Data center moratoriums in Ohio

Remember Jim Jordan? We haven't talked about Jim Jordan in quite some time, but he was in the news on Wednesday . It's today in Ohio, the news podcast discussion from Cleveland. com and thee deal Perl.ain I' Dm Chris Qu hereinn with Leila Tasi, Lisa Garvin, and Laura Johnston. Lisa, Republicans in a congressional hearing about potential Medicaid fraud said a whole bunch of things Wednesday that you could easily def in ased racism , but before we talk about those , which Ohio elected official did Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan accuse ? Yeah, there was a whole lot of dog whistling going on in this meeting. It was a hearing of a brand new House Oversight Task Force on defending constitutional rights and exposing institutional abuses. So in that, Jim Jordan accused Columbus Democrat State Representative Is mail Ali Mohammed of involvement in Medicaid billing fraud that's been alleged in a daily wire article. And the guy who wrote that, reporter James Rosneak testified at this hearing, and Jordan asked Rosne ak if Mohammed, whose law office is in the same building as thirty five healthcare companies that he named in his article. Rosneaks, you know, said, I don't know, but Jordan said, well, maybe that's the next thing that you dig into. And then Rosneak kind of went beyond the scope of the hearing. He says, you know, I only saw two people without an accent in the hundreds of home healthcare companies that he looked at. He said the names of those he investigated included Somali and Boutinees and other African surnames. Man, it is it is over the top racist. And they knew it because they said hey just because we're targeting these folks doesn't mean we're racist. Look, the thing people should understand, if you go into the Ohio Secretary of State site and look at where businesses are registered , they're almost always registered with a registered agent who's a lawyer . So it is not unusual at all to have the incorporation address of a business be at the law office. This is not proof of anything untoward. I was disappointed that the Ohio legislator didn't offer any comment when he was asked about it, but but it's just more smoke. Look, what's going on here? The Republicans know they're in trouble. America is angry. Ohians are angry. They are trying to get back to the immigration anger that Trump used to get elected the last time . And this is their effort. Look at these awful foreigners, many of whom are brown or black , who are scamming Medicaid, even though they don't have evidence of the scam, and even though Republicans have been one hundred percent in charge of Medic aid in Ohio for the entirety. If there's fraud , it's because the Republicans allowed it to happen. They are trying desperately to get people excited about this . So much so they wouldn't even let the Democrats talk in the hearing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, task force chair representative Brandon Gill of Texas, he refused to take questions from Ohio Democrats and declined to recognize Chantelle Brown , who's on the Oversight Committee . And yeah, and Brown said, Well, they're just creating a political narrative to scapegoat minorities and push healthcare costs. And then Gill went on to say that fraud is connected to the over of the American immigration system . We've allowed foreigners from low trust societies to pour into our communities with very little vetting, and we can't back down because of spurious accusations of racism. What this is is, hey, folks, don't forget data centers and near electropills. Forget your property taxes. Forget in Ohio that we've squandered more than a billion dollars a year on private school vouchers that the wealthy use get upset about the smoke we're finding on Medicaid, which would have happened on our watch. This is such a faulty argument and they know it. That's why they wouldn't let Shantell Brown speak. The only way you can try and control that narrative is to stop anybody from pointing out all the flaws in your argument so they shut her down. That's unbelievable if they believed in what they were saying, they would stand up to the criticism. It's an amazing story what they say in this racism in a congressional hearing . Well, has anyone corroborated Rosneak? Because he's with kind of a kind of a far right conservative website and has anyone else corroborated his investigation? I don't even know. No, it's just smoke that might be explainable. What I expect in the end is there'll be some fraud. It won't be anywhere near the scale that they're trying to make it sound like . And everybody will have to remember it happened under the De Wein administration. The Republicans control Medicaid . The whole thing is reeks of desperation to me people who realize the voters have had it with them. I mean, Donald Trump's ratings with the public are lower than they've ever been. So much so that you saw the House vote to take away his war powers yesterday . So things are falling apart and they are desperate to play their old playbook. Immigration, immigration, immigration, it's all these foreigners that are trying to destroy you, but it's so feeble that they have to shut down anybody that might point out the flaws in their argument. And really, it's disgraceful in America to have people in Congress playing racist tropes . You are listening to today in Ohio . How does Republican Lou Blessing want to change elections in Ohio to get rid of what happens in the party primaries where tiny numbers of fringe party members choose candidates for the November ballot. Lea f. What Blessing is trying to do is take the power to choose November candidates away from those primaries and give it to all the voters at once . Right now in Ohio, Republicans pick the Republican nominees and Democrats pick the Democratic nominees in separate primaries, and that means that a relatively small number of highly engaged party activist s end up deciding who advances to the general election, especially in districts where one party dominates and the primary is effectively the real election . So his proposal would replace that system with what's often called a top two primary . Everybody runs, Republicans, Democrats, independents, whoever would appear on the same ballot. Every voter would get the same ballot. Then the two candidates who receive the most votes, regardless of party, would move on to November. So you could end up with a Republican versus a Democrat in the general election, but you could also end up with two Republicans or two Democrats if they are the top two vote getters. Blessing says the goal is to force candidates to appeal to a broader audience instead of focusing on the most partisan primary voters who come out for those primaries , he points out that Ohio has millions more unaffiliated voters than registered Republicans or Democrats, and he argues those independents deserve a bigger voice in picking who ends up on the November ballot. Supporters are pointing to California, which adopted a similar system in twenty ten , and they say it's reduced polarization and encouraged candidates to move toward the political middle to appeal to the greatest number of voters. But there are critics of the system too. They worry that crowded ballots could produce weird outcomes with candidates advancing . They're worried that we'd have weird outcomes. What do they think we have now . Well, I mean if you have a very crowded ballot, you could have candidates moving forward after winning only a small share of the vote . So they are arguing that political operatives could game the system by recruiting candidates to split votes and then shape the outcome that way . But you know, at its core, Blessings Bill is about whether party insiders and primary voters continue to choose the finalists for November or whether every voter should get a say from the very beginning of the process . That's the debate that's unfolding . Yeah, I love this. I mean, this is like ranked choice voting in some ways in that everybody gets to choo se the candidates for November . This doesn't have the rank choice voting, but it does. What's interesting is the people who oppose ranked choice voting say it's flawed is you could have two Democrats or two Republicans , and how is that fair? And yet this could do the same thing. I don't buy the argument about that a small number of people could get a candidate through because my bet is in a system where everybody gets to vote , even a candidate that gets twenty five percent of the vote will have more votes in number than they get now where only fringe party members get to make the choice. So this is right . The party we've said this so many times over the past couple years. The party primary system was a reform of the old party boss system has been corrupted. Nobody wants to sign up to be in a political party. That's why seventy plus percent of Ohians are not. And then we can't vote on the candidates that appear in November and we get loans. We get people that do not serve the interests of Ohio. We have people in jecting religion into schools. We have people to create voucher programs that are hugely unpopular in the state. How many things have these lawmakers tried to force down the throats of Ohioans that Ohioans don't like up to and including abortion . You're totally right. I think this is a step in the right direction. I don't like it as much as ranked choice voting. I mean, the blessing is chasing some of the same goals that rank ed choice voting advocates cite, rewarding candidates who could appeal to a broader electorate and reducing the power of those ideological extremes that you're describing. The difference is that rank choice voting asks voters to, obviously, rank candidates, and it guarantees a winner with majority support. Blessing's top two system keeps voting much simpler but can still produce those November candidates who won only a small share of the primary vote. So it's less complicated. It achieves some of the same outcomes, but I like ranked choice voting better because it gives each voter a say even after their first choice gets wiped out of the running . But I would take this. It's way better than what we do now . So I also would like to see Lou Blessing start to become a statewide candidate because he's a Republican who repe atedly is showing common sense and an interest in actually serving the people . And we don't have many people down in Columbus who do that. You're listening to today in Ohio . Laura has Ohio infringed upon free speech in the way it blocks some vanity plate applications . What is a judge making the state do? The state's got to reconsider a whole bunch of rejections of license plates . And that's because they were a little too strict, according to Judge Dan Aron Polster. He's from the Northern District of Ohio, and he said they used a overly broad standard of what could be interpreted as obscene, sexually explicit, and otherwise inappropriate, because the BMV rejected requests for vanity plates like gay and Muslim and they say they reject plate requests if words, phrases or combinations of letters imply profanity violence or illegal activities. I do not envy them . We've talked recently about how hard it is to monitor comments and how we don't want any personal attacks in our comments that we have in our sports section. This has got to be even harder because you have to think about how an eight can be used as a letter and an R and all of these things that are not actual words, but you read them a certain way and you're like, whoa, okay . You know what, I'd like to know. I wonder if they've approved Catholic . Catholic. You've never seen that or Jewish . I mean is this specific Muslim or do they reject all labels of religion ? I just I'm curious now as to has it been across the board? We're not going to law religions because that creates division, yadda yada yada, or have they discriminated and said some religions and not others? It'd be fascinating to see in broader categories what they have rejected. We've looked at this in the past we have. And we should we should do an analysis now. I when I saw they rejected gay and Muslim, I thought, okay, why ? You know, if somebody wants to do that, they might be inviting vandalism on their cars because we have a bunch of racist and homophobic people in the world. But how is that offensive? That's not trying to say an obscene word the way you described with the letter eight . So how are they deciding? You know, it did somebody seek a hetero license plate and not get approved, but gave us rejected. I'd like to know how they're making these decisions. It raises a whole lot of questions. And of course, they're appealing because they don't want to go back. Right, right. Like I said, this has got to be a lot of work. We used to publish the list of rejected plates. That's a public record, but we can't really publish them on our site because they're really offensive, at least some of them. The last story I could find was twenty twenty one when we had more than eight hundred plays rejected, and that included a lot of phrases of crude opposition toward President Joe Biden, includ ing that coded phrase, let's go brandon and but we haven't looked at it without a discerning eye of what's been rejected compared to what's been approved ? No, I totally agree with you. I'm just trying to put out the context here of how big of a deal this is. So I mean eight hundred out of all the cars in Ohio, not huge, but how many people are really requesting vanity plates that's a good question. And if they are rejecting Catholic, they've got to be looking for the C and the K and the combination of all the words. So it's a fascinating topic, really. But we need to compare what they've rejected to what they've accepted. We haven't done that. We just said, Oh, look, it's usually a novelty story. Look at the things people are trying to get away with. This raises some very interesting state sponsored free speech issues. If they're accepting some and rejecting others because they don't fit their personal beliefs, we have trouble and that's what we need to go and look at now. Trouble with a Capital T. You're listening to today in Ohio. All right, Lisa, will Ohio voters face a ballot question asking them to put a photo ID requirement for voting into the Ohio Constitution even though it's already in Ohio Lwa Definitely passed the Ohio Senate, but it still has to go to the House. So the Senate voted twenty two to nine Wednesday to put the voter ID constitutional amendment on the November ballot. It's known as Senate Joint Resolution ten . It requires voters to show a valid government issued photo ID, which would be a driver's license, estate ID, passport, military ID , absentee voters. This is a new wrinkle , would have to provide a signature and at least one additional identifier that would be established by state law, but they don't say what those other identifiers would be. And there's also a bill and like I said, Senate Joint Resolution ten must pass the Ohio House . House Speaker Matt Huffman says he says, I'm not going to say that we're good with it. He had questions about it. And he also had questions about how in person and absentee voters are treated differently in this resolution. They hope to work it out before a july first deadline to get it on the ballot. And of course, Democrats pointed out that a photo ID is already required to vote , Democrat Columbus Senator Bill Demoris says it's just a badly written rush through piece of legislation . What I love, though, is when the suggestion was made to include in the amendment that the state must offer a photo ID to anybody who needs one. The Republicans said, No, we don't need that. It's in state law, which is the whole argument against putting it in the Constitution because it's in state law. Again, this gets back to what we talked about with Jim Jordan and his nonsense in Washington yesterday . This is a desperation play by Republicans trying to find a red meat issue to get voter turnout, but people aren't passionate about this. It's the law already. Nobody's really that bent about it. What they're much more upset about are the data centers, property taxes and all the other things that are on the agenda. It's a failed attempt and it really does demonstrate how afraid the Republicans are that the voters are finally saying no more. You guys are completely out of control . Well, I think they're targeting low information voters because I guarantee you, I think it'll pass because people say , Oh, that's a great idea, not realizing that it's already the law. It'll pass, but it's not going to drive turnout. I don't think this is what's going to bring people to the polls. And I and depending on how the Democrats run their campaigns , what might bring people to the polls is all that anger. You're listening to today in Ohio . We talked earlier this week about a nearly secret plot by Ohio officials to be able to seize failing schools from communities that paid for them and give them away to private school operators without compensation. Readers are enraged by this because they didn't know about it. I've heard from quite a few. This next story Layla is the other piece of the strategy, I guess. What's to become of the current academic distress law for failing schools? Well, Ohio lawmakers are admitting here, I guess , that the state's decade long experiment with taking over failing school districts didn't really work. Back in twenty fifteen, lawmakers dramatically expanded what's known as the Academic Distress Commission system. If a district repeatedly failed state report cards, the state could essentially sideline the locally elected school board and install a CEO with sweeping authority to run the schools. Youngstown L,orraine , and East Cleveland all ended up under that model. The promise was that state intervention would turn struggling districts around. The reality was years of controversy and lawsuits and community anger and , according to critics, little evidence of meaningful academic improvement. In fact, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee is Andrew Brenner. He's the same lawmaker whose bill became the basis for the takeover system, and even he said it's time to try something else because this isn't working. So now there is a bipartisan bill to formally scrap the model and return control to local school boards instead of relying on state appointed overseers , struggling schools would create local support teams made up of parents, teachers , administrators, board members, and a representative from the state. The thinking is that many of the problems that are hurting academic performance aren't happening inside the classroom at all. They're poverty and hunger, health issues, unstable housing and other challenges that schools can't solve by themselves. So supporters point to places like Cincinnati's Eiler Community Learning Center, which connects students and families with social services and healthcare and community resources to solve those problems. Yeah, but the state's never going to provide those resources. You know that. This was always a resource problem. They would take over a school district and provide no money. It's not the school districts don't fail because they don't know what they're doing. They're dealing with intense challenges. East Cleveland deals with poverty, and even though they have one of the best superintendents going and that they've had improvement, they need more resources. And this program provided that. It was one of the dopiest attempts to fix schools I've ever seen. If you're going to have a state takeover, the state should be providing the resources to get it up to snuff . And this wasn't. It was more like a punishment. Okay, you dumb folks in the school district , you can't be in charge anymore. We're going to take over for you and then they didn't do anything . Right. I mean, it's interesting that they're finally pointing to these underlying causes of poor performance. Cleveland has been pursuing a very similar philosophy through the say yes initiative . The premise there is the same as what they're saying now. If a student is struggling because of homelessness or hunger or untreated health issues or family instability , there's no amount of test prep that's going to fix that problem. Cleveland places support specialists in schools to connect families with services and remove those barriers as the child goes through their academic career . But But the question is whether lawmakers have really embraced the idea that poverty and housing instability and all these other challenges drive academic performance or whether they're simply changing t actics because as you said, Chris, this debate is unfolding alongside that other proposal that could make it easier to transfer struggling public school buildings to private operators. If the state is backing away from direct intervention while maintain ing the same accountability metrics that label schools as failures , it really kind of makes you wonder whether the end game is to declare public schools unsuccessful , withdraw support create more opportunities for private alternatives to take their place . That sounds a little like a conspiracy theory, but it's really not that detached from reality. No, that secret thing we talked about earlier this week was the clearest evidence of what they're up to. They hate public schools, they hate teachers unions. They're trying to drive them out. You're listening to today in Ohio. The eBike issue seems to be growing exponentially with roads and sidewalks filling up with the vehicles. Many communities are trying to deal with it. I actually sent a text message this morning to ask what people are seeing out there. Or what's happening in your own town of Rocky River ? Well, coun isc goingil to discuss potential e bike legislation in the coming weeks. It's the perfect time of year to do this because the eBikes are out in full force . They also want to address golf cart use, again, summer golf cart season, and they might refer that matter to the safety committee. They've talked about golf carts in the past. They don't have any proposed legislation for e bikes, but it started with the e bikes. And then the mayor , who met with a girl scout troop, which I got to say she has met with my girl scout troop in the past, said they brought up golf carts, even more so than e bikes and said that they've seen unsafe behavior from some operators. And the mayor mentioned that she saw three golf carts parked at one park recently. They weren't doing anything wrong, but just shows how ubiquitous they are. Yeah , but come on, a handful of golf carts come compared to the exploding number of e bikes. And one of the worst things about these, they're so quiet. You don't really know they're coming until they're right upon you. You talked about going over a highway bridge recently where a guy on an e bike kind of forced you and your kid off the sidewalk. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I don't see it from Mayor Bob's perspective here. What I see is grownups on big e bikes, the things that practically look like motorcycles taking over the sidewalk and it's like if you in a motor'reized vehicle, you should be on the street. I was. I was crossing over I ninety on the bridge, which is a road and a sidewalk, but there's nowhere to go, right? There's no tree lawn, there's no driveways, it's a fence, and a road. And he came by, I had my dog and my thirteen year old and he was like, Excuse me. And I was like, what? Like, why should I have to move with my dog and my kid for your e bike . And I just I find them really dangerous. The kids love them, right? My kids have definitely pestered me for one. I've said, absolutely not. It's never gonna happen. Like don't even ask anymore. I don't think they're safe. I don't want you riding one. Like ride a bike get, some exercise. I just don't get how these are not regulated right off the road. When I was young there were all sorts of rules for gas motorized vehicles. You couldn't ride them on the street or the sidewalk.i Poder. And every once in a while somebody would get one and they'd ride it for a little while police would find out they'd come they'd come get them. But why is that not applying here? They're motorized vehicles. They should not be on the road without proper licensing. And there's so many of them and they go really fast . Right. And I think you're seeing these issues on places like the Metroparks trails and the tow path and anywhere the bikes go, they think they can go , but they're not the same thing. They go a lot faster and they're more dangerous. Yeah, I think this is becoming kind of a crisis level issue for municipalities and police don't have the time to go chase and down every kid who breaks the motorized bike rule. What do you do to stop this? Because people like you walking on the sidewalk should not have to worry about getting run down by somebody flying down the road on a big wheel bike . Have you ridden one? No, no I rented them in Prince Edward Island last summer and there you have to be sixteen in order to ride an eBike so my kids couldn't do it. And I got to say it was amazing going up hills. It was really cool because it was a very hilly bike path, but I don't think you need them on side walks in a city . Well, you should have some sort of regulation. A lot of people aren't even wearing helmets when they ride around . You're listening to today in Ohio. We have two Cuyoga County employees believed to have stolen , stolen from the taxpayers. Lisa, why will they likely never be charged? Yeah, Cyoga County prosecutors declined to pursue charges against two county employees accused of theft. Investigators found that misconduct likely occurred and referred to prosecutors for charges, but prosecutors ultimately decided not to charge due to issues with evidence uncertainty , how much money was stolen, and also years of weak internal controls. In From the office, attorney Andrew Rogalski, who's with the Economic Crimes and Corruption Unit, he says, We have a responsibility not to charge cases where the evidence might not withstand scrutiny. So case number one , a branch manager at an auto title office allegedly manipulated records to hide cash shortages. Investigators found missing money, fake financial records and years of lax accounting practices, but they said that made it hard for them to determine who stole the money and how much was stolen. Case number two, a county IT employee was accused of being paid without working. Investigators found that he entered work hours for seventeen days, but actually only logged into his computer on four of those days. A whistleblower alleged that this employee spent two years hiding and would quit if he got caught . It's just sad that they don't have the financial controls where they can actually nail somebody for stealing from the taxpayers. What kind of system is that ? Yeah, they really need to, you know, short up their auditing and accounting , you know, practices You're listening to today in Ohio. People like Beiju Shaw of the Greater Cleveland Partnership have argued against city moratoriums on data centers, something we've blasted because the data cent er supporters like Beiju Sha clearly don't talk to regular people . Well, residents of North Ridgeville have made their thoughts known. Leila, what are they? The message from these residents is what we've been hearing from folks throughout the region, really, just slow down, learn more and don't assume these projects are the economic slam dunks their boosters claim they are. City Council in North Ridgeville just approved a one year moratorium on data setters, cryptocurrency mining operations and similar facilities, and residents who showed up largely backed the move. One resident thanked council for acting quickly, saying people don't want these facilities in their backyards because of concerns about their impact on the environment. What's notable is that North Ridgeville doesn't even have a proposed data center project on the table right now. The mayor said no developer has approached the city , but officials wanted to get ahead of the issue before a proposal arrives and they find themselves making decisions without fully understanding the consequences. And those consequences are exactly what residents seem most worried about. The mayor pointed out that data centers can place enormous demands on water and sewer systems, potentially requiring expensive infrastructure upgrades. And we know that these facilities guzzle electricity. Council members say they simply don't know enough yet about the long term impacts and they want to study them. So the mood in Ridgeville seems to be cautioned first and you know think about the consequences which is completely reasonable. That's what you want from your government. That's why what Beiju Shah and some others have said about go , they're out of their minds. These things are out of control. We've shown it. Ohioans are fed up. They're going to go vote based partly on their anger about these things . And I salute the way that the communities are putting more turns on. They're not banning them. They're saying what you said, we need to know more. That's what you want from people you elect to be thoughtful . Yeah, I'm very pleased to realize how it seems that these cities and residents are paying attention to what is being reported about data centers. They're realizing that data centers don't fit that traditional economic development playbook. When a community lands a factory, you see the jobs , when it lands on an office building, they can see the workers, but a data center is a giant building with relatively few permanent employees consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water. So when residents hear the promises of economic growth, they're naturally asking growth for who ? Because the impacts are local, but many of the benefits seem to be flowing to tech companies and AI firms located somewhere else. And I'm really glad yeah, we pay higher electric bills. I mean, that's the they drain all the electricity and we have to pay higher electric bills. This is an absolute good. They need to stop it. Ohio has way more than its share. Other states should catch up . You're listening to today in Ohio. We're going to have to leave it there. It's a good podcast when we don't get to all the stories we want to talk about. We'll leave them for tomorrow. Thanks Leila. Thanks Lisa. Thanks Laura. Thank you for being here. We'll be back on Friday to wrap up a week of news.