- The Ohio Senate smacked down two vetoes by Governor Mike DeWine.

Cleveland City Council, still facing loud protests, has tweaked rules for public comment at meetings.

And Republicans have proposed eliminating Ohio's personal income tax.

"Ideas" is next.

(majestic music) Hello and welcome to "Ideas," I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

The Ohio Senate this week concurred with the House by voting to override two of Governor Mike DeWine's recent vetoes.

House Bill 68, prohibiting gender affirming healthcare for minors and preventing trans girls from competing in girls and women's scholastic sports, will soon go into effect.

The law that bars local governments from banning flavored tobacco products, something communities say is needed to keep kids from getting hooked, also will go into effect in late April.

Locally, Cleveland City Council approved changes to its policy regarding public comments at meetings, though its meeting had to be ended early due to disruption from protestors.

And lawmakers again floated the idea of scrapping the state's personal income tax.

Joining me for the round table, from Ideastream Public Media, reporter Abbey Marshall.

Also with me in studio, the editor of the "Buckeye Flame," Ken Schneck.

And in Columbus, State House News Bureau Chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to round table.

The Ohio Senate smacked down two vetoes by Governor Mike DeWine this week.

Let's start with the first.

Senators voted 24 to eight to override the veto of House Bill 68, concurring with the House, which had voted to override the veto on January 10th.

First, let's talk about what the passing of HB 68 means for trans youth and their medical providers in Ohio.

What practically is going to happen to them?

As I understand, if you're currently getting gender affirming healthcare treatment, that continues, but new folks who want to do that would not be able to.

- It's basically gonna be a mad scramble for the next 90 days to either establish care, 'cause this doesn't, as you mentioned earlier, it doesn't go into effect until the end of April.

So there is a bit of a grandfather clause, but one part of the bill that doesn't get talked about that much is that healthcare providers can be charged with aiding and abetting if they refer families to care outside of the state of Ohio.

So that lends this sense of urgency to the next 90 days to either establish care, or as we'll talk about in a minute, I'm sure, many families making plans to leave Ohio.

The athletics part, again, this is the toughest part about talking about HB 68 is these are two disparate things that are happening at the same time, talking about gender affirming care and talking about banning trans female athletes.

So the athletes part, again, there are only six or seven approved athletes in the state of Ohio, so that's not going to affect things so greatly, but there's gonna have to be a lot of rules that need to be addressed.

- What we've heard from the Republicans who are in favor of this, when the criticism was brought up, this is a solution in search of a problem, that there are six athletes currently approved through a process that the Ohio High School Athletic Association has that is pretty extensive in terms of determining whether someone qualifies for this.

And so the argument is it's really not a problem, there's just a few.

The answer to that was, if there is one trans girl who's taking the place of a biological girl, of just a girl at birth, that in itself is as big a transgression as could be.

- Yeah, we actually just talked about this last night in my Public Policy and Higher Education course at Baldwin Wallace University.

One of the most fascinating things about both sides on the HB 68 as it pertains to athletics is that on the one hand, you have Republicans saying this violates Title IX, that women's rights are being infringed upon, that Title IX should be protecting them.

And on the other side, you have Democrats saying Title IX protects trans students.

And so both sides using Title IX to make completely different arguments.

But as you said, yes, that this affects more than six students, anyone they play against.

But again, there are rules to guarantee that you can't just wake up one morning and decide, "I'm playing for a different team of a different gender."

There's a whole year deferral period, there's testing, and there's medical documentation to assure that you don't have physical advantages.

- Karen, the vote was mostly along party lines.

Was there anything surprising during that Senate hearing?

- Well, the one Republican who voted with the Democrats against the override was Senator Nathan Manning from Northeast Ohio.

And so that was interesting right there in and of itself.

But I mean, we've been expecting this for a while.

The House voted to do this a couple weeks ago.

The Senate said they were gonna do this, so this was not a big surprise.

And even when DeWine was asked about this in Cincinnati yesterday, he said he wasn't surprised at all by this.

He was surprised by the other veto override, which we'll get to in a minute.

There was a lot of emotion in this discussion.

There was a protester who was removed early on, but it proceeded kind of as I think a lot of people expected.

- Ken, what is the impact of this in regards to people with transgender children who live in Ohio?

We've been hearing a number who are saying, "We're going to move out of the state."

That doesn't seem to be a concern of the legislature.

The number would be particularly small as the number of transgender children in Ohio is particularly small.

But what we're hearing is folks are saying, "I'm not gonna stand for it.

I'm gonna go somewhere else that's more accepting."

- There is a organization in Ohio called TransOhio, and they are an all-volunteer led organization.

They established a transgender emergency relief fund that people could apply to in order to get funds for any number of things, including relocation costs.

And so they have told reporters that they have been inundated with requests for people seeking assistance to get out of Ohio.

I think the part, and Senate President Huffman said exactly what you just said, Mike, he said it pretty outright, "This is not going to affect things that much in Ohio."

I think what's not being factored in, and he mentioned Intel and all the people who are gonna come to work at Intel, there are going to be tons of families who will now not come or not even apply to work at Intel because they have trans youth in their family and Ohio will not be a place where their family can thrive in the same place where they are right now.

- When I talked to Equality Ohio yesterday, which is the state's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, I was told that TransOhio's gotten calls from 68 Ohio families looking to either relocate or receive care out of state.

- We had one senator say, Ken, and I want to know what the reaction, the people that you've talked to in the stories that the "Buckeye Flame" has done, who basically just said, "Listen, boys are boys and girls are girls, and never will there be anything but that."

- Senator Roegner stood on the State House floor and just said, "There is no such thing as gender affirming care."

I think what is so maddening and frustrating to so many of the LGBTQ people and families that we've spoken to is that there really is no middle ground here.

On the one side, you have individuals who are saying, 'This gender affirming care saved the life of my child," or trans youth have said, "This saved my life."

And you have Republicans who are saying, "There's no such thing as gender affirming care."

I don't know where the middle ground is.

We have not been able to find a middle ground to write a story there because they're so polar opposite from each other that, how do you even have a conversation?

- The governor has listened to that, and when he offered his veto, he talked about talking to medical professionals and families and hearing that this is an issue to keep children alive, that that's an overriding concern.

He then put forth some administrative rules on gender affirming care, one of which was that you could not have transition surgery under the age of 18, which we're also told is not something that generally happens.

So where do his administrative rules now stand?

I'll start with you and then maybe Karen can supplement.

- Fun answer for you, no one knows.

We're just not sure how these two interact with each other, because there's a lot of conflicting information between HB 68 and the proposed rules that the governor.

And what Governor DeWine had said when he vetoed HB 68 was, he was asked by a reporter, it might have been Karen, he was asked, "Well, are you concerned about a veto override?"

And he said, "No, I think the rules that I'm proposing actually go further than HB 68."

And indeed, the proposed administrative rules would restrict gender affirming care for adults as well.

And so it's very confusing right now as these rules are in the public sphere for public comment where they would go.

- If that's the case, Karen, was this basically a flex by the legislature?

- I think you're getting to something that I wanted to bring up in the discussion of the other veto override that I think is very interesting on that point.

On the rules issue, I don't think these two things necessarily, the veto override and the rules that DeWine proposed, have anything to do with each other.

I mean, DeWine had proposed, he had signed an executive order banning gender transition surgery for minors and also another executive order and then talked about these rules.

They could continue, but like Ken said, there's really no idea of what's happening with those.

And it takes a long time to develop rules.

So those would not be in place for a long time, just like this law won't be in place for 90 days.

(dramatic music) - Less than an hour after the veto of House Bill 68, the Senate overrode one of the line item vetoes the governor made in the new budget last July, a measure that prohibited cities and local governments from banning flavored tobacco sales.

Karen, legislators, in overriding this veto, said it's a big business concern.

- Yeah, and when you time it out from the veto override on 68 to this veto override, it was actually less than a half an hour.

So it was pretty quick.

Now, I will say that's not a record that two veto overrides happened on the same day.

Back when former Governor John Kasich was in office, he was overridden 11 times in the House in an hour and 22 minutes one day.

And then the Senate came back and overrode him six times in about 44 minutes.

So this is, it's a big deal, but it's not a record.

But it's still really important.

And think this was something, again, that senators had said they were gonna do.

DeWine has really opposed this idea.

This is the second time he had vetoed a proposal that would prohibit local communities from banning flavored tobacco products.

And once again, party line vote, except for this time, it was Senator Bill Blessing that voted with the Democrats not to do the override.

And the question then becomes, between these two parties, Republicans say it's bad for business, it confuses people, it doesn't have uniform rules for commerce all across Ohio.

And Democrats say this is a public health crisis in many communities and communities should have the right to make decisions on whether they're gonna allow businesses to sell this stuff.

- Abbey, the public health department in the city of Cleveland has made smoking a number one issue.

It's going after this.

This is one of the tools that it could use.

And it goes to the point about home rule.

Does a local community have the right to govern what happens in its confines?

The state usually says, yes, local communities should, but in this case, no, because we think that it's not good for small business.

- Right, and this is a battle that we've seen back and forth between City Council and Mayor Bibb's administration, where Dave Margolius, who leads the Public Health Department here, has really been pushing for putting a ban on this flavored tobacco for the same reasons and saying that it targets the Black community especially.

And City Council meanwhile is hearing concerns from business owners, entrepreneurs, that sort of thing.

So it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

- On the home rule issue, that's what I wanted to get to when you talked about whether some of this was a flex by the legislature.

There was a really interesting comment made during the discussion of this veto override by Senator Rob McColley.

He's the Majority Floor Leader in the Senate, likely will be the Senate President.

At least that's the expectation once Senate President Matt Huffman, who is term limited, leaves the Senate, and he talked about how if there is a majority that wants to do something in the legislature, regardless of what the governor wants to do, and here I'm quoting, "For us to not even consider overriding that veto in some cases would be an abdication of our authority, would be minimizing our role in this three branch system of government."

I think it's a really, really interesting potential message here that we're gonna go in one direction, and if the governor goes in another direction, we are gonna pull him along with us.

And it really says something about home rule here, because that's a continuous struggle between municipalities and the state.

(dramatic music) - Cleveland City Council allows public comment, but has had problems with what people have said and how they've said it.

New rules to address those issues were challenged in a lawsuit.

And now there are new, new rules.

Abbey, let's walk through the changes a little bit.

What'll be different now, and why was this prompted?

- Sure, so these are kind of two separate issues when we talk about public comment.

So the first thing that we're gonna talk about is the change in these rules.

And this comes after Chris Martin has filed a lawsuit against the city for cutting his microphone off at a meeting in September when he was talking about council members that had accepted money from a political action group.

And council says that that violated the rules, which included being able to address council members directly as well as banning indecent and discriminatory language.

Now, when you have a public comment period at government meetings, which you are not required to, you have to adhere to the First Amendment.

- Yeah, if you have 'em, then you have to adhere.

- Exactly, so someone else's microphone at that meeting had been cut after she had made some homophobic and anti-Semitic comments as well.

But Chris Martin was just listing off the names of council members and they said, "That's it."

So he filed this lawsuit.

So now counsel is taking a look at those rules, and the main change that you see is they struck those parts of the rules that said you can't say anything indecent or discriminatory.

You can't address council members directly.

But nothing will change immediately.

These rules will have to go back to the judge for review.

- So the lawsuit's not necessarily over as a result of it.

- No, no, no, no.

- Meanwhile, we're at this meeting, and it isn't during the public comment period, but the folks have been incredibly loud at these meetings about the war in Gaza and saying they want it to be declared genocide.

They want all kinds of action from the council.

There's obviously a very big Palestinian population in Northeast Ohio.

And it gets loud enough that council kind of adjourns a little bit early.

This was not part of the comment period, but this is also something that's addressed in their policies, which is you can't disrupt a meeting.

- Right, and I will note that council did conduct all of their business right over the chanting.

They finished with the legislation, they adjourned early.

But yes, this is something that we've been seeing happening for months.

As we know, after the October 7th Hamas attack in Southern Israel, Cleveland's Palestinian community, which is, as you said, very sizable, and their supporters have been showing up in droves to council meetings.

They've kind of been flooding the public comment period, just getting back to the public comment, and talking about this need or want for a resolution, which is not a law, it's more of a sentiment of we as a body support or oppose this thing.

It's not unprecedented.

For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Cleveland City Council passed a resolution four days later condemning Vladimir Putin's actions, expressing support for the Ukrainian people.

And so these supporters of the Palestinian people say that they feel like they're not being seen or heard by Cleveland City Council.

So this tension is escalating and escalating to the point where these meetings are being disrupted, and there's really no end in sight.

I'm gonna plug my story.

If you wanna go to ideastream about.org.

- [Mike] I was about to do that.

- And later today on "All Things Considered" I talk a little bit more about this, because it is a very nuanced and complex topic where I spoke to members of the Palestinian community and City Council about why neither of them are budging.

But this isn't anything I see changing in the next few weeks.

- You asked a great question, which was, if you're pushing for this, what is the outcome?

So what if there's a resolution?

Resolutions have zero power.

Also, even if it was legislation in Cleveland, that has nothing to do with the war in the Middle East, there's no way it would have any impact on that.

You've mentioned it's because people want to be heard and they want to feel as though council supports them, but you got the other side from Council President Blaine Griffin, who said basically that, one, it's not gonna make any impact, and two, there's not just a single constituency here.

- Sure, yeah, he's concerned about creating further division and also because you are having such different viewpoints from members of council, he says it's not possible to get all 17 members of council on board with this, especially because, as he says, it's a very sensitive and complicated topic.

But yeah, the Palestinian community here says, "Well, we want to feel heard and seen by our local government."

And so that's just really where this falls, where Blaine Griffin is saying, "We're not gonna solve this problem here.

This is notoriously a very difficult issue to solve."

But people say, "We just wanna feel seen and heard while our families who are in the West Bank or in Gaza are potentially going to be killed."

(dramatic music) - The union representing Akron's public school teachers has filed a lawsuit against the school board, accusing it of violating public meeting laws.

Abbey, the teachers see this tutoring contract first as a threat to their jobs.

- Right, right, and even though the funding, roughly $150,000, would come from a grant from the Ohio Department of Education, they're still concerned because it's being seen as outsourcing their jobs.

They say that it could just be the start of viewing other school employees, not just teachers, as unnecessary.

APS's superintendent, however, did say that the tutoring company is willing to give union teachers and tutors first priority for those jobs.

- Ken, the teachers are upset.

And by the way, part of what you do is teaching the teachers and you're an education expert.

They're upset the contract was discussed in executive session, not in the public part of the meeting.

And executive sessions, Ohio Sunshine Law is pretty specific.

It's for specific legal issues and for employee matters.

This isn't an employee, this is a contract with an outside firm.

What about the sort of the legal ground of going into executive session here?

That's what the suit's about.

- This suit's about, and I think this was the perfect storm of adding in whatever happened with that recording glitch, which just added fuel to the fire of, it's almost the exact same thing we just said about the last story, that there was a lack of transparency here.

That this is exactly as you just said, Mike, not something that's supposed to be discussed in executive session.

And so that's what's being alleged here, is that they violated these open meeting laws, sunshine laws.

This is where this is supposed, have these conversations out in the open so that we can weigh in on them.

They are saying with regarding the glitch that there's nothing nefarious that happened here.

It just cut out.

Unfortunately, that glitch happened at a really inopportune moment for making that case that it wasn't intentional.

- When two of the members of the board were kind of arguing about this particular issue and 40 seconds of the tape suddenly is gone.

And what we hear from the school board is, "Hey, it's YouTube and it's rolling.

We have no control over that."

- Exactly.

By the way, wherever that 42 second could have cut out, I think people would've said that was at a really inopportune moment.

- All right, we'll continue to follow that story.

Connor Morris will, our education reporter.

One other item of note in Akron, Mayor Shammas Malik announced yesterday, police must begin wearing name tags again.

They removed the name tags in 2022 after the shooting death of Jayland Walker out of concern for police officer safety.

The chief at the time, Steven Mylett, said bounties had been placed on officers' heads.

Yesterday, Malik, though, Abbey, said that the return of the name tags is meant to grow trust and transparency.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So as you said, that was a policy that was made in place at a time when there were a lot of protests happening in downtown Akron after the fatal police shooting of Jayland Walker.

And so that was just a measure that I guess was intended to be temporary at the time and it just kind of has continued.

So moving past that, especially as there is a really broken level of trust for a lot of Akron's community, particularly the Black community toward police, this is just another measure that can hopefully restore that trust, Malik says.

(dramatic music) - Republican state lawmakers in both bodies of the legislature have again proposed eliminating the state's income tax.

Karen, scaling back and even eliminating the state's personal income tax has come up before.

And we have seen massive cuts in state income tax, about half.

What's bringing back the idea of just eliminating it altogether?

- This is a Republican idea that comes around every couple of years, honestly, either phasing it out or cutting it back significantly or eliminating it.

And so the sponsor of this bill, one of the main sponsors, Representative Adam Matthews, who is on our TV show, "The State of Ohio," this weekend.

- [Mike] Oh, there it is.

- I know, had to get that in, had to get it in.

- [Mike] Raise your glass if you have one.

- The duck drops from the ceiling every time she says that, yeah.

- All right, go ahead.

- He had proposed a bill last year that would create a flat income tax of two-and-three quarter percent and also make some major changes in property taxes that schools and other entities said would cost them half a billion dollars and would cost homeowners and agricultural property owners almost a billion dollars.

So that has kind of been shelved.

Now he and other Republicans are talking about this idea of eliminating the state income tax because they say that if they do that, that there will be growth in the economy.

And the reality is here that the state income tax provides almost $11 billion of the state budget.

And this fiscal year, the state budget, well, the state will spend about $86 billion.

So that's a pretty significant chunk of change.

And how you replace that, all Matthews would tell me is "We're not gonna cut Medicaid."

But then what else is there?

There's a lot.

- [Mike] Education.

- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot education, which is a huge portion of the budget.

There's prisons, there's health and human services, there's all sorts of other areas.

And so that's obviously gonna be a discussion here.

I don't know if this is gonna move.

This is an election year, so certainly the idea of talking about it is something Republicans wanna do.

But that is such a big part of this.

One other thing in this bill, it would eliminate the commercial activity tax, what used to be the state's main business tax, for the 10% of businesses that are still paying it, because most of the CAT was eliminated in the budget where 90% of businesses no longer have to pay the CAT.

(dramatic music) - The Ohio Supreme Court says the public doesn't have a right to know how much taxpayer money it cost to protect Governor Mike DeWine while he attended Super Bowl 56 in Los Angeles in 2022.

Ohio State Highway Patrol Troopers provided the security detail.

So to be clear, Karen, the governor paid his own freight, paid for his family, they all went to the Super Bowl, had a great time, but when you're a governor and you go there, you're going to have a security detail, which we pay for.

The paper wanted to know how much that cost, and the Supreme Court said, "You don't get 'em because they contain security details."

- Yeah, he always has a security detail.

And so of course, those officers traveled with him, and the "Cincinnati Inquirer" sued after their public records request for information about the cost of that travel was denied.

And so the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that those are not a public record, that these records were used to develop security plans to continue to protect the governor.

It's not a surprise, because in the past there have been lawsuits over, say, former Governor John Kasich's schedule and reporters wanted to see that, and that was also ruled a security record.

So I'm not terribly surprised, but this was an interesting case to see that, we were paying for this, but we don't get a chance to see how much we're paying for this.

One thing I should note here is that the governor's son, Justice Pat DeWine, recused himself in this case.

(dramatic music) - The U.S. Coast Guard had to be called in earlier this week after a large group of people became stranded on an ice floe in Lake Erie near Catawba Island.

I couldn't believe it when someone said, "Hey, we're following this ice floe thing."

And I thought maybe it was ice fishermen, although I don't think we found out what it is people were doing out on this ice floe.

- No, we're not really clear, and no one was hurt, though a lot of different agencies had to come together.

The Coast Guard did come out with a statement that, "Please exercise caution when you are out there."

Implied in the statement, I think, is just stop going outside.

- Stop going on the ice, anyway.

- [Ken] That too, or just go to the library, folks.

- You're better off, I think, probably on land, in the parking lot.

But going out on the ice, I don't know if I'd do that at all, given the unpredictability of the freezing in Northeast Ohio.

Now, it used to be when I was a kid, back in my day, you could walk to Canada, but now it seems as though freeze and thaw happens.

You don't see that kind of hard freeze like we did in the past.

I don't know if I'd go out in any kind of ice, and they shouldn't have either.

- Again, go go your local library and check out a book on ice.

- [Mike] Read about ice floes.

- Yeah.

(dramatic music) - Monday on "The Sound of Ideas" on 89.7 WKSU, we'll talk about entrepreneurs and the various college programs in our area helping to shape the job makers of tomorrow.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching, and stay safe.

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