(soft music) - The Ohio Legislature limits Governor Mike DeWine's power to issue public health orders by overriding his veto of their bill, as the power struggle between Republican legislators and the Republican governor continues.

Meanwhile, Ohio's progress in tamping down COVID-19 cases stalled this week.

And some good news, eligibility for vaccines is about to open up to everyone 16 and over with a record number of doses on its way to Ohio.

Ideas is next.

(soft music) - [Advertiser] Brought to you by Westfield, offering insurance to protect what's yours, grow your business and achieve your dreams.

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Ideas, I'm Mike MacIntyre.

Ohio Republicans hip-checked Governor Mike DeWine this week as legislators voted to override the governor's veto of a bill that would limit his ability to issue public health orders.

Lawmakers say the bill provides a necessary check on the governor's power.

DeWine says it would restrict a governor's ability to act decisively in an emergency.

Is this headed to court?

Ohio is on pace to receive more than half a million doses of COVID-19 vaccine next week.

To distribute them quickly, the state will employ more mass vaccination clinics and throw open eligibility to anyone over the age of 16.

Lawmakers sent the state's transportation budget to the governor, providing far more for public transit than he proposed.

The legislature has finally moved to eliminate fees to subsidize aging nuclear power plants, part of scandal-tainted House Bill six.

The bill heads to the governor's desk.

And we're getting our first look at plans for the National Football League draft to be held in Cleveland.

How will the pandemic fit into the game plan?

Joining me this week to discuss all these stories and more is ideastream health reporter, Anna Huntsman, WKSU reporter Kabir Bhatia, and Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau chief, Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to round table.

Senate Bill 22 will go into effect in 90 days unless it's challenged in court.

Karen, here's the governor talking about that yesterday.

- We have the ability in the next 89 days, I say 89 days because that's bill doesn't go into effect for 89 days.

We have the ability to end this.

We can drive this virus to the ground but it's gonna take all of us.

- He obviously believes that the legislature isn't just putting a check and balance on that, they're ready to just strip these powers and to get rid of these orders as soon as they can.

- Well, I think he has to be prepared for that because that certainly is one of the things that could happen as a result of them passing Senate Bill 22, as it's known, at this time because the question of whether the governor has the power to issue executive orders and health orders in emergencies, that could be settled at any point, but the fact that we're still in a pandemic situation and there still are some orders that some lawmakers don't like, I mean, he has to assume that there was a reason they went ahead with this bill, and this was of course the second time that this bill at least in some form had come up, he had vetoed it last time and there was not an attempt to override that veto but this time there was so I presume that he's operating under the assumption that, if indeed this law does go into effect that in 90 days there would be an attempt to try to override some if not all of the restrictions that he's put into place.

- He went to the effort of vetoing this in the first place, will he go to the effort of challenging it in court?

- Well, I asked him that yesterday as a matter of fact because he said that his tape that you just played there implied to me that he wasn't going to try to challenge it in court, and I think a lot of people had expected that.

He said in answer to my question, my opinion about the constitutionality does not change, whether we file something or somebody else does at some point, I don't know.

So that implies to me that either his team hasn't decided yet whether they're gonna go to court over it, and he even made a comment in the press conference about, now it's time for state lawmakers and the governor's office to work together.

So that kind of suggested that maybe he wasn't gonna file anything, but certainly there are other entities, there was a lot of opposition to this bill, when you start looking at the Ohio Hospital Association, the major health systems in the state, the County Commissioners Association, the Health Commissioners of Ohio, there were a lot of groups that were opposed to this, and so I could see the governor's office joining in and filing supporting documents if somebody else decides to take it to court, but right now we just don't know.

- Anna, what are you hearing from local health officials, hospital officials, public health officials, about this move by the legislature?

- Well, that's what I was just thinking when Karen was talking because this isn't just limiting the governor's power, correct?

This is also about local health departments and so way back at the beginning of the pandemic before the big statewide orders came, you know, with the mask mandate, everything was left to the local health departments, and so you had bigger counties like Cuyahoga and Summit imposing some health restrictions and, you know, the stay at home advisories, and then rural counties where it maybe wasn't as big of a deal, not having those things, and so I see, I foresee this kind of being problematic down the road for local health departments who feel like their hands are tied, and I know that Terry Allen, himself has been very vocal about thinking this is a bad idea and so again, I think it's important to note it wouldn't just limit the governor's power at the statewide level, this would limit a lot of local health departments which were at the forefront in parts during this pandemic.

- Kabir, oppose the legislature right in the middle of health orders, right now as Anna just laid out, they're made by health professionals, the governor obviously in league with that, but now we would have a legislative body, and if that was the case near the beginning of this pandemic, would we would have a shutdown order or some of those things that at the very beginning did flatten the curve?

- Well, I would have to think, no, since so much of the opposition to whether it's wearing masks or quarantining, closing restaurants, a lot of that has come from the legislature as opposed to the governor or at the beginning of this Dr. Amy Acton, or even as Anna mentioned, Cuyahoga and Summit, those are the two health departments that I speak with most frequently in Portage, and all of them would have been, they were all on board with these orders, they were doing their own versions of these orders as Anna mentioned at the beginning of this, so if the legislature at the beginning of this maybe had already been given the power to decide what's going to be put into place, what's not going to put into place, these are the orders, that sort of thing, as opposed to the healthcare professionals, then yeah, I think we would be looking at a very different scenario right now as far as how the pandemic had played out, and it doesn't sound like we would have had as much mask wearing or social distancing and we saw that, I don't wanna use the same word, insurrection, it wasn't as serious, but at the Capitol, those photos of everyone pressed up against the state house in Columbus, pressed up against the windows protesting about the masks and things, we actually might not have seen that because there would have been nothing to protest against because there wouldn't have been as much mask wearing.

- Now you put that picture back in my head again, it was so walking dead, for sure.

- True point, I picture a concert, people wanna get in.

- Okay.

Karen.

- I was there at that event that he's talking about, I saw several of those protests, which started in April.

I mean, you know, when you think about how schools closed in March, March 12th, and then by April we were already having some of these protests, there was, you know, a couple hundred people each time, but they were pretty outspoken in their criticism in that particular press conference and protest, they were surrounding a room at the state house that has a lot of windows and so it was very difficult for us to hear what the governor was saying, we ended up getting moved after that press conference to a different area of the state house.

But, you know, I think that there's another element of this bill, it's really interesting that DeWine has brought up, and that is that it allows for the general assembly to be sued and to be sued for damages.

And so that's another thing that is part of this discussion that I think maybe hasn't been brought up as much.

Another thing that's part of this discussion and I am gonna be putting out a story today with John Corlett from the Center for Community Solutions about this, that the state potentially risks losing some federal aid if those orders are rescinded because there's aid in the CARES Act, and I believe in the American Rescue Plan, both, those two big packages, the most recent ones that brought a lot of federal money to states dealing with coronavirus and the impact, the economic impact, the state could lose some of that money right now, just a preliminary calculation was like $90 million just in snap or food stamps commonly known, just in that category alone, and so that's if the orders were rescinded.

So, you know, there are some impacts of this and it goes, while you can argue about the constitutionality and state lawmakers say, they have the constitutional authority to do this, it's DeWine that's being unconstitutional here, there are some real impacts here.

(upbeat music) - We were moving along in this fight against the pandemic with case numbers dropping and the number of COVID 19 cases per 100,000 residents steadily declining.

Once we get to 50 cases per 100,000, all public health orders will be lifted.

But this week, we stalled.

We had been reporting a big drop and then a steady drop in those cases per 100,000.

I think everyone said, okay, that means light is at the end of the tunnel.

Now, we're looking at leveling off, those numbers are not looking as rosy, that's gotta be a big concern.

- Absolutely, we were thinking that we're going to be headed towards that 50 case threshold where we'll be able to maybe change up some of these orders or remove them altogether.

The vaccine was in place, and now it seems as though we're starting slowly to trend back in the other direction, and that's definitely a concern, not just since vaccine supply, we might talk about Summit County later, vaccine supply seems to be delayed in some parts possibly, but also just for generally with summer coming, people wanna be out, they've been cooped up for a year, year and a half.

That's not the time that we wanna see the numbers going up, and then on top of that, this ability in a few months for just as summer is starting, but the legislature if they want to just say, no more health orders, everybody go back to normal, and I think everyone's looking at that and thinking, we are hoping there's not a big explosion come say July 4th, unless it's fireworks in the sky.

- Karen we're not zooming up but we certainly are going up and Ohio is not alone, many, many states are now seeing increases in their numbers, that's gotta be troubling.

- Yeah, in fact, DeWine mentioned that yesterday saying that the surrounding states have started to go up as well, and if you look at just the case numbers over the last couple of weeks, I mean, we've been around the thousand case mark, little high, little low, but we're still aiming for that 50 cases per 100,000 residents.

That's a weekly total and DeWine said yesterday, it went up slightly over the last week, the first increase since the middle of January.

But the one thing that I think is really important to bring out is it really got bad and I think it's easy to forget how bad it was in November and December and early January.

It was really bad, we had 5, 6, 8,000 cases per day, and when you talk about the cases per 100,000, it was over 850 cases per 100,000 residents.

We're now down to 146.9, I think, that's a tremendous drop, but of course, to get to that 50 where all the mask mandates and other restrictions are lifted, there's a lot of work to go, and DeWine has mentioned this whole issue of the variants and that the we're seeing at least three of the five variants in Ohio right now, and it's a race, as he said against time in a sense to get people vaccinated, to stop those variants and stop the virus going into the population and mutating into those variants and other variants that we don't even know about yet.

- Anna, to get those vaccines distributed quicker, the state is also putting into action more of these mass vaccination sites and some mobile clinics as well.

- Right, I think that we're gonna be seeing a lot of big things happening in the next couple of weeks because so far the distribution has been very methodical, very planned out, very, you can do this, you can't do this, only these people can, you know, things like that, and now the governor is even talking about health departments could give some doses to another one if they're not getting people to sign up, you know, that's not really been something we've seen quite a bit.

The distribution has been based on population, not to count anyone out, but we've seen in some Southern areas, rural areas, there's been less interest, and so they're having a hard time filling those slots, so I know, I mean, I could see on social media and just within my friend groups, a lot of us, 20 somethings, when he announced this earlier this week, we were like, well, can we get them up here?

But it's not really the case with Northeast Ohio providers, those they're really booking all the slots, it's hard to get one up here, and then the governor further clarified that it was some Southern counties that just weren't filling the slots and so I even know some people who traveled to Xenia to get their shot- - [Mike] Road trip.

- Drove three hours because they were like, I'm not sure that I can get it next week when I'm actually eligible because it's gonna be, for lack of a better word, a free for all at that point.

So yes, there's gonna be some mass vaccination clinics, obviously, the biggest one here is Wolstein, but there's gonna be some other ones, I know there's the Field House at Kent State, it has started to open up, I think there's gonna be one in Summit County, that the Fairgrounds, and quite a few throughout the state, I think 15 total.

And then like you mentioned those mobile clinics.

So lots more people are gonna be able to sign up, and assuming that we get the doses that we have been promised, I think we're gonna see, like I said, some big things.

- You were out at the mass vaccination clinic earlier this week and talking to people there, I noticed on social media in general, and in fact on a post we put up on our Facebook page, WCPN, something like 180 responses, all of them were like, I can't believe how great this is, and, you know what, sometimes government does things well.

- Yeah, and I mean, it's the military, I guess you would expect from anyone them to have a well-oiled machine, I guess, and have all the logistics figured out, but I have to say, when I went to the media tour at the Wolstein center before it was open to the general public, I was impressed with how they just kind of thought of everything.

I mean, every question we asked, they had an answer.

I mean, even down to if someone wants due to their religious beliefs, if they want a female to give them a shot, they have plenty of women available, like every, you know- - [Mike] They had translators.

- Yeah, I was gonna say, they have six different languages, if you have trouble walking down the steps, you can go to a whole separate area.

There's an area with a curtain around it if you don't want people to see you, like if you want your privacy while you're getting your shot, I mean, there's just so many things that they've kind of figured out, and I was just scrolling through those comments and it just, everyone kind of seemed to echo the same sentiment that they were in and out very quickly, lots of people saying that everyone was so friendly, made them feel comfortable.

I spoke to a couple people and they were saying that they were impressed by how they would answer questions and they saw people ahead of them who were unsure and asking questions about the vaccine, and they were just saying everyone was so kind and educational and just help them out and they were just so impressed.

And I think the only constructive criticism that I heard because, you know, there's always gotta be at least one thing, compliment sandwich, they said that sometimes it gets, I guess, backed up in the afternoon and there's a little bit of a line outside, and one person reported that they wished that somebody had been in, like volunteers would have been out and said, hey, don't worry, the line is about to move, you know, just because- - And it goes quickly once it does.

- Yeah, exactly, that's what he said, he said once he was in and it was, it was super quick, but that was the only negative thing I heard, but overall it's, I mean, it's been rave reviews.

(upbeat music) - The state's new two year transportation budget is on its way to Governor DeWine.

The Senate approved the bill unanimously this week and the house signed off on a few minor tweaks Thursday.

Karen, the bulk of the $8.3 billion in this budget goes to road construction and maintenance costs but it gives us substantial bump to public transportation over what the governor had proposed.

- Yeah, the governor had proposed what essentially was a 90% cut to public transit, and then the house added more money back into that, the Senate then added about almost $14 million, so the total was about, it's about $73 million per year for public transit.

And that was a big deal because when the governor's budget came out, public transit advocates were very, very concerned saying especially during a pandemic, of course, you know, people may not have been using public transit as much but it's still a tremendously important way for people to get around especially people who don't have cars who are in those lower income levels and so to preserve public transit, they felt was incredibly important, so they really lobbied hard for lawmakers to restore that.

A couple other things that are interesting in their, language for an eight year driver's license, which is kind of unique, and also using the National Volkswagen Settlement on Emissions, using that money to create an electrical, an electric vehicle charging station grant program.

So there would be more of those potentially electric vehicle charging stations.

So there there's some interesting little things in here.

- Some things that are not in there, the distracted driving portion that the governor wanted and a fee increase as well.

- Yeah, he had proposed a fee increase to to go to the Highway Patrol, state lawmakers found that money elsewhere and took that out, but also the distracted driving thing, that's something that DeWine talked about for a while, and he said yesterday at the press conference, he was not hurt that it was taken out of his transportation budget proposal when he was asked about lawmakers not giving him what he wants, he says that that's gonna be proceeding as a separate bill that lawmakers wanted to handle it that way.

And so there's a real desire on the part of some lawmakers to really deal with this issue of distracted driving, texting while driving, that sort of thing.

Of course the issue then becomes, how do you enforce it?

I mean, it's more of an awareness thing than anything else.

(upbeat music) - Rate payers are still on the hook to subsidize two aging nuclear power plants in Ohio as mandated in the scandal-tainted H.B.

six, but the effort to repeal those fees is picking up steam and heading to Governor DeWine.

The Senate unanimously passed the bill this week, the house approved the measure Thursday.

Karen, as expected, the house moved quickly after the Senate passed it.

- Yeah, and this is one of the big key parts of House Bill six and remember House Bill six is a huge sweeping piece of legislation, and this is of course the one, it's tied to Republican former house speaker, Larry Householder, and the other individuals who were charged in the $60 million bribery scheme.

This though takes away those subsidies which were a key part of that and leaves another part of, all the other parts still out there.

And so the question has become what other elements of House Bill six might also be removed, for instance, there are subsidies in there for two coal-fired power plants.

There are big changes and eliminations of programs that utilities were running for a energy efficiency.

There was the whole push for renewables and getting utilities to use renewable energy, and that's gone, so, you know, while the subsidies part of it is the big thing because, individual rate payers, you and me, everybody who has a an electric bill in Ohio, would pay those subsidies, that's gonna be gone, there are these other parts that are still out there that allow, people are asking the question, are those still things that lawmakers wanna keep?

And so it's not over, the big part is over maybe but it's not over entirely.

- Also it's not over is Larry Householder's career in the Ohio House, he's still there, we talked about this last week, no change.

- I just spoke with Speaker, Bob Cupp, yesterday, and it's become a tradition for some reporter to ask the question on the call, what's happening with Larry Householder, and he told me this time, you've heard my previous statements on this, refer back to those.

So I think Cupp is probably getting tired of answering that question, but it's still a legitimate question because certainly Larry Householder is an elected member of the Ohio House and he is innocent till proven guilty but there are certainly some questions about should somebody who's been indicted in what former prosecutor David DeVillers said is the largest scandal of its kind in Ohio history, should that person still be sitting in the Ohio Senate?

He's not on any committees, but he does, he does vote and he does show up to work, he was just there this week.

(upbeat music) - Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, finds himself at odds with the Republican Party in Summit County and the Democratic Party in Lorain County.

In both instances, the respective parties sued LaRose over his blocking of nominees to boards of elections in both of those counties.

Kabir, LaRose initially placed the summit County Board of Elections under oversight and blocked the reappointment of the chairman, citing a number of issues.

What's going on there?

- Well, he cited the long lines for people to drop things off, the ballots during the last election, Williams, he said that he wasn't removing dead voters from the rolls quickly enough, and he just said there was a politically charged environment and actually just before the pandemic even, there was a few people who just, staffers who abruptly left, so there seems to be possibly something going on there.

Of course we don't know until we get inside of that.

But Williams is saying, oh, well this is just political tit for tat from the past, and now the Summit County Republican Party is suing, that's the case that you referred to with LaRose, there's a similar thing going on in Lorain County with Democrats, so this sort of thing is just getting started, but this is kind of the secretary of state's job is to monitor these boards of elections, see who's running things and if they're doing the job properly and if not, then either don't renew them or have them removed or put the board under oversight as he did in Summit County.

- Karen, as Kabir said, this is what the secretary of state's job is.

So the question is, is it uncommon to have the reaction be lawsuits filed by the counties against the secretary of state, or is it just something we hadn't paid much attention to in the past?

- I'm trying to remember, I mean, when Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted was the secretary of state, I remember he fired two Democrats in the Montgomery County Board of Elections for rejecting the early voting schedule that he had put out for the state.

But I don't know that there was a lawsuit necessarily over that.

I think lawsuits are not uncommon anymore, and so I'm not surprised by this.

And it certainly does bring this to the forefront that, yeah, this is part of LARosa's job that while we do have 88 county boards of elections that operate on their own, he is the chief elections officer.

(upbeat music) - The National Football League draft will set up in Cleveland about a month from now, and we're starting to get our first details about the event.

The draft will be held April 29th to May 1st in downtown Cleveland.

The league says the main stage will be located outdoors on the Lake Erie shoreline, and ESPN plans to broadcast the event live.

Anna, our health experts tell us things outdoors are a lot safer than things indoors.

So that's the first step.

Do we know yet what other kinds of protocols may or may not impact events or how vaccines might change those plans?

- Well, I believe that the indoor group has to be vaccinated, there's a special group that can be inside and I know health experts have been saying, it would be hard to require everyone to be vaccinated just because it's kind of not realistic, and also you might run into some problems with people maybe forging their vaccination cards to prove it or something just so they could be inside.

But yeah, as far as the outside event goes, they're saying that especially this summer with more people being vaccinated, hopefully cases are gonna be down, if you're masked and you're outdoors, you should be pretty good.

- Kabir, even if you don't care about football or sports at all, sports ball, which is what one of my friends calls it.

- I call it sports ball.

- You call it sports ball, you're one of them.

This event will provide a big boost to the region and to the hospitality industry indeed.

- For sure this is not quite the scale of say the RNC but the excitement I'm seeing on social media from business owners, restaurants, bars, that sort of thing, They have had a tough year as we all know, and this sort of thing coming right as things are opening back up is amazing for them.

They're putting out calls for extra employees, special menus, that sort of thing, so the hospitality and sort of course, hotels, people will be saying that, and again, not the scale of the RNC, we're not seeing people as we did with the RNC saying, hey, you can rent a room for me at my house in Warren, that far away, we're not seeing that, but downtown Cleveland businesses, that sort of thing.

This is maybe the level of excitement in 2016 when the Cavs really went all the way, the hospitality industry, it's at least that level, and it's probably going to keep growing, given the past year the struggles all of these hospitality industry has had.

- And it does feel like a turning point, this big event, the first big one we've had in more than a year, perhaps we'd have a lot of people vaccinated by then, it seems very positive note for sure.

- I will say, absolutely, and I will say that having been to various where they just have the big screen, you know, from the draft over the last couple of years, they'll do when I'm in Akron or Cleveland, that sort of thing, just the level of excitement around those when those happened pre-pandemic, I think was a good indicator that this is gonna be pretty big for people when it happens.

- And that's going to wrap up this week show, coming up Monday on the Sound of Ideas, we've convened the heads of all three major Cleveland hospital systems and two universities, to discuss the newly created Innovation District in Cleveland, that will focus on bio research and job creation.

I'm Mike MacIntyre.

Thanks for watching, and stay safe.

(upbeat music) - [Advertiser] Brought to you by Westfield, offering insurance to protect what's yours, grow your business and achieve your dreams.