No money, no training: Ohio politicians have advocated for more police training as a response to high profile local and national instances of police officers shooting unarmed civilians and other incidents. But as Jeremy Pelzer explains, the state’s police training requirements are only in effect when the state provides the money to pay for the training, and that funding is given at the whim of state lawmakers. Gov. Mike DeWine has suggested taxing insurance premiums as a permanent funding source, but that idea has previously met resistance from the insurance industry and tax-averse conservative lawmakers.
The Chronic: If a majority of Ohioans vote for the recreational marijuana proposal Nov. 7, they will likely have to wait until 2024 to begin purchasing adult-use weed from dispensaries. Laura Hancock explains how the proposal gives state regulators some time to pass rules to create the recreational program and issue adult-use licenses to businesses. The proposal also allows for home grow, but people likely couldn’t begin cultivating plants until at least a month after the Nov. 7 election. An opposition campaign to the recreational proposal says this timeline of expanding access to marijuana would be too fast.
Stuck online: Northeast Ohioans who won a class action lawsuit against FirstEnergy say their $10 to $20 winnings are stranded in “digital payment” form. Jake Zuckerman looks at what the plaintiffs are saying, and why they didn’t just get money as a check or knocked off their electric bill.
Another no: Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost once again rejected the proposed language for a constitutional amendment that would scale back legal protections for police and other government officials on a future ballot. This marks Yost’s sixth time rejecting the proposal, this time for “omissions and misstatements that, as a whole, would mislead a potential signer as to the actual scope and effect of the proposed amendment.”
Media-shy spokesperson: Northeast Ohio congressional candidate Madison Gesiotto Gilbert has accepted a new job as national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and is no longer running for Congress in Ohio’s 13th congressional district, Sabrina Eaton reports. Elevated by an endorsement from ex-President Donald Trump, Gilbert last year won a crowded GOP primary for the chance to take on Akron Democrat Emilia Strong Sykes, and got 47% of the vote against her last November. Gesiotto Gilbert refused to grant on-the-record interviews to Ohio media outlets including Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer throughout her 2022 campaign, and only agreed to answer questions via email through a campaign spokesman.
Coming to terms: Does limiting the amount of time that an elected officeholder can serve lead to better government? Eaton reports that whether term limits drain talent or drain the swamp, they’ve been popular with voters. If Ohio’s experience is any indication, they’ve added to partisanship and made it harder to pass legislation.
Lawmakers for opacity: A panel of state legislative staffers at a conference in Indianapolis urged lawmakers across the country to adopt laws that guard against public access to legislative documents, Gongwer reports. A top lawyer for the Alabama legislature said it’s necessary to give lawmakers a “safe space.” A top lawyer for Texas’ legislature said the process of how lawmakers arrived at a decision is irrelevant. Ohio lawmakers were in attendance at the conference hosted by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Bank withdrawal: U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Champaign County Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, on Thursday subpoenaed Citibank for documents and communications related to a probe of major banks giving the FBI information about customers’ transactions made in the Washington, D.C., area around Jan. 6, 2021. “Federal law enforcement’s use of back-channel discussions with financial institutions as a method to investigate and obtain private financial data of Americans is alarming,” said a letter Jordan sent Citibank CEO Sunil Garg. It said his committee recently obtained documents “that raise new concerns regarding the extent to which financial institutions, including Citibank, may have shared customer information with federal law enforcement despite the customers having no individualized nexus to criminal conduct.”
Censored: The next day, Jordan sent letters to Yoel Roth, former Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, and Chris Krebs, former Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), requesting transcribed interviews related to his committee’s ongoing censorship investigation. “We believe that you are uniquely positioned to aid the Committee’s oversight, as you served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which, under your leadership, participated in efforts to unconstitutionally monitor and censor Americans’ speech on social media platforms,” Jordan said in a letter to Krebs.
Here’s five things we learned from the May 3, 2023 financial disclosure statement for state Rep. Riordan McClain, an Upper Sandusky Republican.
1. Aside from his legislative salary, he earned between $1,000 and $10,000 from SD Depository for “construction”
2. He’s an owner of Five 17 Homes LLC
3. He disclosed investments in two retirement funds, a mutual fund and a life insurance policy
4. He reported no gifts from lobbyists
5. He ate a meal worth $15.86 paid for by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation
Terra Goodnight, Innovation Ohio’s policy director
The late Doug Green, a former state lawmaker from Mt. Orab
Lauren LaRose, wife of Secretary of State Frank LaRose
“Look, I don’t think the governor should be on there. I don’t think the legislators should be on there either.”
-Gov. Mike DeWine to Gongwer, saying he doesn’t think politicians belong on the panel that draws the maps establishing political boundary lines.
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