From the monthly archives: March 2011
Remember Red Herring from the short-lived “A Pup Called Scooby-Doo” cartoon series – the red-headed bully that Freddie mistakenly blamed for all the mishap?
Red Herring has been recast in Governor Kasich’s first budget as a small consumer call center located in the scruffy consumer agency that is at times considered a thorn in the side of Ohio’s utilities – the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.
The thirty-five-year-old agency will sustain a 51 percent budget cut should Kasich’s budget proposal be passed, or $4.1 million, impacting the agency’s ability to intervene in the variety of utility legal [...]
Full Story... →“There’s a silent majority out there [supporting the legislation], I believe."- State Senator Kevin Bacon
[Source: Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2011]
So silent that they apparently weren’t picked up by the latest Quinnipiac and PPP polls. Seriously, absent a poll from an outfit that begins with an R and rhymes with Assmussen, this would be the most silent invisible majority in the history of public polling.
In case Chairman Bacon has forgotten, the ONLY reason Kasich would be polling this bad is due to opposition to SB 5. Only one poll came out after Kasich’s budget [...]
Full Story... →Thirty-five years ago, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel was born, the product of legislation introduced by a fresh-faced State Representative named Sherrod Brown, to represent customers of public utilities in Ohio and give them a voice against powerful interests.
Today, that agency is threatened by budget cuts and proposed changes to its mission which would limit the ability of the agency to fight for fairness for Ohio consumers.
This isn’t the story of insiders, bureaucratic malaise, or politics at its worst. It is a story of David versus Goliath, and an example of the philosophical differences raging in the Ohio capital [...]
Full Story... →Back home in Scioto County, over 500 people showed up to protest Governor Kasich’s budget that calls for the closure of the Department of Youth Services facility there and the over 300 jobs in an area known for high unemployment and crushing levels of poverty already.
According to the Portsmouth Daily Times (disclosure: whom I used to work for), freshman GOP State Representative Terry Johnson was the only elected Republican to appear at the rally. Senate President Niehaus, who represents the folks who live and work at the facility did not attend nor send anyone to represent him. Nor [...]
Full Story... →Alan Johnson sent this tweet from the Kasich presser this morning:
Kasich’s statement is laughable given the history of phone-related failures in his own office…
When Kasich redesigned the Governor’s website he intentionally left off any contact information – including email addresses and phone numbers.
When we found the number for the Governor’s office and called, no one answered. For days the phones when straight to voicemail.
Eventually calls stopped going to voice mail, a sure sign the voice mailbox filled up.
And during the Statehouse lockout, people [...]
Full Story... →In August 21, 2009, the Columbus Dispatch reported that the Strickland Administration had balanced the State’s budget by “raiding” what are called “rotary” funds that provide assistance for the blind and organ transplants. Buried in the story was that the State budget contained statutory authorization to allow such transfers. Omitted entirely until later coverage was the fact that this was a very common practice that prior Administrations had done with no controversy.
Of course, the anti-Strickland right pounced and none more quickly than Jon Keeling at Third Base Politics. Keeling, who eventually was quietly put on the Ohio [...]
Full Story... →One of the big “reforms” in Senate Bill 5 is the elimination of existing minimum pay scales for teachers. It also does away with pay increases based on experience. The original version of SB5 replaced experience-based raises with a poorly defined merit-based pay requirement. And the bill that finally passed the Senate had been amended to include a set of “performance measures” that may seem to be slightly less biased but turn out to be just as confusing, possibly harder to interpret and, if passed into law, will be nearly impossible to implement without setting off a landslide of legal [...]
Full Story... →This week, Sen. Tim Grendell (R-Tea Party), finally got one of his pet grandstanding ideas passed: banning the use of stimulus dollars to pay for signs identifying the use of stimulus dollars. Does it matter that the signs have already been made? No. Does it matter that GOP critics have often complained about a lack of transparency in ARRA spending? No. Does it matter that Kasich was inaugurated on a Monday and state workers had put his name on the freeway welcome signs by Friday? Does it matter that this has nothing to do with creating jobs [...]
Full Story... →As Brian reported on Friday, SB5 is scheduled for amendments and a possible committee vote in the House on Tuesday. We don’t have a list of the proposed amendments yet – most likely there will be some kind of concessions to the police and fire unions and a reworking of the binding arbitration replacement proposed in the senate bill – but I can guarantee you this: teacher will still be getting screwed in this bill.
John Kasich promised “to break the backs of organized labor in the schools” during the campaign. And so far he’s doing his damnedest to [...]
Full Story... →Case Wester Reserve School of Law revealed last week that Bradley Smith was on the short list for consideration as the school’s new dean. The announcement has sparked opposition including the creation of a website called CaseAgainstSmith.com which claims Smith has “long advocated for extremist views”.
As an anti-campaign finance activist and the former head of the FEC, Smith has admitted to waging “long-term ideological warfare” on campaign finance rules and, according to the New York Times, has been successful in his efforts to “roll back Watergate-era campaign finance restrictions through attacks in Congress, in the courts, at the [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
