- The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said in a Senate hearing that the controlled burn of toxic vinyl chloride after the East Palestine train derailment was not necessary.

Akron has called off its nationwide search for a new police chief saying the law requires they hire from within.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger has added some muscle to the push to end gerrymandering in Ohio.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board told a senate committee this week that the controlled burn of chemicals after the trained derailment in East Palestine was unnecessary.

Cleveland City Council passed a budget this week as protestors who were removed from City Hall continued to call for a resolution urging an end to the Israel Hamas War.

Akron's Mayor says the city's next police chief will come from within the department ending a nationwide search and the Terminator looks to terminate gerrymandering in Ohio.

Joining me to discuss those stories and more from my idea stream, public media, local government reporter Abby Marshall and senior Arts reporter Kare Bia, and in Columbus State House News Bureau Chief Karen Kassler.

Let's get ready to round table.

The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that it wasn't necessary to release and burn vinyl chloride from Norfolk Southern Tanker Cars derailed in East Palestine last year.

Jennifer Hammond de said rail cars were cooling, not continuing to heat up and were not in danger of exploding, which was the justification Norfolk Southern gave for releasing and burning the chemical.

That decision caused a mass evacuation.

Local residents have complained of health issues they attribute to toxic release.

Kabar, who made the call?

- Well, Norfolk Southern made the call about their own train.

NTSB, governor DeWine, the W company we'll get to in a moment.

They, in many cases weren't aware exactly of the severity, or in this case, maybe lack of severity of the situation.

- You would think a major issue like this, everybody gets into the war room and gives their input and then you make a decision.

So the way it sounded, and Governor DeWine was on a microphone saying this needed to happen.

Yeah.

Because we didn't want these things to explode.

But there's a shipping company, a chemical shipping company called Oxy Vinyls.

They were on site.

Yeah.

But according to Hodi, they weren't consulted on this.

- They weren't consulted.

Governor DeWine, I believe either himself or through a representative, said that he wasn't even aware that they were there at the time.

And I'm not trying to defend anyone who made the decision, but being told that this thing is heating up or is at a certain temperature and could be exploding.

I, I have to think they probably were moving fast and people did not consult the right people, even though they were right there and could have been asked.

- JD Vance was asking the questions at this.

It was actually a session in which the discussion was supposed to be about Boeing and those airplane plugs that were in the doors.

And the one that came out, and it transitioned to this because JD Vance asked about it.

He called the testimony extraordinary.

And she Brown called it outrageous and partly because it wasn't just that they made this call, but, but Vance went a little bit further and so did Brown basically saying this was profit motive.

They wanted to get this thing cleared off the track so they could start moving freight again.

Yeah.

- They, they vance in so many words, said this was basically about clearing the tracks, as you said, to get freight to get traffic moving again.

And he didn't use the phrase prophets over people, but that seemed to be the general tenor of his questioning and, and how he feels it went with, with Norfolk Southern and these decisions they made.

- So you wonder what the fallout's gonna be.

By the way, this isn't all brand new information.

If you like, our Abigail boar did listen to the NTSB hearings over the summer.

This stuff was all hashed out.

What's different here was that was where some people were speculating, they made this decision that might not have been necessary.

Now we've got the head of the N tsb Yeah.

Sitting in a senate meeting saying didn't have to happen.

Right.

You have to wonder what repercussions then would come as a result of that.

- Well, they are planning an investigation already of the culture at Norfolk Southern when it comes to safety.

They've had I think eight incidents.

I'm not sure if that includes East Palestine over the past year.

So that's already something that they were going to be looking at.

And this is, this is going to be part of that investigation.

I'm sure.

- I wanna add one thing I can really quick here.

Sure.

Right after this happened, governor DeWine did a press conference talking about how the decision was made to do that controlled burn.

And he said yesterday, or he said after this hearing that there really wasn't a whole lot of time you had to go with what the facts that you had were at the time.

And there's some evidence that, that we're talking about only like 13 minutes for everybody to make the decision to go ahead and do that controlled burn.

So that's part of the reason why it still happened, was that this is the best information they had at the time.

So, and, and these, these pictures, I mean that, that's this thing that still I think sticks in a lot of people's mind is these pictures of that controlled burn happening and, and the, the fear of what the impact of that was gonna be.

Yeah.

- Right.

It's the best information they had at the time, but they had experts on hand who weren't consulted.

So was it the best information?

- Yeah, I mean the, the NTSB says that DeWine and the fire chief who was on site and everything had again just 13 minutes to figure out what to do and how to deal with this vinyl chloride.

And yeah, the question of course is did the contractors not disclose what they were carrying?

Did Norfolk Southern know?

And, and that's why these NTSB and all the other investigations are so important to try to figure out what exactly happened to make sure it doesn't happen again because these trains are still on the tracks all over the country.

- Cleveland City Council has approved the 2024 budget presented by Mayor Justin Bibb with some changes.

The spending plan calls for eliminating 148 unfilled police positions.

And council now has the final say over hiring from a pool of open positions that the mayor wanted for flexibility in hiring.

There was a big battle Abby about who was in charge of staffing and, and council basically took that control back.

- Yeah.

So the vacancy pool, which again pools all of the vacancies from each department except for public safety, which we'll talk about with police out of the department budget into this vacancy pool that gives flexibility basically to move that around as needed.

Council's main complaint with that was we need to have oversight over how the budget is being allocated and spent.

So the compromise here was we're gonna keep that pool so we can still have that flexibility.

However, if any department wants to pool positions out of that, they're going to have to come back to council for final say.

- So same thing, basically.

Council still has control.

- Yes, - Correct.

So I guess win-win.

- Yeah.

It's compromised.

That's why they have these budget negotiations.

So hopefully, you know, everyone can get what they want or at least, you know, we can come to this compromise.

- What about these unfilled police jobs?

There's a lot of squawking about that saying we, we need to have them on the books at least.

And the mayor was saying, we're not, we're still filling a bunch of positions.

We're just, these ones don't need to be filled and won't really, we won't get to that point.

Council just essentially agreed.

- Right.

This was one of the biggest stinks that council had made when it came to the original budget coming out, which was, if we remove these police positions, how are we ever going to put them back in?

However, the argument from the administration is we don't even know if we're going to meet the amount that we've budgeted, which comes after cutting those 148 positions.

And I don't need to keep beating the dead horse every week that I come on here of how depleted the police force is as compared to these budgeted numbers over the years in the situation, as we're looking at with officers leaving, more officers eligible for retirement, being unable to keep up with that in terms of bringing in cadets.

So these pay raises that they're going to use by slashing the positions to make way for the pay raises benefits they're intended to ultimately grow the department.

But that will take time.

- You mentioned every week you're on here, it's been three weeks in a row.

It's unprecedented here.

But that's 'cause there's been so much going on at Cleveland City Hall that we needed to have Abby back to give us some perspective on that.

They spent some money on, on some new things.

They added money, a boost in funding for the right to council program with a number of other thing that was the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, by the way.

Yeah.

But another, a number of others.

A million dollars to the Urban Forestry Division, which plants and cares for trees on public property.

- Right.

So as it relates to the right to council, housing has been a major priority for City Council.

And that is something that came out of these Budget amendment negotiations, which is giving more money to building and housing more money to public works, things that really affect people's day-to-Day lives.

And, and at Right To Council was a program that was created in 2020 and launched in 2020 in the middle of Covid as people were facing, losing their jobs and facing other major economic setbacks that could affect their living situation.

And basically what it does is it gives every tenant facing eviction the right to a lawyer if, if they need it.

So I, I pulled some stats that they had presented, which was in the last, last year, 2023, they assisted 10,355 people in almost 3,500 housing cases of the 7,200 Cleveland residents that they helped 5,300 receive the right to counsel.

And they helped clients achieve approximately 85% of the goals.

A lot of times, this isn't even necessarily going to court, it's, it's having conversations with landlords and property managers about how to keep people in their homes and reaching a compromise there.

- Pro-Palestinian protestors who continue to press Cleveland City Council for a Gaza ceasefire resolution, staged their own mock council meeting Monday to pass their own resolution.

Police told them to leave City Hall.

So they continued on the steps.

Unlike previous meetings, the protestors remain outside of council chambers, but you could hear 'em inside the meeting.

You were there.

- Yes.

So I was in city council chambers on the second floor and the protestors remained in the atrium on the first floor.

In previous meetings, as I've talked a lot about on the show, protestors have been showing up in droves to talk public comment, sometimes chanting, sometimes shouting, sometimes disrupting the meetings, but mostly contained to the public comment.

And this week as I was entering in the security line, I heard them saying, let's stay in the atrium.

We're gonna hold our own meeting.

And basically their message was, we have been coming for months and asking for this resolution for a ceasefire and council won't do it.

So we as the people are going to do it.

So they held their own mock meeting.

It did get loud.

I was in council chambers, so President Blaine Griffin did ask, let's shut the doors.

And then my colleague, EAL Kaufman, who was downstairs photographing the protest while I was monitoring council, messaged me and said that they have asked people to leave, which they did.

I will say EAL said it was peaceful.

They did follow police instruction.

- I saw his video though it wasn't, it wasn't like leave, okay, we're outta here.

Right.

It was leave and let's have a conversation and why do we have to leave?

Right.

And isn't this a public place and we're not in the meeting, so where are we violating anything?

And eventually there was the, the departure, - And I'm sure we will see more come out of that in the coming weeks because I think that that is the argument, which is this is the people's house, this is our government.

However, there have been reports of concerns from city council members.

As I noted in my web story, which gets a lot into the context of this.

Apparently at last week's meeting, council members say that protestors blocked the exits and they had to take a separate back way out of city council.

And so several members of council are saying that they are starting to feel unsafe, but also they have concerns of safety for other people that want to come down to City Hall and talk about maybe the budget or housing situations or, or things that are unrelated to this issue.

And they're just, I think everyone's kind of on edge with how to deal with this situation going - Forward.

And that was one concern.

But I heard more from your story reading it online from council members who are saying, maybe we should be listening more Right.

To this.

Yeah.

I mean, we know Rebecca Morris stood up and gave a speech.

You haven't heard much from others, but it sounded like more folks were saying they're gonna keep coming.

Maybe we should be listening more.

- Right.

Yeah.

Jasmine Santana said that, you know, these people are desperate.

They want to feel like their local government cares about them, even though this is something, a conflict that's happening all the way on the other side of the world.

These are communities, people have family members there, they want to feel heard, they want to feel respected.

And so that's, that's what Jasmine Santana's point was.

Kerry McCormack, you know, went as far to call Benjamin, not Netanyahu, the Israeli president, a war criminal.

However, he said he thinks that the actions are horrific, but this is not the way to go about it.

He says, you know, we have the right to free speech, but you can't come into City Hall and you can't block hallways and you can't do these things.

So it is kind of striking that balance in the eyes of some of these council members.

- Ohio's Chamber of Commerce says the lack of affordable and available childcare options in the state is holding back the state's workforce.

D Stiver's, former Republican congressman from the Columbus area is the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce.

And he says it's an issue that impacts both rural and urban Ohioans.

Karen cost is the big factor for families.

Stivers cited a recent Chamber of commerce report that Ohioans face childcare costs that often are more than what they pay for rent.

- Yeah.

Speaking of tough jobs, I mean the issue of childcare and trying to find good childcare and, and affordable childcare is very difficult.

There was a 2022 report from the Ohio Chamber of Commerce that said that the average annual cost of in of infant care in Ohio is almost $10,000 a year.

That's $808 a month for a 4-year-old.

It's around $8,000 or $658 a month.

These are huge numbers for a lot of families who are trying to balance both parents working or a single parent working and trying to figure out how do you, how do you do all the things that you're supposed to do in terms of housing, transportation, food savings, all these things, and still pay that much infant care for one child, as report said, would take up 16.9% of a median family's income in Ohio.

That is a - Lot.

One of the suggestions that RS had in, in addition to the cost, is the capacity.

He says increased capacity for in-home daycares in rural areas.

But that would seem to undercut the star quality system.

Ohio has to pair kits for kindergarten.

- Yeah.

And that is something that Senate President Matt, Matt Huffman has wanted to do.

He's wanted to expand the idea of having in-home daycares, but that does run up against this step up quality system.

It's a one to five star rating that really measures all sorts of different things that daycares have been providing.

And so he's, he actually put some of that into the budget.

Governor Mike DeWine vetoed some of that.

The idea of exempting some of the programs that are out there from the step up to quality system, there's a real struggle over that and, and whether that system actually is doing what it's meant to do.

And those daycare providers, they're the ones, you have to be in that step of quality system to get state funding.

And there's some federal things going on here too.

The federal government has told Ohio that they need to make some moves here and pay childcare providers more.

They must increase publicly funded a childcare rates by the end of this year.

Or they could face pe, federal penalties.

So state lawmakers have tried to put more money toward that, but it, it's still, it's a difficult balancing situation, especially in rural areas where there just aren't as many available.

- Anybody with a job and kids knows what we're talking about here.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

- Akron says it's national search for a new police chief is over, but that doesn't mean they've hired a police chief.

Mayor Shama Malik announced this week that the city must limit its search to internal candidates in the police department.

Why must Well, his administration's interpretation of Ohio law is that it prohibits hiring outside of the department except for entry-level positions.

A number of legal experts say there are numerous ways the city could hire from outside.

So there's a debate about that, Abby, it's quite a turnaround given that Mooch previously sought to quote, cast a wide net for the next chief.

- Yeah.

And, and the last police chief, actually the last two, Steve Millet, who was actually hired when I was still reporting in Akron, was found via a national search.

He, he came from Arizona.

So I think it was pretty reasonable for Alec to expect that he could do that again.

He, he says he does believe that the previous administrations were acting in good faith.

They were acting on their best understanding that they had at the time.

But yeah, it's a pretty hard pivot from saying we can have anyone in the country to, well actually we have to look internally and actually very narrowly internally based on some of these - Rules.

Channel five did some really good reporting on this and essentially said there are a number of ways that you could hire outside there.

You can, in your own charter, you can declare an emergency and say that it was necessary to do police chiefs around the country, around the state have been hired from outside of the state and from other departments.

So Kabir Malik though, says, this is what our interpretation is.

This is how we're going to have to do it.

- Well, currently, yes.

And as Abby mentioned, it's, it's, there's a lot of even odd restrictions on who can apply internally, but it sounds like they are definitely working on a way to revise this, whether it's going to the voters, asking them to do it some way to change this for the future.

So there's no ambiguity, no question.

And, and I have to think that somebody in the department, internal candidates would've seen these last two processes and brought this up had it been something that was widely known or a real concern that didn't happen as far as, as far as I know.

So now they're gonna codify it.

- Part of it too, I think is that Malik is just taking the helm.

He's new, wants to be careful of course with, with going forward with these processes.

'cause prior to Mayor Dan Horrigan, who was the mayor before Malick, we had a mayor that was there for, for decades.

Yeah.

So I think it's, it's, you know, there was a status quo for a long time and just making sure that these proper processes are followed, especially because police have have been under, you know, tight people have been looking at the police department in Akron after the Jalen Walker situation.

So just making sure that everything, I guess is above board is a reasonable expectation.

- And you wonder how this will play with the public who have been critical of the police after the Jalen Walker shooting death, that now the person who's gonna lead the department comes from that very department.

Yeah.

Maybe the idea that you could hire someone fresh from the outside was a good thought.

But I wonder what the reaction's going to be to the fact that it has to be somebody from already in the upper ranks of the police department.

- Yeah.

And and I think that specifically the, the rules are if one person at any rank applies, you can also consider someone from the, the low, the rank below.

However, if more than one person of the highest rank applies, then you can't.

So right now, if that we are two deputy chiefs, if they both apply, no one else will be considered.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder movie star and governor of California, was in Ohio last weekend for the Arnold Sports Festival and took some time to beat up on gerrymandering at the invitation of citizens, not politicians.

The group that's seeking to put an amendment on the November ballot that wants to end gerrymandering by removing politicians from drawing congressional and state house maps.

And Karen, that's exactly what the former governor said.

He said, that's what we did in California.

You gotta get these politicians outta that business.

- Yeah.

California.

I can't do the, I can't do the pronunciation.

Good try.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, this was a really interesting bringing together of the folks who were looking at the signature gathering process to try to get this anti gerrymandering commission onto the November ballot.

They have until July to gather 414,000 ish valid signatures, which means they're probably gonna have to get around seven or 800,000 signatures just to be sure.

And so bringing in Schwarzenegger at the end of his Arnold Sports Festival was really an interesting move.

Schwarzenegger has been in Ohio before talking about redistricting back in 2018 when lawmakers put a ballot issue before voters, they agreed on it.

This was the one that would change the Ohio Redistricting Commission and the process for congressional redistricting.

Schwartzenegger had did shots of schnapps with them celebrating this thinking that this was going to be the thing that was going to fix gerrymandering in Ohio.

Well, obviously no, that's not what happened.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled five times that the legislative maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and, and had a ruling twice on the congressional maps.

So this is the latest attempt to do something about - This.

I wonder if he said when he was doing shots, I'll be back because he came back.

I can't remember he - Did or not.

It was just really fun.

It was an interesting event.

But you know, when you look back on that and you see, well, there was this agreement voters overwhelmingly approved changing the way that congressional and legislative maps were drawn, put it in the constitution.

And yet we still have maps that the courts have ruled.

Unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

- Cuyahoga County unveiled a newly renovated addition to the men's shelter on Lakeside Avenue operated by Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries.

The county renovated a building a purchase in 2021, adding 14,000 square feet to the shelter, providing 114 more beds.

Abby, I took a look at the pictures of this thing and it looks terrific and I know 2100, the, the shelter there has been criticized forever for being overcrowded and just not enough.

Right.

The new additions down the street from 2100 Lakeside.

The goal is not simply providing more beds, but more comfort and more privacy.

- Yeah.

And and dignity is a huge thing when it comes to being unhoused.

I, I remember when I did my feature a couple, it might have been last month I think now, when I spoke to people that were, were living on the streets - When it was cold.

- Yes.

When it was extremely cold.

Right.

Someone came and dropped off canned goods and false eyelashes and they were kind of annoyed about the canned goods.

'cause they're like, how am I gonna eat this?

You know, I'm not a savage, - But not the false eyelashes.

- No.

Because here's my point, when it comes to these small human things that give people dignity, that goes a long way.

So giving people this privacy, this comfort that really kind of changes how people think about their si situations and themselves and how people view them.

And especially when it comes to violence in the men's shelter, that is a huge concern.

So having these semi-private rooms, these lockers, anything to medic mitigate any potential run-ins, conflicts, theft, anything like that could, could make people feel less on edge on what could be, you know, among the worst days of their lives.

- Where does homelessness and housing land now on the county's priority list?

We've been hearing a lot about it.

We heard Chris Rene saying, you know, we're making a big push.

This is one example of creating more space and more privacy and more dignity.

Right.

Where does it stand on the priority list?

- Yeah, this is a huge priority for county executive Chris Rene.

He has this plan to reduce homelessness by 25% in the next, by 2027.

So this is in a big investment into that.

However, like many things on this show when it comes to these big issues, it, it's very multidisciplinary.

But this is a great first step because when I was talking to people that were living on the street in, in that extreme cold, a big thing that they said is, I don't wanna go to the shelters because I don't like the conditions there.

So making an effort to fix the conditions there does go a long way.

- Playhouse Square is hosting a sporting event for the first time in its hundred plus year history.

The final rounds of the inaugural squash in the land tournament will be played this weekend.

Abby squash the racket sport, unlike tennis, played in a very contained court.

It's like racketball, if you're not familiar, it makes a good fit for a theater in the round like that.

- Yeah.

And what's really great about that specific theater is that there's flexibility in seating.

So I've seen shows there where they've done 360 seating when I went, it was in kind of a horseshoe shape so they can stick in this squash court, which is this glass surrounded court.

And, and I was there as they were kind of building it.

It was really cool to see, because I'm not a big sports person, but I go to the theater a lot.

So it was really interesting to see the space used in a totally different way, because organizers say that there has never been a sporting event held there in, in Playhouse Square's history.

- You may not know about the history and people may not know about the history, but squash in Cleveland is big.

And there's something called Urban Squash Cleveland that is at the, it's on the west side and on Lorraine Avenue.

And it takes these students who are in local schools and sort of teaches them squash.

They're getting scholarships all over the place.

And these are inner city kids, but also suburban kids.

One of those suburban kids, the Shaker Heights team has the chance to play in this tournament.

Dixon Hill, yeah.

Had a round one loss, but I mean, you're going up against some of of the greatest people that there are, but to get into this tournament is a pretty big - Deal.

Yeah.

So she received a wild card.

She's 16 years old, she's nationally ranked for her age.

The tournaments director actually taught her tennis back in the day, which is kind of funny.

But like as, as you said, she was up against professionals.

There were 48 people from 17 different countries for this first ever squash tournament.

And so even if she lost, you know, it's insanely impressive that she, you know, held her own with the With the - Pros.

Awesome.

Congrats to you Dixon.

Monday on the Sound of Ideas on 89 7 WKSU, we'll bring together consumer protection experts from Cuyahoga County, the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission to talk about protecting yourself from scams.

And we've got a new quiz available@ideastream.org slash news quiz.

If you watch today's whole show, you'll know a lot of the answers.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks so much for watching and stay safe.