(gentle music) - Cuyahoga County is eyeing a Garfield Heights location for a new jail.

The city of Aurora has new plans for the old SeaWorld and the Ohio Senate budget has passed and it's now headed to reconciliation to settle differences with the Ohio House.

Ideas is next.

(gentle music) Hello and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It's been nearly five years since the US Marshals Report found conditions inside the outdated Cuyahoga County Jail inhumane.

There's been much effort, but little consensus toward finding a site for a new jail.

This week, Cuyahoga County executive Chris Ronayne, said a parcel in Garfield Heights would be the right spot.

He also is proposing a 40-year extension of the county's quarter percent sales tax to pay for it.

The Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Ohio ballot board to rewrite the language for state issue one.

That's the issue set for an August election to make it harder to pass an amendment to the state constitution.

Opponents of the issue say the new language is still misleading.

The city of Aurora has a new plan for some land that was once part of the old SeaWorld.

It includes buying Geauga Lake, the body of water, not the amusement park, and creating a public recreation space.

And the Ohio Senate passed its version of the state budget packing in measures that had been considering as separate bills, including the one overhauling higher education lawmakers in both the House and Senate must hammer out differences before the June 30th deadline.

Joining me to talk about all of this on this week's round table in studio from Ideastream Public Media, Senior Arts reporter, Kabir Bhatia and Criminal Justice reporter, Matt Richmond.

In Columbus, Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau Chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to round table.

Cuyahoga County executive Chris Ronayne will present legislation to county council next week proposing a 72-acre parcel of land in Garfield Heights as the site for a new county jail.

In addition, proposing the Garfield Heights site, Ronayne is expected to introduce legislation to extend the quarter percent sales tax in the county for another 40 years to pay for it.

Let's start, Matt, with the site, Garfield Heights ticks a number of boxes for Ronayne and the one it doesn't, the main one is that it's not in Cleveland, but the most important thing is it's clean.

- Yeah.

It's, you know, an open piece of land that doesn't have, I mean, clean, you know, it's a relative term.

- Cleanish.

- Yeah, cleanish.

- It's cleaner than the previous account executive site, which was in the Industrial Valley and had been an oil refinery and was, and needed a lot of remediation.

This one, you know, has been prepared in the past and was kind of an economic development site ready to go.

- Now it's outside the city, which is probably gonna be where a lot of debate comes from that and how to pay for it.

But it's pretty close.

And the idea is it's not a city jail.

It's a county jail.

- Yeah.

It's about 10 miles, like about a 17-minute drive from the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland.

And, you know, parts of the city that, you know, the southern part of the city would be closer to this site than the Justice Center.

Other parts would be quite a bit further.

And so, you know, the point that county Executive Ronayne makes is that, you know, we're a county of 1.2 million people and while Cleveland is you know, city center and the county seed is important, we have to serve the whole county and this site kind of all because of all of its advantages, it's the best site.

- What happens now though is the city of Cleveland is collecting taxes from the people that work at the jail.

And most of the people who are detained at the jail are from the city of Cleveland.

So, there's some argument that, well, it should be a Cleveland property.

- Yeah.

So, so far the city council members, several, a couple of them recently went to county council to try to lobby them because this'll go county council's gonna make the decision to buy the land they're gonna make, they're gonna vote on the sales tax increase.

And then any sort of spending on the actual jail that's built gonna have to go through county council.

So they're gonna have a lot of say this and that's where city officials have so far been kind of trying to slow the process down, let's say.

And the Mayor Bibb, who was on some of ideas this this week, said, you know, didn't outright say that he doesn't want it built there, but said that, you know, he needs to learn more and the most important thing is that there is a humane jail built and he would like it to stay in the city of Cleveland.

- It was a terrific non-answer.

And what he said was, yeah, his most important thing is that he wants a humane jail.

He also said, I wanna be a regional partner and that doesn't like sound like somebody that says, you know, by no means can you build this anywhere other than Cleveland.

So it sounds like there's still a lot, there's been a lot of discussion, there's still a lot that'll go on.

- Yeah, and I think the pro like, and Chris Ronayne said this, it's really hard to find a piece of land like this within Cleveland that's not in the Industrial Valley, that's not extremely contaminated and needs a lot of cleanup.

So, you know, basically give me a good alternative and we'll try that.

- Now it's gonna cost tens of millions of dollars to acquire the property and then a whole lot more to build the actual jail.

We have a quarter percent sales tax that was initiated to pay for the Global Center for Health Innovation and the convention center upgrades, it's supposed to expire in 2027.

And so your sales taxes in Cuyahoga County wouldn't be 8% anymore.

They'd peel down a little bit.

And all along on the campaign trail, Chris Ronayne had been saying, this is something the public needs to talk about.

He didn't say I wouldn't install it, he didn't say I would, it would only be a vote.

Although one of his spokespersons did say that during the campaign that it'd have to be a public vote, but this is an unvoted extension of the sales tax by 40 years.

And it's in the legislation.

- Yeah, he is, you know, and he hasn't talked about that so much.

He didn't mention that when he had announced the piece of land that he's also putting, you know, while he's putting the legislation to purchase the land.

At the same time he's putting in the sales tax extension.

So he hasn't come out and said that, you know, this money is going to go towards a jail of this cost and then there'll be some left over for the courthouse.

All those details still are not clear and he hasn't actually said how expensive the jail that he would like to build on this piece of land is gonna be, and you know, it could become something after Coastal County Council that's then put up for a vote.

That options still exist, but that's not in the legislation.

- And it doesn't have to you, they do have the right to extend this sales tax without a public vote.

- Correct.

- But they do have to have public meetings and some hearings and input.

- Right.

- We'll see how that pans out.

In the meanwhile, some of the issues about the location of the property, and think about this as logistics.

Right now you have a courthouse right next to a jail, and by the way, the courthouse is going to need be addressed too at some point.

And that's gonna be very expensive.

Right now the courthouse would still be in downtown Cleveland.

The jail would be, as you mentioned, 10 miles away.

You know, lawyers have offices right next to the courthouse 'cause they dash over for hearings and go back to their office.

You have to transport inmates back and forth.

In fact, Chief Wayne Drummond was asked on the sound of ideas this week, is he concerned about police being off the street because they're ferrying people back and forth.

And he said that's a concern.

I mean he didn't rule it out same as the mayor, but he said that would be a concern as well.

But what about that, the logistics and transportation issue?

- Yeah, that's gonna be somebody who covers some court cases.

One of the things that you notice that the judges there love to do is kind of shift court times around, kind of have last minute hearings.

They enjoy the flexibility of having pretty immediate access to detainees 'cause you know, they just have to call over, have them bring somebody, you know, upstairs to the court.

- Right now.

- Yeah, they can do things like that.

They won't be able to do that so much anymore when it's, you know, it's gonna have to be organized, it's gonna have to be, buses are gonna be going back and forth a couple times a day.

So, that's going to be difficult.

And then, you know, the sort of flip side of that is that when people are being released from jail, it's not exactly orderly.

There's kind of a trickling and you know, a lot of people get out at 10, 11 o'clock at night and this site is on a bus line, but it's a single bus line.

Whereas, you know, downtown is a hub.

So there are buses and transits kind of go all over and you know, it's in a suburb where there's, you might have some people kind of wandering around not sure where to go.

Not in a rush to get anywhere.

And how is that going to be gonna be addressed is a big open question.

- And this jail is taking 72 acres of, I think like an 80-acre plot.

So there wouldn't be room, it seems to, if you decided to build a new county courthouse to put that right next to it.

So, that's still is coming.

That bill is still coming due.

The county courthouse can't stay as is.

Right?

- Yeah and actually, I don't know, people might forget at the end of the process during the previous county executive when, you know, there was a bill for the new jail and there was an estimation how much money would come in.

From the sales tax kind of when you did the math, there was no money left over for the courthouse.

And so, you know, administrative Judge Sheehan and prosecutor O'Malley sent a letter saying, look, if you're just gonna leave us out and not do the needed work on the courthouse, like that's gonna be a problem and we're gonna get a lawyer and you know, don't forget about us.

So there needs to kind of at least be an acknowledgement that something's gotta be do done about the courthouse.

Now I mean the previous study kind of looked at a piece of land of between like 40 and 50 acres for a jail.

And so this has extra room.

- Okay.

- And there's one, you know, it's an 80-acre plot of land they're purchasing and there's one like 10 acre portion of it, 8 to 10 acre portion that's just blocked off for future private development.

So, you know, there is the possibility that the courts could go there.

And some people have said like, there's no way that they're gonna be able to pull this off without putting the courts next to it.

But yes, you know, they're eventually gonna have to figure out what to do about that building too.

(gentle music) - The Ohio Supreme Court sent the Ohio ballot board back to work this week to rewrite the language.

Voters will see when they decide state issue one in August, that issue would raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60%.

It would also increase the signature requirements for putting citizen-led amendments on the ballot.

While all amendments whether proposed by citizens or lawmakers would be subject to 60% only citizen-led issues would have to meet the tougher signature requirements.

And that was Karen part of the big change in terms of the language?

- Yeah, it was interesting.

There's two lawsuits that have been filed with the Ohio Supreme Court over issue one.

And again, that's the constitutional amendment that would be on the August ballot that would require 60% voter approval to amend future for future constitutional amendments.

Not that one, that would just have to pass by a simple majority.

And it also makes some changes for these citizen groups that are trying to put amendments before voters.

And so the ballot board met to make these changes that were ordered by the Ohio Supreme Court.

They were small, but they are important.

I mean when you go to the ballot or when you get your ballot and you see the title of this, there's the title is elevating the standards to qualify for and to pass any constitutional amendment.

The Supreme Court said any, that's not fair because this is about citizen amendments, not about amendments from state lawmakers.

And so they had to change that.

They also had to change a number in there about the requirement of signatures per county.

It seems very technical, but it really does show that there are some things in this summary that certainly folks say are not accurate, could be misleading, and that could potentially be a problem for people who are confused about what issue one would actually do.

- Right.

And then when you talked about the percentage of voters, when you grab, when you gather the signatures, the ballot language had said the percentage of the electorate, and it isn't, it's the percentage of those who actually voted in the last governor's election.

- Right.

It's a big difference because between the number 5% of the number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election, which is about 414,000, at least in terms of the signatures that are being gathered this time versus 5% of all registered voters.

And you know, there are 8 million registered voters in Ohio, so that makes a huge difference.

And even the ballot board admitted in its court filing that, yeah, that wasn't right.

We need to fix that.

And so they did.

But of course Democrats say there were other things that needed to be fixed and those who are opposed issue ones say there were other things that need to be fixed, but those are the only two things that got fixed.

- Yeah.

Including what you started with the word elevating the one person one vote says that's a loaded word, it sounds positive, it shouldn't be used, it should be another kind of word.

And the Supreme Court said, listen, we're, it means the same thing is raising and we're not here to pick which word is better than the other.

- Right.

It's the connotation of elevating meaning moving to a higher level and making better maybe.

I think that was the argument they were trying to make.

But one of the other arguments that they've tried to make, and they tried to make this before the ballot board and we're not successful, is that there's nothing in this that says what the current standard is that this amendment would make future constitutional amendments need 60% voter approval, but it doesn't say right now that amendments need only a simple majority of 50% plus one.

So they're saying that that's misleading on its face there as well.

(gentle music) - The city of Aurora is pursuing the purchase of Geauga Lake, the body of water, not the amusement park.

The city wants to buy the lake and about 40 acres of adjacent property, the old SeaWorld to create a new public park with a pool beach and non-motorized boating.

Mayor Anne Wool Benjamin says, the potential purchase is the opportunity of a lifetime for Aurora.

Kabir.

All you have to do is say, Geauga Lake Sea.

- Oh man.

- SeaWorld.

And suddenly everyone wants to know more.

- Yes.

The floodgates open.

People still miss it.

It's still a shock that it closed.

I feel like even though it's been 16 years or the wild water kingdom, the subsequent, the sequel waterpark, it's been, what, seven years since that closed.

But yeah, people have such fond memories.

It was here for a hundred and some years.

So people have fond memories and they're glad to see this.

- When you think about Geauga Lake and SeaWorld property is vast, so there's all kinds of different things going on.

There's housing development and other things that are going on in what used to be Geauga Lake.

It's never gonna be an amusement park again, there was an effort by some to try to return it.

But now we see that the SeaWorld pocket is going to become something that gives you access to the actual Geauga Lake.

- Yeah, I mean, well this is what it started as.

It was Giles Pond, you know, 102, almost 200 years ago.

And it was a recreation area with picnic.

People wanted to be on the water, near the water.

The actual Lake.

Geauga Lake itself, as a subsequently was called.

That's what's gonna be bought.

And then about 40 acres along that.

But as you mentioned, on either side of that, there's a big retail area on one side.

Then there's housing where wild water kingdom used to be.

But then there's 377 acres in the center, which has the Geauga Lake has the land we're talking about former SeaWorld.

It's just been sitting there, the huge parking lot there taunting us for the last 16 years.

That's all been sitting.

But finally they're doing something with all that.

And this portion will be for the city.

- Millions of dollars.

How does the city plan to pay for it?

- Part of it's ARPA funds the rest from the general funds.

So as the mayor said, it's chance of a lifetime.

And that's really what I think she's trying to put across to council and everyone, because most communities, if they even have such a feature like this, they might not have the funds or the Land Conservancy or the foresight to preserve something like this.

- If you went to the property now, is there any indication of what it once was?

- Little.

I haven't been by there in about a year, but you could still kind of make out where the driveways were and some signage.

The one maintenance building was there the last time I went by, but mostly, no, I think the last coaster to come down I think was the Big Dipper, which was at one time that was the entrance, the wooden coaster.

And there's drone footage of that online.

You can see it just before they took it down and it's the person who did it also put sad music.

So that doesn't help.

It's heartbreaking.

- The aquarium for SeaWorld is still there.

- That's still there.

- A part according to this development plan that might become a restaurant.

- That might become a restaurant.

- Seafood restaurant.

- So I was gonna say seafood, whatever they serve there, I hope it's not something that was at SeaWorld 16, 20 years ago.

But that could become a restaurant, it could be, who knows, the infrastructure there is extremely solid.

I was reading about four-foot thick concrete foundations that the company that's remediating and and gonna be developing the rest of the land, they're having to take those down and it's taking forever because that was very solid infrastructure.

(gentle music) - The Ohio Senate passed its version of the two-year state operating budget yesterday.

The 85.8 billion proposal, as we discussed last week, would overhaul public education and expand the use of private school vouchers.

It also seeks to cut taxes by eliminating all but two of the state's tax brackets.

The budget must be passed and signed by June 30th.

Karen, as expected, what this budget has is a bunch of bills we've talked about with numbers in the past and now they just said, let's throw that all into the budget.

What's the thinking behind that?

- That happens almost all the time, right?

Because budgets have to pass.

And so if policy, if there's lawmakers, if there's policy that lawmakers wanna see passed, they kind of throw it into the budget.

And for instance, former Governor John Kasek, you saw a lot of abortion related policy that got thrown into the budget.

I should say that the budget is, there's different numbers that are being thrown around.

We're calling it a 94 million budget because it is regular funds also along with some federal COVID relief funds, the last of those funds that are being spent and some big projects going on there.

So the numbers do bounce around a little bit and that's why.

But yeah, this budget includes a couple of different provisions with regard to education that we've talked about.

Senate Bill 83, that's the one.

And you've probably heard Ken Schneck talk about that one.

In fact earlier, I think earlier this week, that's the bill that would seek to overhaul higher education to address some of the concerns that Republicans specifically have about what they call indoctrination and bias on college campuses.

And it would ban most diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

Faculty strikes require what it's calling intellectual diversity to be expressed on certain topics, which it's specifically names, that's in the bill, all also in the budget.

There is this proposal to overhaul the state school board and the Ohio Department of Education, make it the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and give the governor the power that the elected state board, state school board members have.

And basically make a gubernatorial appointee in charge of that state school board, make the state school board basically an advisory panel and not be the authority that is right now in terms of making certain decisions.

- Since some of these things were not in the house budget and they're in the Senate budget, when we get to reconciliation, who has the power, who's gonna prevail here?

- That's a really good question.

There were reports earlier that Senate President Matt Huffman, who is term limited and it's no secret that he wants to run for the house and possibly run for speaker that he had been trying to avoid a conference committee and trying to work behind the scenes to get this budget pushed forward as the Senate had changed it.

While speaker Jason Stevens, who is not term limited and certainly one would expect, would wanna keep his position as speaker, he has said, no, this is gonna go to a conference committee.

There are some concerns.

He's interested in having the dialogue about some of these things.

But I mean there are some big changes here.

There's changes to the proposal on income taxes, the income tax cut, there's obviously these policy measures that were added in.

They've passed the Senate but have not passed the house and just some other changes that really do bring attention to the differences between these two budgets.

(gentle music) - Cleveland police responded this week to what leadership described as misleading national news reports on missing children in the city.

Chief Wayne Drummond says missing youth cases are up 20% from last year.

But he says there's no evidence that kidnapping or child trafficking is behind the increase.

Matt, Chief Drummond attributes most of these cases to runaways.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

He said particularly at this time of a year with school out, the weather getting warm, a lot more kids are just not coming home 'cause they, you know, wanna do other things.

- Yeah.

The chief was very careful to say, I'm not saying these aren't important things.

All of them are if a child is missing, but in most cases it isn't.

What you might think when you see here 27 are missing the last two weeks, do you think someone's running around snatching up kids?

- Right.

- And that isn't necessarily the case.

The department does have different protocols to handle different circumstances of missing juveniles, contrary to what people might think.

There's no minimum time someone has to be missing before a report is filed.

- Yeah, I think that maybe came from TV.

I don't know what probably they-- - Yeah, you'd go and they go, oh, you gotta wait three days.

- Yeah, yeah that's not a thing at least in Cleveland.

And you know, they have somebody in each police district who is dedicated this say a dedicated detective.

They have a patrol car that's kind of available in each district to go and follow up on these calls.

And then somebody in downtown who's sort of like a liaison and looks at all the reports from the previous night and sees what needs to be kind of kicked up.

And he says that, you know, if it's anybody under 13 that goes to Chief Drummond and says that goes to his desk and he starts kind of, he says, ringing the bells, getting people to pay attention to it.

And then you know, if the initial call is, well we got in a fight and my child left and I haven't seen him in a few hours or a day, that is kind of categorized in one way as a likely runaway.

If it's, somebody saw this child picked up off the street, grabbed and thrown in the back of a car that is of course handled as something much more serious.

And then they have detectives and the commander in the district gets involved.

So, you know, they can learn enough in the initial call to get an idea about what's probably going on.

And they investigate everything.

(gentle music) - The city of Cleveland named its first Arts Czar yesterday.

Rhonda K. Brown will be the city's senior strategist for arts, culture and the creative economy.

Kabir, what is this position, what's the city hoping to do with it?

- Arts Czar is I think a good way.

It's the point person for anything doing with the arts.

Whether it's, I wanna hold a street fair festival, I need funding for a mural in my neighborhood.

Or large cultural institutions like say museums, the rock hall that want to come to the city and say, we have this idea expansion, you name it, it's going to be in theory going through this person who's going to sort of bridge the economic development and creative sectors in Cleveland.

- Well, arts is huge.

And we've seen studies about the impact to the economy of arts in northeast Ohio.

- Yes.

- Brown's family interesting history, broke barriers in the arts world.

- Yes.

Both her parents have a strong education and arts background.

They opened the first for-profit, black-owned art gallery in Shaker Heights, which is where she's from.

The Malcolm Brown Gallery, which I think was around in from 1980 for like 30 years.

And they brought a lot of artists to this area for performances.

Alvin Ailey dance troop, all sorts of things during that time, they both unfortunately passed away, but they were really big patrons of the arts.

And obviously they instilled that in their daughter 'cause she's an artist herself.

And then she's got this fabulous background with development in philanthropy that she's gonna bring to Cleveland.

- Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann died last week at the age of 77.

He led the Canton Symphony for half its existence, was born in Van Wirt and wanted to play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

But childhood polio redirected his life's passion to music.

He oversaw the construction of the Symphony's current home, which bears his name.

The Zimmerman Symphony Center opened in 2014.

Kabir, I got a notice from ML Schulze who lives in Canton.

And formerly of WKSU over the weekend.

And she said, listen, this is a huge deal if you don't know who this person is, but beloved in the community.

- Oh, beloved, absolutely.

He brought, I mean, the orchestra was, of course, as you said, for 43 years it had existed when he came aboard in 1980 and it was known and everything, but it's like on the world stage now.

He took it to a new level and he got, as you said, the building reconstructed.

And it's an amazing facility where they play.

He really upped the level of musicianship, diversified a lot of their repertoires.

So he will definitely be missed.

And he was there right till the end of his life.

- What a wonderful thing to be able to say goodbye.

And he was able to do that to the public.

- He was, he sent this beautiful letter about four or five days before he passed, just thanking the community for their support, saying, I'll always be with you in spirit, you know, continue this love of music.

So many of the people after he passed commented on that note was so that letter was so indicative of his spirit and his love of music, and it's something that a lot of people will cherish.

So fortunately he got to do that before he passed.

(gentle music) - Monday on the sound of Ideas, on WKSU, our team is off for the Juneteenth holiday.

In our time slot, we'll bring you a special house full of black women.

It focuses on a group of women in the Oakland Bay area who've been gathering together for the last eight years around a dining table once a month to discuss the issues facing their community and black women nationwide.

If that interests you, check out The Living For We podcast by Ideastream Public Media, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching and stay safe.

(gentle music)