- [Rick Jackson] The Ohio redistricting commission approves new state legislative maps without bipartisan support.

Ohio's top doctor says the COVID-19 surge is putting a dangerous strain on hospitals and the governor says his hands are tied when it comes to issuing another mask mandate.

"Ideas" is next.

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(dramatic orchestral music) - Hello, and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Rick Jackson, in for Mike MacIntyre, thank you for joining us.

The commission redrawing Ohio's legislative boundaries approved maps this week that appeared to preserve the GOP's super majority in both the Ohio House and Senate.

An Ohio Republican Congressman says he will not seek reelection.

Ohio's top doctor issues another warning about the strain being placed on our hospitals and healthcare system by this current wave of COVID-19 cases.

And hospital executives ask school leaders to implement masks while the governor says any mask mandate he would want to impose would be immediately repealed.

We'll talk about that and much more ahead on the Reporter's Roundtable.

Joining me this week, Ideas Stream Public Media Health Reporter, Anna Huntsman, WKSU News Director, Andrew Meyer, and from our Statehouse News Bureau, Reporter Andy Chow.

Let's get started.

The Ohio redistricting commission has approved new maps for the state's legislative districts.

They appear to preserve the Republican Party's super majority in both the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate.

Not surprisingly the vote for the maps went right along party lines, commissions, five Republicans voting for, the two Democrats voting against approval.

That's critical because the lack of bipartisan support means the maps will only be in place for four years, not the standard decade until the next census.

This is the first time that the redistricting process has taken place under reforms approved by voters, which were supposed to make the process more bipartisan and lead to less gerrymandered districts.

Andy, you attended the marathon session for the maps approval.

Republicans say they adhered to the voter approved reforms.

Democrats and voting rights groups don't really agree.

- (Andy Chow) Yeah, that's right.

And that's why this is very likely to end up in the Ohio Supreme Court.

All roads sort of suggested it was going to end up there anyway, but especially given the arguments that have been presented, not only by the voter rights groups who have been watching these hearings and these commission meetings take place, and not only from the Democrats who voted against these maps on the commission, but even the statewide Republican office holders who did vote yes, suggested that there are some big questions around the maps that exist right now.

So just to break it down a little bit, the maps that have been officially approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission and the Ohio House, it retains by all analyses, that retains a 62 Republic-, 62 seat Republican majority to 37 Democratic seats.

That's a super majority, a veto-proof majority in the House, and then a 23 seat Republican majority in the Senate compared to 10 seats for the Democrats.

So this is a map that even by the Republicans who drew the map, say it retains their super majority.

And the issue here is when you look at Ohio as a whole, when you look at when the voters turned out and ended up casting a vote on statewide issues, statewide candidates, you would see that about 46% of the voters would be voting for Democratic candidates, and about 54% of the voters would be voting for Republican candidates.

That shows sort of a partisan breakdown of how voters vote statewide.

Yet the, the maps do not reflect that voter breakdown statewide in the chambers that in the maps that were created.

- Letter of the law and not spirit of the law.

- Letter of the law and spirit of the law.

So one of the big things here, and this is a big conversation that we did hear during the commission meetings and something we're set to hear most likely in the Ohio Supreme Court is this idea of proportionality, Section 6 in the Ohio Constitution, which was written out by the reform that was passed in 2015, that voters approved overwhelmingly, Section 6 says, that's the proportionality issue, that maps need to reflect the voter breakdown of the state.

If 46% of the state is voting for Democratic candidates than 46% of the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate should be reflected somehow in the seats that have been created.

And in these maps, that's not reflected.

- Is there at least though a more competitive edge in some of the districts?

- So that's another issue.

So we're talking about proportionality, meaning like, so do these districts create 46% favorability to Democrats and then 54% favorability to Republicans.

But what about the comp-, competition in these districts?

Because another big fight here is that you don't want districts that are always determined by the primaries because that just forces candidates to run all the way to one side or the other.

The argument here from the Republicans is that they believe they have created a lot of competitive districts.

Again, by the analyses that we've seen so far, there aren't many competitive districts, maybe one or two more that does give a candidate who's used to running a little more safely in their district, maybe it gives them more of a run for their money, but in the end, it has come down to that argument, and most people who are arguing against these maps say there are not enough competitive districts.

- Andrew, we saw a number of well attended public hearings for input around the state.

This is clearly a high topic of interest.

And the, the meetings here in Northeast Ohio is certainly very well attended.

- Very well-intended indeed, Rick.

And a lot of this, I have to say, probably stems from what happened 10 years ago, a little bit of a history lesson here, then Congressman John Boehner and other key Republicans hold up in a hotel room in Southwest Ohio, and they plotted on how to redistrict the Ohio congressional districts.

We're talking about State and House, but I think this is all a legacy of what happened with congressional districts 10 years ago.

And they did so in a way that really dramatically skewed the favoring of the GOP that we've seen for the last 10 years with the 12-4 advantage going to the Republican Party.

Now, we've had three hearings within this week.

There was one in Dayton, another one in Warrensville Heights, and another in Columbus.

And I think one of the big concerns that we're seeing, and why there's such big turnout here, is just how fast this is all moving.

Some advocates are worrying that maybe it's moving way too fast for people to, even if they show up in numbers to really have a say, any influence in what goes on, and maybe that's reinforcing this concern of what happened 10 years ago, where maybe it's just a small group of people who are really controlling the greater fortunes of politics in Ohio and what affects people's daily lives.

- Mhm, five people deciding the fate of 11 million.

You didn't use the word dissatisfaction, but that's what I think we're hearing with the maps here in this area.

- Yes.

A lot of dissatisfaction indeed.

We talked about those, I just talked about those three public hearings.

The one, the second one at Tri-C, at the Corporate College campus in Warrensville Heights was on Monday.

It went on for six hours!

They had 70 speakers, they had overflow rooms, and they had a crowd of more than a hundred.

It was heated.

Now, all seven members of the commission were there.

There are five Republicans and two Democrats, the two Democrats from Northeast Ohio specifically, but most of the criticism was directed at the Republican members.

And that common theme that came out of it was when it came to redistricting and gerrymandering, there are real concerns about that, despite what the voters approved in 2015, and again in 2018.

One of the things that we're seeing also about these concerns when it comes to the redistrict in the, in the real concerns about gerrymandering is, is, is being expressed outside of the meetings as well.

And one of the prime examples of this is one Northeast Ohio legislator, we actually heard from him, Representative Casey Weinstein of Hudson.

His district is getting a significant overhaul to also include slivers of Cuyahoga and Geauga counties now, in addition to Summit, what she represents, and he actually tweeted that this is the opposite of what the Constitution dictates.

And he called it in his tweet, quote, unquote, "illegal gerrymandering".

- And talking about the idea of something being illegal.

Andy, all five Republicans, as we said, voted to approve.

But Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Governor Mike DeWine did express reservations, including whether these are constitutionally valid concerns.

- Yeah, they really stopped short of saying that they would probably agree with that.

But you have people like Governor Mike DeWine, who said that this map could have been drawn to more clearly follow the Constitution.

Now, that's sort of a convoluted statement, but in the end, that's I, that's what I read to believe.

He doesn't believe that it's constitutional.

And I do believe that the comments from Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who said that there were members of the commission who are not acting in good faith, and auditor, Keith Faber, who also expressed his concerns with the maps, they were all basically saying that this can be subject to a legal challenge, all going back to Section 6, the proportionality issue, and even President, Republican Senate President Matt Huffman, who drew these maps, who was really sort of taking charge on this pro-Republican map standpoint, he had a whole statement written out saying, this is what we're gonna take to court.

If somebody challenges these maps in court, this is gonna be our statement.

But even members on the commission were surprised that President Huffman had a statement ready to go at midnight when these maps were approved, and they said that they hadn't seen this statement.

So there's just a lot of different things up in the air, and they're wondering that this could have been a better process from beginning to end.

- If DeWine and LaRose had these concerns, why didn't they not just vote no with the Democrats, and we'd still be going on and having more discussion?

Was it just party over policy?

- You know, this is a question that we asked over and over again, these leaders tried to explain their answers.

When they were speaking during the commission meetings, we went up, we went up to them afterwards to ask them again and again, you know, it's, it's up to everybody's interpretation, I guess to, to see if they really think that Governor DeWine and Secretary LaRose have actually answered the question, but I think it's still up in the air.

If you didn't like these maps, why vote for it?

Governor DeWine said it was just time to vote for something, and he decided to vote yes instead of making it linger any longer.

He didn't believe that there was any give in the stalemate between what the Republicans in the legislature wanted and what the Democrats in the legislature wanted.

But again, we asked if you don't like these maps, if you do have constitutional concerns, then why vote for it?

The other thing was there was a deadline on September 15th where the maps had to be passed and I think that was part of the incentive to move it forward.

And it does really seem like, and advocates are saying that this might be just members on the commission, punting it to the Ohio Supreme Court saying, we did what we could do, we had a deadline, now it's up to the court to look at it.

- Andrew, voting groups we can expect will challenge the maps in court.

Do the comments of those two leaders weigh in, give them hope?

- I think it's all going to resign in the, in the purview of the Supreme Court ultimately.

It's, it's obvious it's going to go to the courts.

The Gerrymandering Project in Princeton gave the Ohio House map an "F" when it came to partisan fairness, and Republicans, this is interesting, Republicans said that they didn't consider partisan makeup in drawing new districts.

I found the words of a Democratic Senator, Vernon Sykes, who's one of the two Democrats on the redistricting commission, be very telling.

He called it, quote unquote "disingenuous."

I think he might've had a stronger word in mind.

The Equal Districting Commission has put out a statement that indicates that they're going to push for it.

This is heading to the court, so the question is, with the makeup of the court, what comes next?

(dramatic orchestral music) - Republican Congressman Anthony Gonzalez announced on social media that he will not seek reelection in the Ohio 16th congressional district.

That's huge as we're thinking about redrawing things, it's one seat that they could wiggle with the borders if he's not going to be there.

- Yeah, it does.

It does put sort of the future of these congressional districts up in the air now that you have an incumbent not rerunning for their seat, maybe there's less pressure from that incumbent to sort of weigh in on the process, but what's really happening here is that we already know that Ohio is going to lose one congressional seat when the map makers sit down and redraw the lines.

And now that Anthony Gonzalez is out of the picture, someone who's been known to be, you know, in this day and age, more of a moderate Republican, somebody who was critical of former President Donald Trump, somebody who voted for impeachment, not having that voice, not having sort of that representative or figure up in that area could maybe impact the way lines are drawn.

And of course, this is supposed to be something where people are not considering how to get the biggest of the majority from one party or another.

But we, you know, we've seen that that is actually not been the process so far.

- Supposed to be, he says.

Andrew, as he just alluded Gonzalez voted to impeach former President Trump in connection with the January 6th riot.

He was sharply criticized by many Republicans who called on him back then to resign.

In a statement, he said, this is the best thing for me and my family.

Did all of what happened then, and up until now play a role?

- Yes, because not only do you say that this is the best thing for him and his family in his tweet, he also said that the toxic nature of everything that's going on is certainly factoring into this.

This is me paraphrasing what he wrote in his tweet, but that's essentially what he said.

So that has a factor, and again, it calls into question who's really controlling the Republican Party, who's pulling the strings there.

The other thing I wanted to say is this is now with Gonzales's announcement, meaning that there are going to be two vacant seats in Northeast Ohio, because of course, Tim Ryan is running for Rob Portman's open seat.

So when it comes to redistricting on the congressional level and taking us down from 16 to 15 seats, the mapmakers are gonna have a few other considerations to take into account.

(dramatic orchestral music) - Ohio's top doctors says the current wave of COVID-19 cases is putting a dangerous strain on the state's hospitals.

Anna we've not reached capacity levels, hospitals and other parts of Ohio have, but we're seeing changes implemented here.

Let's start with the visitor restriction at the Cleveland Clinic hospitals.

- Right, so recently this week, the Cleveland Clinic is restricting visitors.

So you used to be able to have two people with you if you're in the hospital or just going in for an appointment.

Now that's been reduced to one person, even if you are positive for COVID.

There's a couple areas where you can have two people if you're negative, such as labor and delivery, or if you're in for a prenatal appointment, pediatric patients can also have two parents or guardians there if they test negative for COVID, otherwise just one person.

And that's due to the rise in cases.

- Right.

I referenced the Cuyahoga County executive issuing a mask advisory.

That would include schools, but it's an advisory, it's not mandatory.

- Correct.

They say they can't do anything more than an advisory because of that Senate bill 22, which allows the legislature to strike down any health orders that state and local health officials put on.

That's also what Governor DeWine was referencing when he said, that's why he won't do this statewide school mask mandate, but they're just advising people to yes, wear masks indoors, regardless of your vaccination status.

We've heard this for several weeks now.

And there's nothing that, you know, you can't get fined if you're out, not wearing a mask or something like that, but it's just this guidance that they've come out with.

- Year and a half ago, we used to have the daily updates from the governor, then it was twice a week, then he kind of went away.

Andy, he comes back this week with the old style news conference, and then he blames fellow Republicans.

Were you surprised?

- No, and this is why, when Senate bill 22 was passed, that was really sort of a shift in policy making from the administration, from the statewide side of things, that Governor Mike DeWine was sort of conceding that if the legislature wanted to pass a piece of legislation like SB 22, which gives the legislature the power to revoke and rescind health orders, then he believed that he needed to take a different approach to handling the pandemic, to handling COVID-19, and that began with allowing the state of emergency regarding COVID-19 to expire, and with that, the health orders under that state of emergency to also expire.

Now, the thing is the governor can issue a health order.

He can issue a statewide State of Emergency through, through the Ohio Department of Health, and Senate bill 22 doesn't stop the governor from taking any of those actions.

What it does is, it allows the legislature to review those actions and then make a decision, and so what we're hearing now is not necessarily that SB 22 and the new law is stopping the governor from doing this, the vibe, the, the way that the legislature is carrying themselves and sending messages to the governor, that's what stopping him from doing it.

Essentially, he's afraid that the legislature is going to just rescind it right away so he's not going to do anything about it right now.

- The Senate President, Matt Hoffman said, there's zero interest in allowing new mask mandates for schools.

That's not kind of what I'm hearing from superintendents.

- Well, and I think what, what Senate President Matt Huffman might be saying is that there's zero interest among his lawmakers and among his members to pass something like that.

But then again, you are hearing lawmakers who they believe in the talks with their communities, that there are parents who don't want this.

There are other school administrators who don't want this.

And right now, school districts on their own can pass mask mandates.

And so, there is this debate, there is this question of, do administrators want a top-down approach?

Do they want to be told by the state government to do this, so they don't have to make the decision on their own?

- Anna, the president upped the ante on vaccine mandates.

He simply required employers of more than a hundred workers to have their people vaccinated.

How does that impact the places we have in Cleveland that have huge numbers of employees?

I'm thinking University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Progressive.

- Yeah.

Well, the hospitals are the big ones to watch for because four weeks before that both Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals had said they were not going to mandate vaccination.

- (Rick) Even after MetroHealth had.

- Even after MetroHealth had, yeah.

We asked them about that, that day saying the main reason was because they're already facing these huge staffing shortages, specifically nursing shortages, in some cases that's because healthcare workers are simply exhausted, they're tired, they've covered their, you know, they've responded to this pandemic for over a year now, they've seen people get very sick and die and that's really exhausting to work through, so many have actually left the profession.

And so they were saying, if we mandate vaccinations, employees who don't want one are going to quit.

And so that was what was holding them back.

But now that it's a federal mandate, they have to follow along with it, and Cleveland Clinic has expressed that they will.

UH was reviewing the guidance before, you know, they're going to comply, but they were figuring that out.

So yeah, this is now our reality and so it'll be interesting to watch and see what actually happens with those staffing shortages.

- Andrew, we'd heard talk that they were simply waiting for the government to give them cover, to do what they wanted to do in the first place.

- Well, of course, there's your easy out there.

The government says we have to do it, so we're going to do it, but that didn't happen, and so now people are caught in the position of having to make the hard decisions and be accountable, and there's of course the continuing controversy, people are very split on whether or not this is something that they want to do or need to be compelled to.

- Anna, something I should have followed up on a minute ago, you talked about the idea of health organizations' fear of losing staff.

You also reported this week on public health officials leaving the field because of threats and harassment from those opposed to vaccine measures, not just the people in the hospitals, it's officials.

- Yeah.

So the health departments and the workers there that have been kind of in charge of enforcing these pandemic measures and guidance are oftentimes the messengers that are the bearing the brunt of criticism and threats.

And so unfortunately.

a lot of health departments are facing really high turnover.

The Summit County Health Department has about a 10% turnover rate and they've been able to use a nursing service through the state to help make up for that, So they're also seeing a nursing shortage there.

So yes, we've seen public health officials leaving their jobs because of this, and I mean, remember before the pandemic, these people were mostly behind the scenes.

I don't know that we could have always just named off all of the people.

And now they're very much in the spotlight and that is having a really negative effect in some ways.

(dramatic orchestral music) - Kent State University's Board of Trustees voted this week to approve an agreement that hands over operations of its public radio station, WKSU.

Two Ideas Stream Public Media, under the agreement, Ideas Stream will take over management of WKSU beginning October 1st, although you're on air programming will not change just yet.

We'll still be right here.

Andrew will still be right where he is.

The agreement expands Ideas Streams' reach from 2.4 million to 3.6 million people across 22 Northeast Ohio counties, largely because of KSU great repeater system.

Andrew, the board was told that since both stations currently offer similar national programming, and there are costs for that, joining together made some sense, moving ahead.

- It made a lot of sense, Rick, and this is hard for everybody involved because you're talking about significant change here, but there was a study funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last year, it looked at how the two stations could work better together, and it just really surveyed a wide range of options, and while our two newsrooms have worked well together over the years to better coordinate our coverage of Northeast Ohio, to reduce redundant coverage, to share content, to collaborate on special projects like Learning Curve, which you just mentioned, there's still significant overlap when it comes to the programming that we both carry from NPR and one of the drivers for this, in addition to better serving journalism, the needs of the people of Northeast Ohio, is to make sure there's one clear voice when it comes to presenting and carrying this indie coverage that we both do currently.

- People are always hearing us when we're doing pledge drives talking about the fact that this stuff does cost money.

It's like a lot of people would say, yeah, why would we pay for Morning Edition twice?

Nothing will change at first over the air, but over the coming months, what do you think listeners should expect to hear?

- Well, come October 1st, when the agreement is supposed to go in place, you really won't hear much difference on either station.

As I was mentioning, there's already a great amount of news sharing stories sharing between our two newsrooms.

What you will gradually start to hear is more integration.

You'll hear more of WCPN ideas, Stream reporter voices on WKSU.

And I expect the same to happen with WKSU reporters being more on Sound of Ideas and being more part of reporting on Ideas Stream.

It'll be a gradual process.

It's not going to be jarring, so that when ultimately we get to, what's going to be the big step in this in the spring, it will be not a jolt to the system.

And that big step, Rick, of course, is when there's going to be a realignment of the frequencies.

This was also talked about during the press conference and the announcement at the Board of Trustees meeting at Kent State University on Wednesday, but coming in most likely April, there's going to be a switch of frequencies, not, and WCPN, we'll basically swap call letters with WCLV, and 90.3 will become a classical station, 104.9 will become part of the WKSU new network, which will join our other six transmitters in being the presenter of NPR news and information.

At that point WKSU will become the news and information source for Northeast Ohio, the only one, there won't be repetition, but this doesn't mean that you're going to be losing anything.

You're going to be gaining so much when this happens, because we're going to have a powerhouse newsroom, a joint staff of 40 people working to serve the journalism needs of Northeast Ohio.

- Right.

The emails that are already pouring in, I'm sure there are probably some tweets too, I didn't look, I should open the other phone.

People saying, well, what about the people who right now don't get one station or the other?

Am I going to lose my coverage?

That's, that seems to be the big concern I've seen on Facebook and in our emails.

- Part of the realignment of the frequencies is intended to help fill in areas where there are gaps.

For instance, with WKSU, there are areas within Cleveland where our signal is not as strong, harder to tune in, for WCPN currently there are areas that are outside your broadcast area, which we serve very well, which you just don't reach, and this is really going to help to extend collectively our reach in serving Northeast Ohio with quality public radio programming.

- Monday on the Sound of Ideas, we bring you the latest in a series of conversations about the progress and issues involved with the Cleveland Police consent decree.

This month's discussion focuses on the Cleveland Police Commission and citizen involvement.

I'm Rick Jackson.

Thank you so much for watching.

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