(gentle music) - Ohio Redistricting Commission members approve another tried state legislative maps, but not the ones you saw drawn live on Webstream.

It's looking like voters will have to deal with a split primary, as the map drawing process bogs down.

And Cuyahoga County releases a plan of ideas on how to connect the entire Lakefront.

Ideas is next.

(upbeat orchestral music) - Hello and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Rick Jackson in this week for Mike McIntyre.

Thank you for joining us.

The map making process for Ohio is stuck in a loop.

A fourth set of state district maps has been approved, but not the set people were expecting.

Cuyahoga County unveils a plan laying out options for connecting the Lakefront.

And Cleveland City Council Committee approves a proposal to give police access to home security cameras, including doorbell cameras.

We'll talk about that and the rest of the week's news on the Report's Roundtable.

Joining me this week from Ideastream Public Media, WKSU News Director, Andrew Meyer, and Multiple Producer, Gabriel Kramer.

And Statehouse News Bureau Chief, Karen Kasler joins us from Columbus.

Let's get ready to round table.

The Ohio Redistricting Commission has approved a fourth attempt at drawing district maps for the Ohio House and Ohio Senate.

But instead of the maps being drawn by two independent map makers in real time on a live Webstream you could watch, the commission instead of proved a republican drawn map that had been created out of public view.

Now, Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, who is a member of that commission, says if lawmakers don't take action affirming or changing the primary election date today, voters will have to have a split primary.

Karen, let's start with that primary and where we are.

LaRose says lawmakers have to take action, although they've been kind of reluctant to do so.

- Yeah, and I don't see anything happening today I mean, you'd have to get a two thirds majority in the House and Senate for something like this to happen today.

And lawmakers aren't around usually on Friday.

So this would be kind of an unusual circumstance for something like this to happen.

And there's no appetite among Republican leaders and Republican lawmakers to really make this happen, to move the primary, but boards of elections and the secretary of state have been saying, this is a serious issue.

You can't just proceed forward with the May primary when you have invalidated maps.

And just before we went on the air here, the ACLU of Ohio and the League of Women Voters filed their challenge to that fourth set of maps that were approved on Monday.

And so, once again, this whole process continues on.

The secretary of state last night, wrote a letter to state lawmakers saying, if you don't vote today, then we're gonna have to go forward with basically two primaries.

Now he turned the blame on that to the federal court that had been hearing this case because there were a group of Republican voters who asked the federal court to step in and figure all this out.

And those three judges on that federal court decided not to step in.

They said they wanted to wait and see what the Ohio Supreme Court did.

So they pushed that off until April 20th.

Once again, kicking it back to state leaders in Ohio to try to figure this out.

And so we have early voting starting on Tuesday, and voter registration deadline is on Monday.

Secretary of State, Frank LaRose says, "Those military and overseas ballots need to be mailed out tomorrow."

So all of this is leading toward a May 3rd primary that will have everything on it, except for State House and Senate Districts, which means they'll have to be a second primary, he says.

And he says the only date for that is going to have to be August, 2nd.

- Karen, on the bog down map, making process really seemed that when the outside map makers were brought in, we thought all of this was moving ahead.

- Yeah, the outside map makers, there was one hire and recommended by the Democrats, one recommended by the Republicans.

They got together on a livestream camera here in a room in the State House and put together the maps, and people could watch if they wanted to on the Ohio channel.

It was really kind of interesting.

And you could watch not only what they were doing, but you could see the computer feeds.

It was really very, very interesting.

And the Ohio channel folks, Ohio government telecommunications, did a magnificent job in putting this together really at the last minute.

It was kind of, it was completely amazing.

But that map, speaker Bob Cupp and others have said that that map just they didn't have time to look at it or, and they really blamed the time issue for not adopting those maps, which they paid those outside map makers $49,000 each to put together.

And so they went back to the maps that were already ruled unconstitutional, the third set of maps, tinkered, and tweaked them, and they've submitted them now to the court.

And that's part of the challenge that the legal women voters in the ACLU filed this morning saying, these are basically the same maps that the court already rejected once.

And here the Republicans on the commission have just voted to basically submit their homework that had already been gotten that bad grade again.

And so that that's some of the basis of their challenges that these maps are very similar to maps that have all already been ruled on constitutional.

- Let me read you an email that came in from Willow Wick.

It says, when will Huffman and Cupp understand that they can't have it the way it used to be and gerrymander the maps.

To reject the maps that the map makers created for the amount they were paid is just crazy.

Karen, do you feel like there is a underswell of voter dismay with the people like Huffman and Cupp?

- I think among voters who have been watching and are engaged, there's a tremendous amount of frustration.

And certainly there's a tremendous amount of anger toward Republicans on the commission who keep voting for maps that the Supreme Court keeps ruling unconstitutional.

Republicans are defending this saying, the problem is not the map makers, the problem is Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.

Which is an interesting argument to make 'cause she's a long time Republican.

I mean, she was former Governor Bob Taft's lieutenant governor, she was Summit County prosecutor.

She's been a long time Republican leader here.

So to blame her as opposed to looking at the commission and the Republicans on that commission, that's a choice, I guess.

So the problem is, I think that there are a lot of people who are not engaged in this process and that's been making this difficult.

And what we're also seeing now is kind of a move toward talking about what's gonna happen in the future.

When I spoke to Governor Mike DeWine, again, one of the four Republicans who's voted for every map that's been ruled unconstitutional as has Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, Senate President, Matt Huffman and House Speaker, Bob Cupp, they all voted for all those maps.

Mike DeWine was talking about, hey, we need to go back and re-look at this constitutional amendment and maybe make some changes here because the idea of competitive districts is just as important as the party split 56, 54% Republican and 46% Democrat.

He said that that competitive district's thing is really important.

But that would mean going back to voters for another constitutional amendment, which costs money and could be very difficult.

- Andrew, Karen already talked about the fact that the ACLU has been part of a objection lawsuit to the fourth iteration here.

You were also following a meeting this week where some other folks got upset with the commission's actions had to be removed by OSP troopers.

- They were being vocal earlier in the meeting, and credit to one of the advocates for a better districting, redistricting process.

They were in the room, they captured what was going on social media.

Now we don't have the fuller context of everything that preceded it, but it appeared at the moment.

If you go back and watch that video, they're sitting there quietly, and the state police who are responsible for security in the room, are asking them to leave and they escort them outta the room.

So, we're talking all about democracy here and it paints a bad picture about people's voices actually being hurt in the process.

All of this was done back in 2015, this was passed to improve transparency.

You go back to 2012 when the current set of congressional maps and legislative maps were created.

And the problem then, the concern then, the complaints then, was that this was all done in a hotel room secreted by a group of certain people who were dictating the process.

There was no transparency to this.

2015, the attempt was, let's make it more transparent.

Let's come up with a solution.

But right now we're in a process where, all right, there's a different way of doing it but the result seems to be the same at the end of the day.

(upbeat orchestral music) - Cuyahoga County wants to find ways to connect the Lakefront Parks that stretch along the lake area shore from Bay Village to Euclid.

The county has released a 100, two-page plan along with an interactive website.

Andrew, the county does not envision a 30 mile trail or a boardwalk, but it does have key areas of focus.

- Yeah, and the key areas are the Lake Clifton Bridge between Rocky-River and Lakewood, Lakewood's Gold Coast, an area near Burke Lakefront, and a new Lakefront path in North Collinwood.

And you know, why isn't it continuous 30 mile boardwalk or bike path along the lake?

Because it can't.

- Yeah.

- Because a lot of this property is in private ownership.

And so what the plan envisions is quote unquote, knitting it all together.

I guess it's the, well don't let the good be the enemy of the perfect in this case.

So they're gonna do their best according to this plan to really create a continuous path, not necessarily all along the lakefront, but one that runs the 30 mile stretch off the lake shore in Cuyahoga County.

- Yeah, you talk about the private ownership.

There are so many streets, just east of the Bratenahl line that have essentially private ownership to the lake.

The City of Bratenahl, is all private ownership of the water there.

So people, nobody, you can knit, but that's an awfully big gap to try and crochet.

- You know, I think we're talking about sum total of maybe about six, seven miles of this plan that's actually along the Lakefront and the rest of it is, creating more pedestrian slash bike-friendly and paths along the streets that are close enough to the Lakefront.

- Okay, the other part of this conversation is equity.

I mean, we can build in certain areas, but there's certain areas where we can't and the people in that area, going back to the Dave's story, you don't have a car, you can't get to these lakefronts.

- Right, and last summer, the Cleave foundation every year has these common ground conversations, different parts of town.

You can sit apart community have a conversation about different things.

I went to one in Collinwood last year and the discussion was about environmental issues, environmental concerns, and to a lot of people, access to the lake was a huge topic.

And it really is a matter of the haves and have-nots, right?

There are people with houses on the lake.

There are private businesses along the lake.

So for the rest of us who don't live on the lake, how do we get to it?

We have this great lake that we can't really get to.

I'm thinking to myself, what would I, if I need to get to the lake, how would I get there?

I'd go to Edgewater, but how else would I get there?

So for a lot of people, you don't have a car, you don't have easy access to transits, you know, whatever it takes.

So perhaps these trails would help us get to the parts we can get to, but even opening up the lake to a more friendly way of getting to the lake would certainly be a benefit because people wanna utilize this lake.

People wanna get there.

People wanna fish in it, swimming it, whatever, you know, take a boat or whatever.

- And what it speaks to is actually a century's old doctrine called the public trust doctrine, which says that our waters are in the public trust.

A natural resource that needs to be accessible to all.

But the sticking point over the hundreds of years of the public trust doctrine has been that access between the, where we are the public ways and the actual waterfront itself.

And I don't know, I mean, it's 100 and two page document.

I applaud it, it's, thorough.

It's finally cohesive, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see suits that will come up as related to this plan.

- Right, 'cause it's a real shame.

You know, there are a lot of people in Cleveland that live a par five away from the lake and they can't even get to it, you know.

- Good point.

Andrew, we're also talking yesterday, Akron looking for input from its residence, how to improve the parks there.

- There's a multi year process that they've got going.

It's the Akron Parks Collaborative and each year going back to I think 2018, they've had eight parks challenge in Akron.

It's not a matter of the city coming in and say, hey this park is neglected.

We're gonna fix it up.

Here's what we're gonna do for you.

But rather they're making it competitive.

And they're saying, what ideas do you have for bringing your park back to improving it?

And these are city parks.

They can be as small as this sliver.

Some of them can be a block, but the idea is submit your ideas and we're gonna pick two of them.

And if you're picked, we're gonna give you $100,000 to make your dreams a reality.

It's the way that this should be done.

You go to the people in the communities and find out how do they think their parks can best serve them?

What needs to be done to reverse the years, the decades of neglect to make them part of the fabric again of the community.

So this process is just getting underway.

This is the first day that applications are being accepted and they will be accepted through April 22nd, Earth Day.

And then they will pick two winners.

So far, they have rehabbed seven parks in Akron through this initiative.

(upbeat orchestral music) - Cleveland City Council Safety Committee approved a proposal this week that would allow police to seek access to home security cameras, such as the Ring doorbell camera system, even if they're installed in private homes.

Andrew, we haven't yet determined parameters, how long we would use this, how we would use it, where it would be kept, how long it would be kept.

There's a lot to discuss.

- There is a lot to be ironed out, and that is really going to affect what I think is most essential here, which is homeowner buy-in.

Because in order for the police to access the video that comes across through your Ring doorbell, you need to say, yes, I give permission, whether it's a one time or just a blanket overall acceptance.

I actually surprised that it's only now that Cleveland is getting to this.

Akron police entered into an agreement on this back in 2019.

In fact, Akron Council in 2020, even considered buying and distributing Ring doorbells to residents.

Now, I don't think anything ever came to fruition from that, but this has been done in many other communities.

So now it's Cleveland's turn to consider whether this can be an effective tool in the crime fighting toolkit.

- Doing some research real quick yesterday, I saw that Amazon and Ring had deals with 400 some companies or (indistinct) places three years ago.

Yep, so yeah, so Cleveland really is late jumping on that bandwagon.

Gabe safety committee members largely viewed the measure as positive.

They see this as a way to what increase public safety.

- Right, and what they're saying is that we'll do, is it will kind of bridge the gap of lacking police officers.

So when there were crime recruit more police officers, they have a number they wanna reach for what, how many police officers they need.

They are short of that number.

And they're thinking that if they're able to access these cameras on people's doorbells or whatever security cameras, people have from their private homes, that it will help them at least be able to provide surveillance of the city and have eyes in places that they can't provide eyes or have people patrolling.

But, I will say that Cleveland is a city, like many cities across the country where there is a distrust for many people between the police and the citizens.

So I do think that for this, a lot of people would be a little bit worried about providing this to the Cleveland police, just a matter of I understand the surface might sound like, yeah, you can have access to this tape for now, but it could, I think to a lot of people, it might seem like a slippery slope for sure.

But for the Cleveland police, this seems like a way to bridge the gap of not being able to have as many people patrolling.

- Andrew, he touched on it, the doorbell surveillance's one way of the city using technology but he touched on this gap in officers the city has, and this really does put more eyes in more places.

I mean, we have the shots fired system already for sound.

This could help the police a great deal.

- That, and also council wants to deploy a couple of drones to assist in this.

And I believe also they've launched an effort to do a survey of all public and private surveillance cameras creating this network.

And again what Gabe said about this being potentially a slippery slope, it helps the police, but when does it become something that is intrusive on our own civil rights.

And that's why it's very critical when we're talking about, well, what are the limits to the access that police have?

Is it for a specific crime or it in perpetuity?

when you start talking, everything held onto forever, that raises some real concerns.

- I'm kind of surprised that security companies are so willing to jump in because as a potential consumer, if I know that somebody has access to my camera, I'm not buying one, I'm too private a person.

I don't want something that somebody can peek into my property.

- I'm with you.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I don't have a ring, and apparently, no, I'm not gonna get one, so.

(upbeat orchestral music) The first and only primary debates for United States Senator and Ohio governor are in the books.

The Ohio Debate Commission of which Ideastream Public Media is a member held the debates this past week at Central State University.

You moderated one of the three debates.

Do you have a sense who benefited?

- Well, I think hopefully Central State University did 'cause they were great.

They were, it was, I've never been there before.

It was a really nice campus.

The folks there were terrific.

And I really appreciate all the work that they did.

I hope the Ohio Debate Commission benefited.

It's a coalition of news organizations and civic groups and others that really are concerned about making elections better.

And so to have real journalists involved and all the candidates in the races, other than the one that unfortunately got canceled, that you were supposed to moderate Rick, having all those candidates on stage potentially benefited the Ohio Debate Commission, I hope.

I mean, we need to have the opportunity to see these candidates face to face, take real questions from journalists who are not afraid to fact check them, which is what I did.

And I think it makes the process better.

I know a lot of people think the debates are old school, who watches them, who cares.

It's still an opportunity for voters who really are struggling to decide who to pick.

It can potentially show the differences that they have with other candidates.

And it also shows them, shows people who they are.

How do they handle stress?

How do they handle questions?

How do they handle being in front of a live audience, getting real questions from a journalist, to not sophomore questions, in some sort of a forum where they're a lot more sympathetic to the causes there.

So I hope a lot of people benefited.

- As we learned on Monday night.

Apparently if you have stress turn on Karen Kasler, because a lot of those candidates did.

(laughs) - Yeah, I mean, I knew, I kept viewing it in my head as going into the arena, not the auditorium, 'cause I knew what I was getting into.

I knew that there were going to be campaign staffers there and that each of the candidates on stage had 20 tickets that they could distribute to staffers, family, friends.

So I figured that first question, which again, the questions came from people who submitted them to the Ohio Debate Commission's website.

And so when you had some candidates complaining at the end that I never asked about abortion, or guns, or anything like that, we didn't get any questions about those.

And the candidates' views on those issues are pretty well established.

So a lot of voters wanna find out other things.

But the one question that we got over and over and over again, that was my first question, was about the 2020 election and the false claim that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him.

I set it up saying there are facts that show that that's not what happened.

Do you still maintain that that's what happened?

And six outta seven of the candidates said, they pretty much do.

And so I had to fact check them.

That got the audience a little upset with me, but that's part of the job.

That's part of what it takes at this point to deal with some of these folks and the disinformation that they're willing to use.

- A little upset she says, they booed Karen Kasler, which I just cannot understand, but.

- She hears boo, we takes it as cheers.

- Oh, okay.

Well the, (laughs) the Republican Senate that is the race that you did, that is the race that people were paying attention to.

That is the big debate of the three.

They're spending a lot of money in the wake of the debates on ads.

Right now it looks like Mike Gibbons is the topic.

What's it say about his campaign?

Is he doing well, that all of a sudden the others are taking potshots?

- Well, he's definitely spending a lot of his own money and ads do work.

I mean this campaign is proving that ads do work because Gibbons kind of came from behind and now appears to be leading the pack, but it's not over.

I mean, again, May 3rd is the date that we're gonna vote on this primary, that Ohioans are gonna vote.

And in between now and May 3rd, you're gonna see a lot of campaign spending.

So far, just this race, $40 million has been spent, more than $40 million.

And while Gibbons is spending most of it, you do have the Club for Growth, which backs Josh Mandel, that's really getting into this and starting spending money.

Jane Timken's been spending money.

Matt Dolan's been spending money.

J.D.

Vance has been spending money or at least the pack that supports him has been spending money.

So you have a lot of people who are getting in and a lot of ads that are kind of, pointing back and forth at each other.

And that's kind of what you would expect this point, because there was a well cover dust up between Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel from one of those forums, it wasn't a journalistic debate.

It was a forum - Futuristic.

- where they got in.

(laughs) Yeah, they got in each other's faces.

That's become fodder for ads.

And what's interesting here is that, there's a lot of disinformation just in those ads, where Mike Gibbons never said Josh Mandel never worked.

He just said, Josh Mandel did not work in the private sector.

Josh Mandel's been pushing back saying, I did work, I was in the military.

So all of these expensive ads, lot of money being spent, and there's not a whole lot of real information about the candidates, their positions on issues, that sort of thing.

- Andrew, by 6:30 this morning, I had already seen a Timken, a Dolan and a Mandel ad.

I mean, they're out there.

- They are out there.

And I think what this comes back to, building on what Karen is saying, is a lot of times over the last number of years, we've seen increasing importance of ads and candidates feeling they really want to, have to, need to dictate the information.

That's not how elections are supposed to work.

That's why these debates are so critical, because they give voters in Ohio the opportunity to really understand where the candidates stand on all the issues.

It's about transparency.

It's not about us megaphoning what the message that candidates have, but getting answers to the questions that the voters have.

So I applaud the debate commission for what it's been able to pull off.

We need a debate commission where all of us in media, all across Ohio are involved with this because it's the power of us working together that makes it possible to really put the pressure on the candidates to stand up and be held accountable, and be transparent with the voters about what they really stand for.

- Right, thank you.

Gabe let's not short the Democrats here, Tim Ryan also starting to buy up ads, but his message causing concern for members of the Asian American Pacific Islander community.

- Right, so Tim Ryan put out his first ad for a Senate campaign earlier this week and almost immediately after he put it out, there was a statement released by the Asian American Midwest Progresses Organization.

The ad essentially for Tim Ryan is saying, the US needs to compete with China when it comes to manufacturing.

And the message is very us versus China, us versus China.

And it's called the One Word campaign.

And he's saying the word China, China, China repeatedly.

And in the similar sense to what happened in 2020, Rob Portman, the senator, Ohio Senator Rob Portman was continually blaming China for the pandemic.

And what had happened was as people start putting blame on China, even if it's for political reasons, even if we're not trying, even if they're not trying to blame specific people, but blame a Chinese government, what happens is Americans refuse to see the whole picture.

Americans will often just hear China and associate anything that with China, anything that they associate with China to be bad.

And what has happened last two years, we've seen an increase of hate crimes toward Asian Americans Pacific Islanders because a lot of people associate China with all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, right?

So that's the concern with this ad as well that Tim Ryan had put out.

So we reached out to his campaign this week, where they said we can expect the response here pretty soon, but certainly it is, especially in the last couple years, as we've seen this increase of hate times, harassment toward Asian Americans, this does not help.

- Okay, and real fast, Karen, Governor DeWine, didn't won a debate, but his ads are out there.

- Yeah, and he said yesterday, when we asked him about that again, that he's been very accessible, he's done more press conferences than any other governor.

And that's true.

But also there's the issue of standing in front of journalists, taking questions and dealing with your opponents.

He's got some interesting opponents in that race that really haven't beaten him up, but not only personally, but also for COVID, and the policies there and spreading a lot of disinformation.

So he decided to step away and not decline the invitation.

Then Jim Renacci did.

Joe Blystone did accept the invitation, and Ron Hood who's running like, I've called it a stealth campaign, 'cause nobody seems to have heard anything from him.

He didn't and even respond.

- Monday on The Sound of Ideas on 89.7 WKSU, we talked to Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan, about the opportunities and the challenges, his city's facing as we emerge from the pandemic.

He is the first in our Get To NEO a Leader series that will introduce mayors and city managers from across the listening area.

I'm Rick Jackson, thank you so much for watching.

(upbeat music) (orchestral music)