From the monthly archives: September 2011
Republicans have tried to paint Senate Bill 5 as a reasonable response to the Public Employee Collective Bargaining bill signed by Governor Celeste in 1983. The bill expanded collective bargaining rights to “six hundred thousand public employees including teachers, firefighters, police officers, state and local service workers [that] could not only form and join a union, but also enjoy legal rights in negotiating workplace contracts with the public employer.”
According to Kasich insider Chan Cochran SB5 is “an ‘equal and opposite’ reaction to the excesses of 1983″. Cochran blames, among other things, the current $8 billion dollar deficit [...]
Full Story... →Bill Cohen followed up on our story about GOP Senate staff raises with State Senate GOP spokesperson John McClelland who confirmed the raises and provided what seemed like a reasonable response:
“Why in the middle of a serious budget crunch is the Senate giving pay hikes? Republican McClelland says it’s to keep hard working staffers with what he calls ‘institutional knowledge’ on the job. He said some have been offered jobs elsewhere and senate leaders don’t want to lose them.”
I couldn’t agree more. ALL Hard working, experienced public employees deserve to be paid fairly for their service, [...]
Full Story... →The Columbus Dispatch beat us to the punch (darn you, Joe Vardon). The Republican Governors Association is running ads under the committee name “Make Ohio Great” that will promote Kasich’s agenda.
Mike Schrimpf, a spokesman for the RGA, said in an email to The Dispatch last night that Make Ohio Great is “connected to the RGA and was formed to support all of Gov. Kasich’s agenda.”
“In fact, when you watch the first ad … you’ll see that SB 5 isn’t even mentioned,” Schrimpf said.
Media buys for both Building a Better Ohio and Make Ohio Great were made [...]
Full Story... →On January 20th, 2011, Governor Kasich released additional details of his JobsOhio plan to privatize certain functions of the Ohio Department of Development. Governor Kasich boldly promised that he, as Governor, would be directly involved with economic development in the State, a slap at Governor Strickland and other past Governors that allowed others to run the Ohio Department of Development’s efforts. Kasich also boldly promised that JobsOhio would be “self-funding” in that it could rely on private funding sources from the business sector alone and would eliminate the need for sustained State funding. More importantly, John Kasich said [...]
Full Story... →Out of sheer morbid curiosity, I wanted to see what Governor Kasich had to say about Labor Day today, so I went to the Governor’s website to see if he had issued a resolution.
This is what I got instead:
Poor server couldn’t handle the file name. Kasich—- Labor Day Resolution…. Does… Not…. Compute…. ERROR! ERROR!
Funny thing is, I’ve got the feeling the people of Ohio come November will reach the same conclusion on Issue 2, that SB 5 is damaged and could not repaired. Vote No on Issue 2!
Full Story... →Plunderbund research reveals that GOP Senate President Tom Niehaus, leader of the brain trust behind a bill to strip benefits from rank and file public employees, and champion of a budget that makes painful cuts to nearly every program in the state, has now committed the ultimate act of hypocrisy.
Let’s remember, the Senate GOP is responsible for passing a state budget that steals hundreds of millions of dollars from local governments, redirecting it to the state’s piggybank – a move that forced mayors, county commissioners and township trustees statewide to decide between cutting vital services like police and fire, [...]
Full Story... →Last Saturday, based on recently released school data from the Ohio Department of Education, we calculated and published a list of the 6,333 teachers and 349 schools who would be impacted by the new Retesting Teachers law initiated by Governor John Kasich in his state budget bill (HB153). The reaction to our post was swift. Before the end of the day, over 2,000 people had accessed The List.
Teachers around Ohio called their friends to share the information and still others burned up the phone lines of their union leaders to inquire about the effects. On Tuesday, [...]
Full Story... →Labor Day weekend is the traditional start of the campaign session, especially the paid television spots. Today, We Are Ohio announced that they would use the Labor Day weekend to remind people the reason for the season.
According to various media reports, it’s an impressive initial statewide ad buy. The Dispatch reported yesterday that We Are Ohio is spending $60,000 to air this ad through Sept. 12 (with a blackout on Sept. 11), on WBNS in Columbus alone.
We’re only sixty-seven days away from the election. Right now, all public polling data shows a clear [...]
Full Story... →Details about Kasich and Kvamme’s implementation plan for JobsOhio are finally starting to come out and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the problems with JobsOhio’s lack of oversight and transparency are not going to go away.
ProgressOhio has made the news lately discussing the announcement that Kasich would be setting aside a “$24 million pool of Third Frontier funds for distribution to local chambers of commerce and other private, regional economic development agencies.” As ProgressOhio points out, “The announcement came after most of the agencies or their partners endorsed SB5″ – leaving a lot of unanswered questions about who [...]
Full Story... →Well, isn’t this an interesting case of irony. Issue 3, the “Ohio Healthcare Freedom Amendment”, the constitutional amendment on the ballot this November that is being championed by Tea Party groups as an effort to repeal the individual mandate in the recently enacted Affordable Care Act (ACA) is so sloppily worded and ambiquous that only one thing is for certain – if it passes the people who make out the most will be attorneys who will litigate the hell out of it.
The progressive think tank Innovation Ohio released a report yesterday highlighting the fact that the language of [...]
Full Story... →Balancing it with “no time” money.
Like prison privatization proceeds that was supposed to be nearly $200 million? Or State revenues from growth in the economy that has already not performed as projected? For the last two months, Kasich has been touring the national political circuit telling anyone who’d book him that he solved Ohio’s “unprecedented” budget crisis. Apparently, Kasich forgot that a budget is a plan, and not necessarily the reality. Before you declare your budget is balanced, perhaps you should wait a month into it first. Had Kasich done that, Kasich would have realized Full Story... →
Budget Watch
