Ohio Secretary of State Frank La Rose wants a judge to compel the Department of Homeland Security to share citizenship databases with his office.

While posturing continues over where a new Brown stadium will go.

Gateway says it needs $40 million to pay bills.

A progressive field and rocket mortgage fieldhouse.

And love it or hate it.

It's time to fall back on ideas.

His next.

Hello and welcome to IDEAS.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRoche has sued the Department of Homeland Security for access to citizenship databases.

He wants to check them against Ohio's voter rolls to make sure Nancy Rosen's don't vote.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that new citizens may be asked to show papers if there is a challenge to their eligibility at the polls.

Gateway, the nonprofit landlord of Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, has told Cleveland and Cuyahoga County that they must fork over $20 million apiece to cover upgrades and maintenance.

Attorney General Dave Yost wants the chance to defend the state's model law, which is intended to make it harder for teams to leave taxpayer funded stadiums.

And if you feel spent this weekend, it's because we're losing Daylight saving time.

Get ready for that dark drive home from work.

Joining me for the Reporters Roundtable in studio, senior reporter for arts and Culture at Ideastream Public Media, Kabeer Bhatia from Axios, Cleveland Reporter Sam Allard, and in Columbus, Statehouse News bureau chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

The state's top election official has filed suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over access to databases that he wants to use to check the citizenship status of Ohio voters.

Karen, he says he's been seeking access for months.

What it wouldn't work now to do anything before this election.

So why are we hearing about this now?

Yeah, and I asked him about that.

Why is this important in terms of the timing?

He says he has, like you just said, been looking for access for months there.

The state does have access to this one database.

He wants access to three others.

And it kind of goes with the narrative that Republicans have been talking about, that large numbers of non-citizens are voting in this election, which is just not true.

The data does not support that at all.

So if he even gets access, which I mean, we're a couple of days before the election, it seems very unlikely.

We've discussed earlier on this show was a rule form that might force naturalized citizens to show their papers if they're being challenged at the polls and don't have a current or proper ID that shows that they're a citizen.

That one also went to court and a federal judge tossed out a legal challenge.

Here's another case where you've got naturalized citizens who may have an issue with their driver's license or whatever.

And the question was whether they should have to bring proof of citizenship with them, along with a photo ID when they come to vote.

And Judge Christopher Boyko ruled that that directive can be enforced and that those who oppose it don't have standing.

And he also said that things are different than they were in 2006 when he made a similar ruling that actually went the other way.

That ruling said that the law that required challenged voters to provide proof, he said, was unconstitutional because it subjects naturalized citizens to disparate treatment.

That's not the case this time.

So the ACLU is saying if you're a naturalized citizen and you're worried about being challenged at the polls, you bring documentation in case that happens.

The nonprofit organization that serves as landlord to both Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse told the county and city it needs $40 million more to pay for maintenance at both facilities.

They want the city to pay 20 million for work at Progressive Field, the county to pay 20 million for work at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, some $40 million at both of those places.

The landlord is on the hook for those that the the teams front the money.

But the landlord apparently owes them back.

Yeah.

And the landlord, of course, is Gateway Economic Development Corporation.

That means the public.

That means the taxpayer.

The short answer to what this this money pays for right now is, I mean, honestly, it's anything they please.

The conditions of the lease agreement stipulate that gateway the public must pay for any repairs, capital repairs, add rocket mortgage fieldhouse over and above $500,000 and at progressive field of any capital repairs of any any size.

Capital repairs are in quotes.

For the listening audience.

Because often I mean, sometimes they actually are legitimate repairs.

Things that you might call your insurance agent for as a home owner, something like h-back, roofing, plumbing, things like that.

But they're often what we would call improvements or enhancements more akin to installing a home theater or something.

So the Jumbotron, the corporate suites, seating things like that.

In the current ask, I believe at least for the Cavs situation, this is they as you say they fronted money last year for escalators elevators and a control booth like cables and tech for their control booth operations.

And I'm not exactly sure what the Guardian's one is.

It's difficult to disentangle repairs with the ongoing $200 million renovation.

There.

That's another issue we can discuss.

Should Gateway not have money in a bank?

They are being funded through a syntax.

Funny.

Funny.

You should ask that, Mike.

I mean, the Cuyahoga County voters passed in 2014.

The syntax on Cigarets and alcohol, which was projected to generate over the 20 year lifespan of the tax.

$90 million per teen.

So there was a $90,000,092 million bucket that each team had for 20 years.

Now it's 2020 for about to be 2025 and they've already blown through it all.

So and not only that, I mean, the county's borrowing money against future projected revenues from the syntax.

So not only are we paying the tax itself, but also interest on the bonds that we sell and any projected shortfalls.

So now all that's left for these teams to do is come to plunder the general funds of the city and the county.

And they're saying you're on the hook because they're public facilities.

So the money has to be paid.

Well, they're they're referencing the lease agreement itself.

They're saying, hey, we're not hey, listen, we're just we're just civic partners here.

We it's in the lease we got to do with the lease says, which is a faulty argument.

But Cleveland City Council was none too happy about it.

Yeah, no kidding.

They this was Monday.

And to be honest, so like, from personal experience, I covered the deal very closely back in 2017 and 2018.

And you never saw this level of vocal opposition.

But what I would classify as kind of moral outrage back then, you saw a lot of typical cheerleading and kind of the rhetoric we're seeing now around the Brown Stadium stories from Chris Ronayne about, you know, growing up, watching the team, talking about their economic benefits to downtown.

That's what we always saw, talking about all the teams.

Now we're seeing city council people referencing the recent CU deal renovation, hundreds of million dollars of subsidies, the ongoing progressive field renovation, hundreds of millions of public subsidies, whatever the Brown Stadium renovation or new construction is hundreds of millions of subsidies.

The syntax now they're coming for the general fund, too, they say.

They say enough is enough, notwithstanding the fact that the constituents in their wards generally can't afford to go to these facilities.

So they're saying this is an untenable financial arrangement and we can't even our citizens can't even enjoy them.

Come here.

We're talking about the syntax that's alcohol and cigarets for these venues and by the way, the revenues may be going down.

People are smoking less.

But I want to make sure to point out there's also a cigaret tax that voters are being asked to approve this election for arts funding that's separate from this.

That is completely separate the arts intact.

It's not a sin tax, a cigaret tax that is currently $0.30 per pack issue 55 would raise that to $0.70 per pack.

That's completely separate from the syntax which is related to the stadiums.

That's four and a half cents per pack of cigarets and that is not on the ballot.

And there's also alcohol tied into that as well.

And you mentioned smoking is decreasing.

Recently we heard from music venue owners about the need for some sort of financial mechanism to fund them.

And they cited one of the things they said we're finding that people are drinking less.

So I mean, that's anecdotal, but still, the fact that they're coming out and saying that shows that the syntax as Sam pointed out, is probably it's only been ten years, but it's already blown through a lot of that money, which is why it's such a gamble to borrow against future projected revenue.

Those projections were made ten years ago or whatever it was.

Right.

And smoking's gone down in ten years and likely would do more later.

I do need to disclose, as we always do when we talk about the arts tax that ideastream public media benefits from that.

It's an it's a recipient of that arts tax.

And we discovered in the newsroom because it's not a newsroom decision that ideastream public media also contributed to that campaign.

So we want to make sure that that's clear as we talk about this as news Sam, council members, they're clearly frustrated, we've said, but they've asked what did happen, what would happen if we just said no?

Yeah, and this this is where it gets cut.

Well, actually, one of the many places where it gets complicated and I'm not entirely clear at the at the caucus meeting on Monday, a number of outcomes were discussed, it sounds like.

If so, if Gateway did in fact default on its obligations, ownership would revert to the public entities themselves.

So the city would then own progressive and then the county would own Rocket Mortgage fieldhouse or vice versa.

Blaine Griffin, Council president Blaine Griffin said if that happened, that could trigger a, quote, doomsday scenario in which the teams would vacate because they're unhappy would go to a different market, which caused Councilman Brian Casey to walk out of the room because it was such an empty threat.

He felt.

But, yeah, I mean, I think there are more realistic probabilities.

Like, I mean, if we don't have the money, the teams, soulful civic partners that they are would undoubtedly sue and they'd probably come to an agreement.

I mean, they just settle for less.

The optics and timing aren't great.

And you mentioned it earlier, the Browns Stadium, which is, you know, now talked about, is north of $2 billion wanting to move out of downtown.

And by the way, Pablo, come up with half of that.

Right.

Which is the most money you've ever heard of for a stadium in Ohio.

Yeah.

I mean, it's it's bad optics.

And like I say, I mean, this is on the heels of both the New Deal and the progressive field renovations.

It's just I mean, there's I think there's a growing recognition, though we've may have ignored it in the past that this the Cleveland market just cannot sustain three professional sports teams at the current level without additional contributions from their billionaire public owners.

And Attorney General Dave Yo says Ohio should be part of the lawsuit challenging the model law.

The Haslam's owners of the Browns say the law is vague and they sued Cleveland to get clarity as they seek to move the team to Brook Park.

Yost wants to defend it, but isn't a party to the suit.

So, Karen, what is Yost's point here?

What is why does he want to jump in the middle of this?

Well, he is arguing that the Browns interpretation of the model long is wrong.

His filing does not get into specific legal arguments that that of course the Browns have argued that the model law is unconstitutionally vague and unenforceable because it doesn't specifically say how far a team must move for the law to apply.

And so Yost wants to get in the middle of this in a way the same way that former Attorney general now Governor Mike DeWine did the one and only time the law has been used in 2018.

And the Haslam's were also indirectly involved in that one, too.

The Columbus crew and its owner were planning to move to Austin, Texas, and the owner was negotiating with Austin publicly.

And Columbus had filed a lawsuit based on the model law.

Mike DeWine as attorney general, joined it in the end, and the team, of course, was sold to the Haslam's and stayed in Columbus.

But I think that he's hoping to get involved in the same way.

What's interesting here is the language that the attorney general use.

He's talking about the law and he says it requires a professional sports team which reads the benefits of a tax supported facility, take certain steps before it can, quote, cut and run.

So it doesn't sound like he's saying, hey, you know, Brooke Parks, just as good an idea.

Sounds like he's in line with what the city of Cleveland's point is and the Cuyahoga County, which is in it, ought to stay in the in the center of the county, in the city center.

Yeah, it sounds like it.

I mean, the rest of the argument, says the Ohio attorney general passed the law to protect public money and the lawsuit seeks to strike down those protections.

So I guess the public money that the idea is the public money stays where the facility is.

And I suppose that could potentially bring in questions about the public money that could go to a new stadium.

Of course, we still don't know what, if any, public money would be part of that, though we assume that there would be some public money.

Sam, I wonder one thing, and that is if the if the model law was employed because a team in Columbus was going to move out of state to Austin, you can understand you don't want it to move.

But is it really a move away if they move ten miles south?

Yeah, that's I mean, that's for the lawyers to determine.

To me, that's not in keeping with the spirit of the law.

But I'm you know, I don't I don't know, have to argue that out.

I just wanted to make a point that the that the crew situation and the Brown situation was slightly different only in terms of scale.

I mean, the Haslam's bought the crew for $150 million.

And every NFL franchise right now up to and including the Bengals are valued at $5 billion or more.

So the the market of potential buyers of a of a Browns team is very, very small and I don't I was actually a little unclear with the model law.

I mean it sounds like I was under the impression that they had to give the public the opportunity to buy the team.

But it turns out, I guess it could be anybody, any area resident.

So any billionaire who happens to have ties to Cleveland or something like that or anyone just interested in keeping it in downtown Cleveland would perhaps qualify, but have like the three of us got together.

Yeah, we could maybe a go fund me or something.

Akron school Superintendent Michael Robinson delivered his state of the school speech at the Akron Press Club Wednesday.

He described a district in transformation and spent time addressing questions about his reportedly rocky relationship with the teachers union.

Kabeer Robinson came out to tout the district and its accomplishments under his leadership.

As you always get at a state of the anything, its at a time when the district faces a critical levy and bond issue vote that's on the ballot.

And he was there really to say, look at all the great things we've done.

He was touting their pre-K classes, although there's been some bumps there as well.

The graduation rate graduation rate is 88.1%.

That's pretty big.

It's pretty big.

It was it was much higher than I remember, which about a decade ago it was 74%.

And to give you an idea, currently it's 74%, I believe in C MSD Cleveland schools.

So 88.1% is nothing to sneeze at.

That's the highest of all of what they call the major urban school districts in Ohio.

So he did have things to talk about positively.

And as you said, when you're giving your own speech about the state of your own organization, you're going to talk about what's positive.

What's interesting about this, though, it wasn't just him giving a speech.

In fact, he had a different event later that night where he could have that format in this.

It was the Press Club and Hour, and Huntsman was the moderator.

When we moderate these events, we don't prescreen questions.

We don't agree not to ask some things and to ask other things.

And she asked him about his his bumpy relationship with the teachers union.

What did he have to say about that?

He I mean, he I don't want to say sidestepped, but he certainly said I sleep very well at night.

That's that's how he kind of responded to that and that the employees are very important to me.

Important to me.

I'm a firm believer in unions.

He's been kind of under fire from the union.

I think there's three grievances filed or three three issues filed for what they call union busting, filling union positions with nonunion employees.

So he says he's working with them is I sleep very well at night.

Does that ring as a kind of a weird answer to that question?

It is something that you could say if if you don't want to say something else.

I get that I sleep very well at night.

I do as well.

I actually don't.

Not last night with all those Ricci cubs.

No, no.

Robinson also clarified his stance on police officers and the district schools after that incident at Firestone Learning Center, where a student was punched and there was a request to have that police officer removed.

But his point wasn't we don't want police in schools, he said.

I mean, that officer is not going to be back in the schools.

But he said, you know, we need them.

And I think the quote from him was we're going to have to call them anyway when things happen and we might as well, you know, in his opinion, we might as well have them here.

And he was supportive that there are groups saying we don't want any police in the schools.

But he's essentially saying that's that's just not feasible.

This week, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Attorney General Dave Yost overstepped when he denied the summary language for the Voters Bill of Rights amendment, which sought to place voting protections into the state's constitution.

Yeah, and this is interesting because this was the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously ruling.

I believe that he the Ohio voters, because of the Ohio Voters Bill of Rights, was in the process of getting to the ballot.

There's a process that involved the attorney general and the state ballot board.

And so they were moving through that process.

They submitted it once he got rejected, you know, said fix these things, including the title.

They fixed those things and change the title and he rejected it, apparently, just based on the title, The Ohio Voters Bill of Rights.

The Supreme Court said he doesn't have the power to review the title at all.

He can look at the summary language, but not the title.

So they've ordered him to go back and look at the summary language and see if that actually works.

But the group that wanted this wanted the court to just go ahead and order him to push it forward.

And they said, We're not going to do that.

We want we're going to order him to go back and look at this, but he can't look at the title.

And that potentially affects other ballot issues and things that are potentially in the works here.

There's a one on qualified immunity.

There's a discussion about minimum wage increases.

So there are a lot of ballot issues that are affected by this issue.

I would think he'd go through the language and not the title with a fine tooth comb might come up with the same conclusion.

What does the voter Bill of Rights do?

Well, it will repeal some voter passed law or some laws that are affecting voters like the photo ID law and things like that.

It would also replace some other laws.

It really seeks to set up expanded rights to in-person early voting because some lawmakers have talked about scaling that back.

It would set up same day voter registration, which we just talked about in Virginia.

Some of these ideas have been talked about by Republican legislators, but this will be a constitutional amendment.

So it would guarantee all those things, and it's still working its way through the process.

So it may be a while before or if we ever see that on the ballot.

Unintentional drug overdose deaths in Ohio declined last year by 9%, according to the Ohio Department of Health.

That followed a smaller year over year decrease in 2022, a promising trend after overdose deaths had skyrocketed.

Karen Governor DeWine addressed the numbers the other day.

What does he point to for the reason the deaths have declined?

Well, I think that there's been a steady decline.

I mean, I can remember when we were reporting about a 20% increase in one year, and we're still talking about a large number of people.

We're still talking about more than 12 people a day who are dying of opioid overdoses.

And there's a way that they've been tracking the data to try to figure that out.

There was a thought that maybe this was a change in methodology, but it looks like that there has been incremental changes here.

So this is potentially really good news.

But also, there's still a lot of work to do to try to lower those numbers even further.

Right.

In the 20 tens, it was the second highest percentage of deaths nationwide in Ohio.

And when you say this is progress and I just did because it is progress, it's reducing, you noted 12 more than 12 a day.

That's 4452 Ohioans died of a drug overdose last year.

That is still massive.

Absolutely.

I mean, the state DeWine's talked a lot about intervention and treatment and enforcement programs and he says that that is what's helping out here.

The naloxone kits that have been distributed, 291,000 of them around the state, they potentially helped.

But again, this is still it's progress, but not enough progress, because when you're still seeing more than an average of more than 12 people a day dying of something preventable, there's something more that could be done.

All right.

Let's talk about graffiti.

It's given way to a vibrant new mural along the Cuyahoga River in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

And Mural tells the story of the region's rebirth as a wild urban refuge.

And I know you were out there career reporting on this.

It actually serves two purposes.

It covers up graffiti, and it also celebrates the anniversary of the park.

That's right, The Park Tech, a win win.

It's a win win.

It was signed into existence 50 years ago this December by then President Ford and now this mural.

It's kind of an angular motif and it's got very vibrant colors.

And if you're kayaking or paddling down the river there by the Boston Mail Visitor Center, you look off to your right and it's it's about the size of two garage doors.

It's on one of the buttresses under the abutments, under the bridge.

It's beautiful.

It hasn't been a national park for 50 years or so.

It wasn't a recreation area.

It was a recreation area from 74.

And then in 2000, it officially became a national park.

But they cite December 27, 1974, as the as the anniversary.

So somebody went and graffitied.

That happens on the bridge now.

An artist went and covered up.

Who who is that?

His name is Arlan Graff.

He's originally from Brazil.

Now he lives in the area.

His wife is from here.

And this is sort of he grew up playing with his father's woodcuts.

The scraps from his father's woodcuts.

And he says that kind of informed his his angular motif, the look that he gives to everything.

And he went down.

It took him only about ten days and he put that together and he's covered it with this film.

So if you do try to put graffiti, it's that's not going to happen.

That's I was going to ask because it's like, you know, graffiti, then mural, then more graffiti, then another mural.

Now I know I think this one's protected.

I think this one's protected and it's going to be protected for a while.

The Cleveland Museum of Art landed on the number seven spot in a ranking of museums by The Washington Post.

It's obviously way off.

It should be top five.

You've reported this week, too, some news from the museum career being our senior arts reporter.

Yes.

That the museum decided to return a 13th century manuscript leaf to the Italian government because it turns out the provenance of this is that it was it was stolen.

It was actually stolen.

The museum got it, you know, in good faith in 1952.

But it turned out in 1932 it had been stolen from Italy.

And the where it was between then, there was there was a war, it turns out.

And so it's difficult to trace things, but for those 20 years, no one's quite sure where it was, who has it, who got it, how they obtained it.

But then the museum got it in 52, and about a year ago they were contacted by Italy's Ministry of Culture and they said, Look, we saw this on your website.

We'd like to investigate.

We'd like to do some digging.

And it turned out, yeah, it was it was part of this haul from 1932.

So it gets returned to the Italian government initially and they display it.

They'll decide what to do.

I mean, hasn't been displayed here in about and since 93 as Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday, are you happy to get an extra hour in the day or do you want to stop the shift?

Where do we stand on daylight saving time?

I'll I'll I'll chime in here, please.

I'm opposed.

I mean, I'm not an early riser, though, so, you know, I value the sunlight at the end of the day as opposed to the beginning of the day.

I opposed I always found it irritating because in Chicago, they're, you know, an hour behind us always.

I mean, generally not I'm not saying socially, but then north northwest Indiana is the same as Chicago time, but the rest of Indiana is not.

So I can't tell you how many times going between our great city and Chicago.

Confusion ensued in the days before our cell phones.

It automatically updated.

There's a thought that daylight saving time should be permanent, that people want to just have one.

We had a question from I don't know if anyone here can answer that question, but from Rick, who said, can anyone speak to the healthfulness of staying on Standard Time?

So not daylight Saving Time, but what we're going to be returning to?

I have no idea.

I just know that it throws my clock off.

It's not a great time for this to happen.

You do get an extra hour.

Back in the day, it used to be the bar didn't close for another hour.

There you go.

But, you know, beyond that time now, all of us.

Yeah, after Covenant goes to the bars, nobody goes.

No, no one does.

That's true.

Can I just can I just offer a word in support of farmers?

I mean, poor farmers all this time we have been maligned and blamed, but it turns out they were on the air.

This was news to me.

They're on the opposite side of the issue.

Yeah, they were opposed.

This was not an agrarian thing.

Yeah.

To save energy during war time or something like that.

This was all news to me.

But all this time I've truthfully thought it was farmers like the lot the farmer, the agriculture lobby who wanted to more time to harvest their crops.

Untrue, untrue.

Not by the way, to that question that Rick asked.

I do have the answer that it was in my notes and I didn't even see it.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine made the stance clear in 2020 when it released a position statement recommending that the Country Institute year round Standard Time, It said in part that Standard Time is more closely associated with humans intrinsic circadian rhythm, and that disrupting that rhythm, as happens with Daylight Saving Time, has been associated with increased risks of obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease and depression.

So now I know what to blame it all.

And I think that's probably just the bar's opening later.

The bar is opening later Monday.

On The Sound of Ideas on 89 seven KSU As the number of data centers in Ohio continues to increase, as we'll discuss the impact those sites have on our resources, including water and electricity, A.I.

has a cost.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching.

And stay safe.