- Jeremy Pelzer, chief politics reporter, Cleveland.com
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich and the Weekly Reporter Roundtable, an hour where we catch up on the political news of last week and preview the week ahead.
I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Joining me on the roundtable, we have Joe Ingalls, the senior reporter for the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau. Welcome back, Joe.
Jo Ingles: Great to be with you.
Juravich: Jessie Balmert, state government and politics reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Welcome back, Jessie. Thanks. Happy Monday. All right. Now we got your microphone on. Say hi again. Hi. Hi.
All right, and I wanted to get your hi in there. And then Jeremy Pelzer, chief politics reporter from Cleveland.com. Welcome back Jeremy.
Jeremy Pelzer: Hi, great to be here.
Juravich: So the bribery trial for former First Energy executives Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling has been going on for weeks and weeks. And it was in the hands of the jury about seven days ago. And we still don't have a verdict.
I don't know if any of you have been following it that closely. It's been a long trial. I know that each news organization kind of just assigns one person to look at the trial, but does anyone know why it's taking so long? Why has the jury not come back with a verdict after so many days?
Ingles: They did come back with a, Jesse, if you got, they did come with a question. They were asking. Oh, I was.
Juravich: Oh, I was like, I thought you were about to say they did come back with a verdict. No, no, no. I guess not. They did.
Ingles: They asked the judge a question about what constituted bribery, kind of having this question around bribery and could they maybe decide the rest of the case without kind of deciding that.
Juravich: Which is the crux of a lot of the case, is whether the bribe happened, right? Yeah.
Jessie Balmert: I think it's interesting, the two people who are on trial here are former First Energy CEO Chuck Jones and a vice president who was like heavily involved in lobbying Michael Dowling, and really the attorneys for both of these individuals who are very well paid, in part by First Energy, their argument was that really Sam Rendazzo, the former POCO chairman was to blame for a lot of this that Rendazso was stealing from his clients, and that this was just money for the end of a consulting agreement.
Randazzo died a few years ago, and so cannot testify in his own defense in this situation. So I think that has been a compelling line of questioning for the defense attorneys.
Juravich: All right. And I think, Jesse, we're having a little bit of trouble with your mic. It's like it's really low, which is not your fault, but we're going to work on that. Jeremy, what are some of your thoughts related to the jurors submitting a question, them not really, you know, there's a lot of charges here. I mean, not that you can predict what's going to happen. What do you think is going to happened?
Pelzer: I think every day that goes by the press corps is more and more skeptical that this is going to result in a verdict and this will be a mistrial and then they'll have to maybe potentially start the entire trial all over again. But this is a very complicated bribery case. It deals with utilities law, which is famously pretty opaque to a lot people.
And, you know, my colleague actually asked a bunch of experts and... They like legal experts and said this is not unusual for a jury to be out for six, seven days or even two weeks to reach a verdict. So it could end up in a mistrial. It could end with a hung jury. It could ended up with us having to do this all over again, but we could also get a verdict still. It's not out of the realm of possibility.
Juravich: In a related item, the Department of Justice last week urged the Supreme Court to deny review of cases related to former House Speaker Larry Householder and former GOP Chairman Matt Borges, both serving time for their convictions.
Ingles: You know what it means. Actually, Matt is out. Oh, he is. Yes, you're right.
Juravich: Yes, you're right. You're right he is out. Yes, but does anyone know what that means if the Trump administration is You know if the trump administration would intervene here will a pardon be coming the Department of Justice urged the Supreme Court to deny review Does anyone? Yeah, I think you're working now Jesse. Let's try that. Okay. Yay. Can I say where it's now? Yes. Awesome
Balmert: Yeah, I think this is interesting, really, in contrast with another bribery case, which was the former Cincinnati City Councilman, P.G. Sinefield, who did receive a pardon from President Trump, and the Department of Justice urged them to dismiss the corruption case against him.
In contrast, the Department Of Justice has said that this case should stand against the householder. And gorgeous and so really like the DOJ had an option here to take a different route and they're saying that this isn't a great case to challenge, you know, the breadth of the bribery statute.
Pelzer: I don't, the DOJ made that argument in Sittenfeld's case, though, after he had been pardoned by Trump. So I think it was sort of a fait accompli of, well, Trump pardoned him, and it was actually unusual for Sittenfield even to keep appealing his case even after he'd been pardon'd because he wants his conviction just on principle to be overturned.
I think if, the Sittenfel case is really interesting because it's farther along, and we've been waiting for months now for the US Supreme Court to decide weather. They accept it or not, and if they do accept it and they rule for Sittenfeld, there's been a couple of judges now who have already said, if Sittenfeld wins, that will result, the dominoes effect will result in the householder and Borgess's convictions also being overturned because they rely on similar case law.
So, I mean, we'll see what happens, but it's, I don't think it's hard to read into it because you have one part of the DOJ. Who are not necessarily political appointees making this argument, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the thinking over at the White House where if someone gets in President Trump's ear about, hey, you should, you know, this is a miscarriage of justice to have Larry Householder sitting in prison, then you could have a pardon tomorrow for all we know.
Juravich: This whole idea of bribery and first energy really just, for the average person, leads to energy costs. And Jo, you had a story this morning that was on WOSU related to energy cost and the impact on consumers. It's not all related to bribery in first energy, but just everything is expensive and it's getting more expensive. What do lawmakers say should be the remedy here to energy bills?
Ingles: Depends on which lawmakers you ask. The Democrats in the Ohio House have proposed a couple of bills. One would freeze utility rates or utilities from being able to raise the rates for the next year. The other one, which is more controversial even, is a severance tax on gas and oil.
The thinking behind the Democrats is that fracking has been occurring and that consumers have been left out of the benefit of that. And so they say, well, if you put a severance tax on these industries like they have in Oklahoma and Texas, that that money could go back to consumers in the way of $150 rebates.
However, that's not likely to fly in this Republican legislature because they've turned it back before. It was proposed more than a decade ago. The lawmakers didn't want it then. And House Speaker Matt Huffman, Republican, is saying that he's not in favor of it now.
He says he hasn't seen the whole bill, but he thinks that consumers have indeed benefited from it and that it's kept costs down. Of course, Ohioans who are opening their electric bills may not see those efforts because... There have been increases in the energy bill, but I talked with someone at the Consumer Council, and that's the group that watches the utility rates for consumers, kind of acts as a consumer advocate.
And they said the transmission costs have gone up. There's other things in the bill that have gone up in addition to just the cost of the actual product. So. This remains to be seen as to what happens with this, but the Democrats are out there talking about it in hopes that people who are having hard time meeting their energy costs will say, hey, I like the fact that this person's talking about this and maybe has a plan to do something to help me.
Juravich: All right, well, we'll see what happens with those bills and we will see if we have a verdict in the first energy trial, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe soon.
You're listening to the Weekly Reporter Roundtable on 89.7 NPR News. We are talking this week with Joe Ingalls from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau, Jeremy Pelzer from cleveland.com, and Jesse Ballmer from Columbus Dispatch.
Jeremy, you wrote last week that lawmakers passed a $1.9 billion re-appropriations bill. What is a re-appropriations bill? That's a lot of money, $1.9 billion, but what's the significance this year?
Pelzer: Yeah, the sticker price is pretty formidable. But if you look at it, most of that money is just, it's a kind of a rubber stamp because they pass budgets only two years. And if you have a five year project, a construction project, well, they have to re up the appropriation every two years because they only pass appropriations that last two years, so it's, hey, we, okay, we passed up a hundred million dollars for this five year project.
So after two years, we have to do the rest of the 100 million that's not spent and all the way through. So it's not controversial. However, there are some things they tack on that are new things while they're doing this. And one of the perhaps the most controversial part of the bill is about SNAP funding.
And so under the one big, beautiful bill passed in Congress last year, it cuts SNAP administrative food stamp, Administrative. Funding for Ohio by about $38 million between next October and June of next year. There's about 1.4 million Ohioans on food stamps right now. That's about 11% of the entire population of Ohio.
So what this cut means is about $5.6 million cut for SNAP in Franklin County, about $7.5 million for Cuyahoga. It's a significant amount of money. So county officials have been going to the state saying, hey, can you give us money to make up for this funding cut. In this bill, House Bill 730, state lawmakers agreed to cover part, but not all of it.
They appropriated $12.5 million. But the controversy is how this money will then be divvied up, because up until now, it's been divvying up by, based on how many SNAP recipients and eligible residents each county have, so bigger counties get a bigger share of the money. But this divides it equally, and that means that about 59 rural counties will be made whole by this.
But 26 larger counties, including Franklin and Cuyahoga, They're only gonna get about $226,000. And meanwhile, like Franklin County has to make up a what, like I said, a $5.6 million hole. So these larger counties are saying, what are you doing here? Like, Cuyahoga County officials I talked to said that there's going to result in perhaps 90 people being laid off and just a dramatic effect on core safety services. It's a big deal for as county is.
Juravich: Oh, so was this because it's a re appropriations bill and you called it earlier a rubber stamp. So did this come by as a surprise to the counties? They didn't expect they they they asked for the money and they kind of expected it to be distributed the way they thought not evenly like this.
Pelzer: They did, and they threw stuff. I compared to trains leaving a station. If you have like a big suitcase that you think is pretty important to leave, you just look around and look for a train leaving the station, and then you kind of throw it on there. And they threw this into this reappropriations bill, which is, you know, on the whole, largely uncontroversial.
Juravich: Did it so it passed so they can't change it.
Pelzer: They can't change it now. It's performed by Governor Mike DeWine, who could theoretically line item B to it. So we'll see what he does. And so that's where it stands now.
Juravich: Okay. Then what was the rationale for distributing it equally? Because obviously Franklin County and Cuyahoga County have a higher population than other counties. Is there, is, was there a rationale or?
Pelzer: Senate President Ron McCauley said, well, we only have a limited amount of money to give here. And instead of giving, if we did divvied it up based on like allocated the old way based on how many SNAP recipients there are, these smaller counties would only get like a very tiny amount of money. And so we're going to make 59 counties whole and we're gonna give some to the larger counties too.
So at least we're, you know, make up, it's going to do more than if we just, you know, not made everyone whole. But obviously larger counties are.
Juravich: Yeah, the larger counties would say percentage-wise, they're getting a tiny amount. They're getting a tiny amount.
Pelzer: Now, the big wrinkle to this, too, is that the one big, beautiful bill also said, if you don't states, every state, if you lower your error rate below 6%, your SNAP payment error rate, you're gonna be penalized for that. So if Ohio right now has an error rate of about 9%, and if it doesn't get it below 6% it could be penalize hundreds of millions of dollars.
So what these large counties are saying is like, You want us to lower our error rate, but then you're going to make us lay off dozens of people that's going to.
Juravich: If you cut staff, there's no one to figure out where the errors are.
Pelzer: And then fewer people have to do more work and then Ohio is penalized. So that's the big wrinkle in this too.
Ingles: You know, Speaker Matt Huffman was asked about this last week, and he said, he told reporters that some of these big counties, they have these big savings that he's looking at. And he's like, well, if you've got all this money sitting over here in savings, why can't you spend some of that?
And of course, if he talked to the cities and the counties, he would say, you know, that money is already kind of in their head spent for other things, you now, and for emergencies. Because there are contingency plans that these big counties have to have. So that's another thing that went into the thinking behind this maybe.
Juravich: So we're back to lawmakers not enjoying places having big rainy day funds. Yes. Well, certain places, yes. That sounds familiar from school districts as well. They didn't want them having big amounts of savings. All right.
Well, before we take a break, I did want to get to some news from over the weekend. Crowds gathered Saturday at the Ohio State House and throughout the state to protest the Trump administration. Um, Mia Lewis from Common Cause Ohio was one of the organizers and told WOSU public media, there were many reasons driving people to the no Kings rally this weekend, um, and they were protesting president Donald Trump and his policies.
Speaker 6: There's an affordability crisis, there's ice in our streets, there's violence rising across the world. This is not a president who is taking care of the people in America, he's taking care of himself.
Juravich: So there were thousands and thousands of people at the state house, and everything for the most part for most of these protests was very civil and nothing dramatic happened. But I did see a report from NBC4 in the dispatch that said that Don Leonard, a Democratic candidate for Congress, was arrested at a Grove City protest. Jesse, what do we know about this? Apparently he was using a bullhorn and they told him to stop it.
Balmert: Yeah, I think the gist from the reporting is, you know, the officer took the megaphone and informed him he had violated a noise ordinance and so like returned to the cruiser briefly and so forth. It's interesting, Leonard is a Democrat running in a primary against Adam Miller and then ultimately whoever wins that would go against Mike Carey, the Republican who's running for re-election. It's kind of an interesting quirk to the no-kings protests this weekend.
Juravich: Yeah, did anyone hear anything else out of the No Kings rallies? Any numbers or anything dramatic like a loud bullhorn?
Pelzer: I did not. There were a bunch of them in Northeast Ohio, for sure. And there were thousands of protesters in Cleveland and suburbs, too. Nothing too dramatic beyond just people having snarky signs and chants. They always get pretty creative with those.
Juravich: Yeah, the signs are very creative. I drove past some signs and I had to tell my kids to look away from the potty words on the signs. Now, my kids are old enough to read and I was like, oh no, don't read the signs!
Okay, well, and then also one last thing before we take the break is Ohio's primary election is just about a month away. It's on May 5th and the man responsible for running it, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, has been deployed. He's a part of the National Guard. Do we have any more details of where he'll be serving or is this related to the war in Iran? Do we know what Franklin Rose is doing?
Pelzer: We do not, we do not know where our secretary of state is right now. It's on security grounds, makes sense that the military is not going to say, oh yeah, he and his unit got deployed to Iran and here's where they are and here is when they arrived. That's pretty standard to not release that information.
But his office isn't even saying if he's in the country right now, but they did say is that he's still doing his job as the state's top elections officer. In under the Ohio constitution if the secretary of state is incapacitated or not able to unable to discharge his or her duties it goes to the assistant secretary of state and so far his office says there's been no need to do that.
Juravich: Okay, do we know what his role is in the National Guard even? Because there's different roles. I mean, there's, you know, people do all kinds of different things in the National Guard. Do we know his job or his duties have been in the past or what he does?
Pelzer: He's a staff sergeant and he's also a former, the unit that he serves in, 19 Special Forces, is involved in like counterintelligence, anti-terrorism work, that sort of thing. So I don't, it's not clear exactly what his specific job is, but it's that kind of work that he's involved in.
Juravich: So perhaps he still has access to a computer and a cell phone and he can be Secretary of State remotely. Is that what they're saying?
Pelzer: I guess that's what they're saying, that he is still able to do his job and if he was in a foxhole somewhere in Iran and without any access, I think that would count as not being able to his job.
Juravich: Got it. Do we know how long National Guard tours are for someone like Frank Larose? I don't even know. No, I have no idea.
Pelzer: I mean, it can always be extended, you know? Yeah, I know, yeah. It's at the discretion of the governor.
Juravich: OK, we'll put a pin in that, but I was just wondering if he'd be back in time for the election on May 5th, but I guess we don't know.
Alright, coming up, there is an effort to stop huge data centers from coming to Ohio, and rural communities are leading the charge. That's when the reporter roundtable from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR news.
Speaker 7: This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of "Fresh Air." You'll see your favorite actors, directors, and comedians on late night TV shows or YouTube, but what you get with "Fresh Air" is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billie Eilish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the "Fresh Air" podcast from NPR and WHYY.
Juravich: You're listening to the Weekly Reporter Roundtable, an hour where we talk all things Ohio politics. I'm your host Amy Juravich. And with me in the studio, we have Jeremy Pelzer, chief politics reporter at Cleveland.com, Jesse Balmer, state government and politics reporter of the Columbus Dispatch, and Joe Ingalls, senior reporter at the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau.
Jesse, you wrote about action taken last week by the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission to open up thousands of acres of what's called the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area. This is in Belmont County, and they're opening it for applications for oil and gas drilling. It'll also offer up some acres to Salt Fork State Park. So far, the only state park approved for fracking. So why additional acres? Have we already used what was approved before?
Balmert: Well I think it's interesting. Certainly opponents of fracking are saying that this is tied to the proliferation of data centers in the state and the demand for more energy and oil and gas being you know one way to get there.
It's sometimes it's kind of random what what parcels are opened up at any given time but this is a pretty large chunk of Egypt Valley wildlife area. And then an expansion of Salt Fork, which has already had, you know, over 6,000 acres approved for fracking.
This is kind of a process that going all the way back to Governor John Kasich approved fracking under state parks, but it was slow to get going. He didn't really appoint people to the commission that was supposed to approve it. This really kickstarted a couple years ago when the lawmakers put a process in. And so now this commission is in charge of like, okaying whether these parcels can be put out for bid and then approving which companies.
Juravich: Actually win the bids. And there is opposition. There's people protesting. There's People trying to stop it. Will they have any luck?
Balmert: So there were more than a thousand people who submitted letters saying that this is just not how they would like to see their public lands used. And that's something that the commission has to take into consideration. But the way that the statute is set up, it's very hard for this commission to deny these applications. And if a company has, you know, a bid that checks off the boxes, then they basically have to be approved.
Juravich: Do we have any results of the fracking there? I mean, is it finding natural gas? Are we making money? Are we, do we have more energy?
Balmert: Well, for example, like Salt Fork, a certain percentage of the money goes towards reinvestment in the actual park. So things like improvement to like bathrooms or facilities and so forth in the park. A lot of it goes, some portion of it, goes to the Department of Natural Resources budget. And actually a change in the state budget makes ODNR more reliant on that money than they previously would have been. And then the rest kind of goes to the state budget for various funding sources.
Juravich: All right. Well, another bill I wanted to pivot to is the Ohio House has passed a bill that would expand the state's public indecency laws, setting a new standard for what minors can be exposed to in a public setting. Critics argue that the bill is overly broad and could disproportionately impact drag performances. Who can walk us through this bill? It's called the Public Indecency Bill.
Ingles: Basically what this is, is this is a bill that redefines how you look at public indecency. And there were some lawmakers who were upset with a performance in a park over in Xenia, and they felt like there were things that were going on in this performance that children shouldn't see.
That was brought up, you know, several times and But the thing is, as you pointed out, the opponents say the language of it is vague. And they say the problem is that if it's left to interpretation, it depends on who's interpreting it. And we saw the famous drag performer from Columbus, Nina West, she came in, and she was testifying on this bill and had concerns about how vague it was and the fact that.
It could possibly make some drag performances illegal. Now what the lawmakers are saying is, hey, we're not outlawing drag, but we are telling you that if you're going to have drag performance that is not appropriate for kids, and that's kind of left to interpretation too, if it's not appropriate, then it needs to go. In a cabaret. It's like behind a closed door. It's got to be in a place where it would be 21 and up. Right on a stage outside not in the amphitheater where everyone can see it that kind of thing so they have passed this bill in the house it goes to the senate and you know the senate's not in right now but it will go to the Senate later on when they come back and
Juravich: Will the Senate take it up? Have they said anything?
Ingles: I think this, you know, I don't know that they've said anything, but this is the kind of thing that they would take up. It could very well, you now, this is lame duck year, so it could very well end up being one of the things that gets, you know, plugged into something else at the end of the year for lame duck.
Pelzer: Also happens to be an election year. It does.
Juravich: I've heard of that election, yeah. I read in one article about this bill that someone said that it could even ban like a woman from wearing a sports bra or something like that. Like it's vague and yet specific at the same time. Is that true? Is that true?
Ingles: Yeah, it's because the law used to speak to private parts, but then that wasn't defined. And there was a case that kind of questioned how that worked. And so now it's private areas, okay, that they're talking about. Areas, I see.
But they have carved out breastfeeding in public. So you are allowed to, a mom can breastfeed in public, Um, they've carved that out, but you know, some people say, well, sports brawls, you know could be, it's all, you know, that's the thing. A lot of it's left to interpretation.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides in our weekly reporter roundtable.
We're talking with Joe Ingalls from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau, Jeremy Pelzer from cleveland.com, and Jesse Ballmer from Columbus Dispatch. We talked last week on this show about a $33 billion natural gas plant the federal government is planning to develop in Piketon, along with a huge data center.
There are pushback against data centers and it's growing and it is especially robust in rural areas. Brown County attorney, Austin Boerichter has drafted a petition and filed it with the attorney general's office. Here's some audio from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau about his efforts.
Speaker 8: It's definitely not one county. It's certainly not rural areas, although the push is coming from rural areas. And I would say don't ever count out the people out here, don't every count out the voices of us Ohio residents on making it known what we wanna do.
Juravich: So they're trying to basically, are they trying to do a constitutional amendment to ban what they call large data centers? Is that right?
Ingles: Yeah, over 25 megawatt is the size of the data center that they're trying to ban. It would basically abolish them. And, but, you know, a lot of these rural areas, they're very concerned about the farmland being taken up and given over to data centers. So this is kind of like, I remember they were upset about solar farms coming in too, so.
Juravich: Well, and Jeremy, getting something on the ballot is a tall order. It's hard. What do you make of this effort that they're trying to create?
Pelzer: Well, first to clarify, this would just ban new data centers. It wouldn't be like if anything larger than 25 megawatts would be torn down, you know, like getting back to nothing.
But it's, it's pretty difficult, especially for like, by all indications, it seems to be a truly grassroots effort in Adams and Brown counties. And they passed an initial hurdle by getting about 1800 signatures just to put it before the attorney general and secretary of state and now goes for the ballot board. But then they have to collect about 413,000 signatures by July. It's already about August, I'm sorry, it's already about April now. So that's a lot of signatures to collect from around the state in just a few months.
Juravich: Yeah. Okay. So the but so it hasn't been approved to start collecting those signatures yet the language but they're through that they have the signatures to put it before the ballot board at this point.
Pelzer: Yeah, they pass a small hurdle, but the big hurdle awaits. Okay.
Ingles: And once they do that, there's some indication that there's going to be a pushback, because my colleague Karen Kassler on the State of Ohio TV show had a guy from a data center coalition on, and he said that an amendment to abolish these data centers would put Ohio at a competitive disadvantage, and that by not constructing data centers, the U.S. Be behind.
That coalition of data centers could come up with some money. They could help boost public opinion of data centers, because right now, a lot of people are opening those electric bills. And one of the places they're placing the blame is these data centers that they see constructed, whether it's fair or not.
Balmert: Yeah, I will say the politics of data centers break down in really interesting ways because you have on one hand on the Republican side, you have these rural voters who are concerned about farmland or just kind of not wanting these in their backyard.
But then you have business interests, the chamber, like those traditionally Republican institutions that are very much for data center construction in the state. And then on the Democratic side you have people concerned about like the environmental impacts are opposed to them.
But then you have folks with the unions who help build the data centers that see this as a job creation location. And so you're seeing this like really come to a head on this veto override on tax incentives, which they're having kind of a time getting to the 60 votes that they would need in the house. But it's just a really interesting because you're not seeing like universal support or opposition from one political party or the other on this
Juravich: And what you just mentioned there is the governor vetoed a line that would stop the tax breaks for like construction products for some of these data centers because the governor wanted them to keep the tax break for now. But there's been a lot of talk of the House and Senate overriding that veto because for the most part there seems to be consensus that they should pay, these data center should pay taxes, at least on something. But they haven't actually done that, right?
Balmert: Yeah, I think number one, you need a larger number of votes in order to do an override than you do to just pass a bill. This was also something included in a budget where there's like a gazillion trillion things that you're voting on versus pulling it out and just having a vote on this one issue is a little bit more challenging. But you see Speaker Matt Huffman saying like, this is something that we need to override. Like we do need these companies to be paying more and not getting so many breaks. So it'll be a kind of interesting test of his leadership as well.
Pelzer: And that's partly because, again, as Jesse said, House Democrats are reluctant to vote for overriding the veto because of these union calls to, hey, we're getting a lot of money from our union members. And also, Matt Huffman subscribes to the old Bill Batchelder, former House Speaker Bill Bacchelder philosophy of, hey we don't want to rely on the other party to give us our votes. Even if we don't have enough, we don't have the votes among our own caucus, we're We're not gonna move it.
Juravich: All right, I wanted to pivot for just a couple of minutes to Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. He caught some flack the other week for comments he made about consolidating Ohio's colleges and universities. He laid out a fuller plan in a guest column for the Columbus Dispatch. It was titled, "Ohio Must Reform Its Fragmented Public Universities." Did anyone look into his plan because to his point, for example, Ohio Dominican University last week missed a bond payment, but they said they're not going to close.
Ingles: And they're also private, so. Oh, they are private.
Juravich: That's true. Well, I get confused as to which ones are public and private, but let's get back to it to Ramaswami's point Do we know about his plan about? Reforming fragmented public universities thoughts on it
Balmert: It's interesting because in this guest column that he provided to the Columbus Dispatch, he mentions a few universities that are public, Cleveland State, University of Akron, Kent State, and Central State University, which has been on Fiscal Watch, and my colleague Laura Bischoff has detailed a lot of their challenges. That's not to say that those are the universities he would necessarily target in a budget, but he did say that that's something if he were elected that he'd take a take a look at during his first budget is are these universities being run well, you know, is there opportunity for consolidation?
Ingles: Yeah and you know, this isn't the first time that someone has suggested this. This came about in the Kasich administration. Kasich used to, a governor, former governor Kasich, used to talk about you know putting these universities kind of consolidating them in a way that you know maybe one university was kind of the leader in one area, another was a leader in another area, But, you know, that didn't go anywhere, really, because... You know, it's going to take, lawmakers are going to have to step up and do this.
And, you know you kind of have a NIMBY issue and percolating underneath here because a lot of these universities serve a lot of people in more rural areas. And especially the ones that, you know, that Ramaswami named in the editorial. They serve a lot of students who maybe cannot drive to Ohio State University because it's too far away or to a bigger university. So there's going to be a conversation, and need to be conversation with lawmakers about how to address the university access problem that exists for all Ohioans if you start shutting down certain universities in certain areas.
Pelzer: Certainly the problem that he's bringing up is an actual problem, not just in Ohio, but around the country. You know, there's not only, as he says in his op-ed, there's only gonna be fewer high school graduates in Ohio overall, but fewer, a fewer percent, a lesser percentage of those graduates will go to a traditional four-year college.
Now, politically, this is not. This is full of landmines because every alum from the school is like, wait, you want to close my university? Or you want consolidate it or take away its identity? It's not. It's loaded with pitfalls to do this. But Ramaswami here is clearly saying, look, it's a big problem and we need a bold idea to do it. It's kind of unusual how he did it. He initially put this out on the social media site threads on a Friday kind of without warning and
Juravich: Yeah, we joked last week about no one checking threads, and then like, but apparently that's where all the good gossip's at. I did have.
Balmert: I have to re-create my threats account.
Pelzer: So, it's interesting how he's doing that, but now he's putting more meat on the bone here about what he's looking to do. So regardless of what you think of his idea, it is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed in some way.
Juravich: Yeah, we joked last week that it was like he put it on Instagram and Facebook and then someone was like, No, no, no. Take it down. And then they forgot to take it down from threads. That was the joke. I don't know. Everyone forgets about threads.
But related to something that also is full of landmines, has Ramaswamy talked more about his plan to roll back all taxes? Has he said more on that? Has he walked that back a little bit? So, Ramaswamy...
Balmert: Put out an ad on Friday talking about property tax relief, obviously a topic of like tremendous interest to Ohioans, especially as this group tries to put an issue on the ballot to eliminate property taxes entirely. And so he said he wants to roll back property taxes to where they were before the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, which would have been kind of in the 2021-2023 range. Not a lot of specifics on like how he would achieve that, but something that he would want do in his first budget as governor.
Juravich: So, I guess to talk about the other side just for a minute, Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton, has she said anything in reaction to, we've heard her talk about taxes, but what about the universities part? Has she said in reaction to his consolidating universities comments?
Balmert: Yes, she made a lot of comments. She referenced March Madness because there were a number of Ohio teams that made the basketball bracket this year. And so, like, I don't know that that, OK. I think her overall approach is that she sees universities as job creators for the community and doesn't feel like they should be consolidated. And uses it as like an opportunity to say that she graduated from Youngstown State University, whereas Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard and.
Juravich: She also put out a post about paying her way through Youngstown herself, right? Something like that.
All right. Well, coming up, the installation of a new women's monument at the State House has begun. It will be open in a few months and it becomes one of the few in the country. That's when the Reporter Roundtable continues from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to the All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable. I'm your host Amy Juravich. Still with us, we have Jessie Balmer at State Government and Politics Reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, Joe Ingalls, Senior Reporter for the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau, and Jeremy Pelzer, Chief Politics Reporter at Cleveland.com.
Ohio last week became one of the few places with a monument that will soon honor the accomplishments of women. The installation began last week, and the monument will be unveiled in the fall. Here is a former state lawmaker Stephanie Kunze at last week's dedication ceremony. No, maybe not. That's okay.
She says, nationally less than 8% of all public statues depict real women. So Joe, your colleague Karen Kastler wrote about the monument. It's been years in the making. Can you tell us how this effort came together and why they decided to make this women's monument?
Ingles: Well, this is the first such monument dedicated to women on the Statehouse Grants. And you know, there are a lot of other things on the statehouse grounds right now, dedicated to different parts of Ohio. But this is first one dedicated to woman. It's had broad support from some women's group. I know I talked with Jen Miller with the Ohio League of Women Voters.
That's one of the sponsors of it. But it's had a lot of support from the Joanne Davidson Foundation and others. There has been a move to try to get something done on the State House grounds to honor women and the right to vote and the accomplishments of women that they have made during the time in the legislature.
So this will be a monument that is designed and the artist Brenda Council is She has done other work in other parts of the state even And she's a pretty well-known female artist. She will be doing a sculpture It will be as I understand it pretty substantial and it will be unveiled They're saying later this year
Juravich: And do we know how she ended up getting picked, or is she just, is she known for her sculpture creations?
Ingles: Like I said, she's done work, I think it was out in Zanesville, but also there was a group that was picking her and she's respected as a female artist who has done this kind of thing. Well, we.
Juravich: Well, we actually do have a cut from her, the Monuments Designer and Sculptor, Brenda Council of North Carolina. Here she is talking about her creation.
Speaker 10: It invites people to walk among these figures, to reflect and to respond, to see activism not as history, but as a living, ongoing pursuit.
Juravich: So it's gonna be a statue you can like walk around, not just look at, is that what she means? Do you know?
Balmert: Yeah, so there's like four different pillars and three of them have statues of various women like throughout time. It's not a specific woman, but like representative of different eras. And then one of them is open with the sentiment being like you could envision yourself being part of the future of Ohio's history.
Juravich: All right, so we'll get ready for that opening in the fall.
Coming up, we do have a primary election on May 5th. The last day to register to vote is April 6th. Election officials are getting busy gearing up for this primary. Jesse, you wrote about a dispute at the Delaware Board of Elections that prompted one lawmaker to propose a change on how county election boards work. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Balmert: Yeah, so this is an interesting situation locally here where there was a vote to allow someone onto the ballot for state central committee, which is basically the group of people that helped make decisions for the Ohio Republican Party in this case, or the Ohio Democratic Party.
And one of the members of the board of elections was like making a decision that affected whether her opponent in this race was able to stay on the ballot. And so stay Brian Lorenz introduced some legislation that would kind of clarify when you have to step aside in those kind of votes.
And the other element that was kind of interesting is that he said you couldn't be on state central committee and also serve on the county board of elections. And there are a large number of people who that would affect, including the current Ohio Republican Party chairman Alex Triantafilou, who is on the Hamilton County Board of elections.
Juravich: So someone is proposing this to be a law, like the change didn't happen. They're just saying that if there's a conflict of interest, they should address it in a law.
Balmert: Yeah, effectively kind of like spelling out how this should be handled versus relying on people's like better angels to recuse themselves from these votes.
Ingles: Yeah, and the Democrats who are on that board, they recuse themselves from the vote, saying that there was a conflict of interest, which that was another issue there that played into it.
Pelzer: This fits into a larger schism within the Delaware County Republicans, a lot of it based on kind of personal animosity. There's a schism? I was going to say. I don't know if I'd maybe not a schizm, but there's no love lost between some of the figures involved here. And it predates this specific incident.
Juravich: Well, Jeremy, you posed a question on social media asking, did the Ohio Chamber of Commerce recently endorse a Democrat? Can you tell me about that? Did that happen?
Pelzer: Well, they did. That's not a question. They did. They endorsed two of them, actually. The chamber endorsed Alison Russo for Secretary of State and John Kulowitz, who's an Arlington City Council member and attorney for attorney general. And I actually talked with Steve Stivers, the president CEO of the chamber.
And the answer is, well, we don't know the last time that the chamber endorsed a Democrat. Part of that, though, the con the catch here is that they traditionally don't endorse statewide candidates in primaries at all, at least not in recent elections.
And so the thinking here for the chamber is, well, no harm in doing this. And if in endorsing these Democrats and if they happen to win, well, maybe it'll get us to, maybe they'll listen to us a little bit and it gives us an opportunity to talk to them about what our goals are now. This is only for the primary election. So if Alison Russo wins, and there's no guarantee of that, and if Kulowicz wins, he's also in the contested primary, they all go up against a Republican.
And so the chamber might very well, and I think they probably will, endorse a Republican in that race. But it's interesting. It's not often seen. It's interesting for them to weigh in. Because it's about as Republican a group as you can get.
Juravich: Are there any other primary election developments that anyone's following that you want to update on? I mean, it's not the most exciting primary in the world. I think it's inter-
Balmert: that we have so many primaries and it's really the result of a lot of these folks are term-limited and so you have open seats on all of your kind of statewide elections but we have primaries on the Secretary of State's race on both sides, the Democratic AGs, you have a pretty interesting Republican primary for state treasurer or as interesting as straight treasurers races can be and so just like the fact that we a lot of competitive primaries is really interesting.
Ingles: And I also think that these primaries, they might look co-hum to some voters, but to other voters, these primries really do indicate who serves as the representative for your area, because Ohio is so heavily gerrymandered in some areas that whoever wins the primary is the person who's going to represent your district in November, because there's just not a. A real election in November. It's just kind of going through the motion.
Juravich: All right, everyone out there listening, you've got a vote in the primary. You don't skip it. I'm sorry to make you do this because we only have three minutes left, but Joe or Jesse, there's legislation that would require providers to inform patients about an experimental process to reverse an abortion, and this legislation has been proposed. It's the third time it's been proposed without passing. Can someone give me a quick rundown on that? Well, yeah.
Ingles: Basically, yeah, it's the third time this has come up. You know, the people who are proposing it say that women should have the right to know that there is an option to stop the two-pill process for an abortion, to stop it midway. So if you take one pill. Right, and then they would give you information about how you could reverse it before you take that second pill.
They say that, you know, women have said that They wish they could turn it back, or that women are somehow coerced into that decision, and this would give them an opportunity to carry on with the pregnancy. Of course, the other side, the opponents of this bill, would say that this is dangerous. This is not healthy, that it has not been proven as a scientific practice. And they refer to a test that was ongoing that was actually stopped because so many women. Had health problems trying to reverse after, you know, the first half of that...
Juravich: The bill would require providers to tell the patients that there is that option between the two pills. Is that correct?
Ingles: To give them information, which, you know, of course the opponents are going to say, well, that information is going to be, you know, wrong because this is not a scientifically approved process. But then the backers of this plan say that that this is something that can happen and that women have a right to know.
Juravich: Is it, but it hasn't been voted on as just as it's been proposed or has a committee or now.
Ingles: That's been proposed.
Juravich: Well, this has been the Weekly Reporter Roundtable from All Sides, and I want to say thank you to Joe Ingalls, Senior Reporter at the Ohio Public Radio, State House News Bureau. Thanks, Joe.
Ingles: Thanks for having me.
Juravich: And Jesse Balmert, State Government and Politics Reporter at the Columbus Dispatch. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks. Happy to be heard. And Jeremy Pelzer, Chief Politics Reporter, at Cleveland.com. Thanks Jeremy. Thanks a lot.
You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News.