Cleveland officials are still offering little detail about the cyber threat that shut down Cleveland City Hall this week.

Akron and local nonprofits have started a fund to assist victims of the recent mass shooting there.

And property taxes are on the rise concerning homeowners and state legislators.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to IDEAS.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

Cleveland City Hall was closed for two days earlier this week.

Opened briefly Wednesday and has been closed to the public since after a weekend cyber threat.

City officials gave no details on the cause or consequences.

Only the tech experts are on the case.

Akron Mayor S.A. Malik has withdrawn the city's $400,000 offer to buy out a veteran deputy police chief.

The mayor wanted to clear the way for diverse new blood.

City council balked at the price tag, and there still is no suspect in the mass shooting in Akron that injured 27 people and killed one.

The city and local nonprofits are pooling funds to assist victims.

Joining me for the roundtable from Ideastream Public Media, senior arts reporter Kabeer Bhatia and deputy editor of News Stephanie Check Wolinsky in Columbus.

Statehouse News bureau chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to roundtable Cleveland City Hall has been closed all week after a cyber attack last weekend.

What is the nature of the threat and how will it impact residents?

Is it a ransomware attack like other cities have seen?

Cleveland officials are tight lipped.

this is some serious stuff.

If you're talking about an entire city operation being closed for a week and we don't know how much longer that might go.

They are in the midst of not just, you know, trying to fix some sort of glitch with the IT guy.

They're in the middle, it sounds like, of something really serious.

I mean, we yes, we don't know what that might be.

However, I mean, if you look at what's going on in other cities across the country, though, like Wichita, a week is nothing.

Wichita was offline for a month in May, and that was a ransomware attack.

That was a ransomware attack.

And in some cases, you know, the city is is trying to balance I mean, they're trying to fix the problem right there, trying to figure out how how extensive it is.

But they also have to, you know, make calculations if it is a ransomware attack about, you know, do you pay ransomware or do you pay the ransom?

And, you know, how do you weigh that against the revenue that the city is losing being closed?

Yeah, that's the that's the rub, because there are some cities that basically are like, okay, I'm going to pay to get the hostage back.

I mean, Dell pay.

And that's why these kind of things continue to happen in Dallas.

The ransomware attack there in 2023 compromised the personal data of at least 26,000 people.

The city then had to offer two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance to those folks.

We don't know in Cleveland.

First of all, we hear today from the Channel three report that it is malware, that it's a known gang.

So clearly they're they're seeking money in order to to clear the computers, if that's true.

If that's the case, it is a ransomware situation.

Who knows if there's data that's been compromised.

I mean, probably people in the city, but certainly not us.

The well, they handle they handle vital stuff for the entire county.

They do.

And besides that, I mean, like there's also the the impact that this is having on people who are trying to do, you know, just regular business.

I mean, building permits.

That affects the construction industry.

Abby Marshall went to city hall.

People didn't weren't aware earlier this week she went.

People weren't aware that it was closed and people were telling her, you know, how devastating not being able to get access to your city business or your doc, your documents are.

It can you know, it can be the difference between getting into an apartment and in a, you know, a period of time or being homeless for a lot of people.

So this is serious.

Yeah, that was a really good story where you go out and find out the actual impact of just closing city hall.

Many people don't go to city hall.

So you think it's not a big deal, but when you need it, you need it and you need it.

I mentioned with what they do for the county, it's if you need your birth certificate, you go to the Cleveland city Hall to get that for your no matter where you are in the county.

So there's a lot of people that are being affected this beyond by this beyond the city of Cleveland.

Not a great week for Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb.

In addition to the cyber attack, his SUV was involved in an accident yesterday morning.

The mayor was taken to the hospital as a precaution, but is reportedly fine.

There are questions about why emergency lights were turned on by the mayor's driver before entering the intersection against a red light.

The SUV that he was in was T-boned.

The mayor got out of the SUV and walked to an hour to a shelter where he appeared a bit shaken.

He was taken to the hospital as a precaution.

The SUV was being driven by a plainclothes Cleveland police officer, which is always the case with the mayor in Cleveland.

They have a cop who's their driver and protector.

There's more to the story, though, stuff The mayor spokesperson said they were engaged in emergency response driving.

But you and I were looking yesterday at video footage and it looked like that emergency certainly came up pretty suddenly and it might have been sparked by a red light.

Yeah.

I mean, the video first let me say the people are everybody's okay, according to the city.

So that's that's what's important.

The other driver also, you know, Mayor Bibbs and his driver were taken to the hospital for a precaution.

But everybody seems to be okay.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing, though, is the on the video, you can see the mayor's vehicle slowing as it comes to the intersection, as it approaches a red light.

Then those emergency lights flip on and it kind of rolls through that intersection and pow, you know, there's a crash.

So, yeah, it definitely looks like somebody ran a red light.

Those weren't the kind of lights either that are up on the top.

And it was like sort of the stuff that's on top of the of the windshield.

It's one of those kind of things where if you're driving from the side and expect that to be clear because you're seeing a green light, you can imagine why such an accident would happen.

I know you've asked for a lot of information on this.

What was the emergency?

For example, what's the mayor schedule?

What's the situation with the police officer that was driving it?

None of that has been provided yet.

The city is obviously they have some computer problems at the moment, but we've asked for that information.

We certainly have.

Yeah.

And, you know, the crash incident report, this is one of those things that everybody these are one of the ways that the everybody interacts with city government.

And when you're unfortunate enough to have a crash, you go to the city government and you have to get your inciden We're waiting for it.

Yeah, they say it's part of an investigation, which is interesting.

Cleveland police are investigating the person that was driving in the accident was a Cleveland police officer.

So you just you wonder how that's going to pan out.

We'll certainly continue asking questions about that as well.

But the idea that it was an emergency response mode, when you look at that, you know, I have to say I've seen in the past and it's against city code and it's been spelled out specifically.

Former chief Calvin Williams was specific about it.

That police officers can't just pull up to an intersection if the light is red, flip on the lights and get through, because that's not what the emergency.

I mean, they should be in the midst of some sort of very serious emergency.

And yet, I have to tell you, I see it all the time.

Yeah.

I mean, the wording is interesting, too, that we got from the city.

They said that they were involved in emergency response driving.

So they aren't saying like they were responding to an emergency.

It was emergency response driving.

So that's that's a different thing.

No suspects have been identified in the mass shooting last week in which 27 people were injured and one killed at a birthday party in Akron.

The city and a number of nonprofits are uniting to raise funds for the victims.

Compare the Gun Violence Response Fund has raised a good deal of money already.

They have about $200,000.

I think earlier this week when they first announced it and the city committed 150,000 of that, who else chipped in?

The other 50 so far initially is from the Akron Community Foundation and United Way.

And they're the ones who are administering this.

And for people who want to give, they go to the Akron C.F.

website.

And so how does this work?

Who who, who gets assisted by this and what kind of assistance are we talking about?

This is well, as it says, for the for the victims specifically and possible assistance could be medical bills, funeral expenses.

There's one family, of course, who lost one person, the Cooke family in this.

That's initially what it's going to be as far as when they talk about victims.

Those are the people, the 27 specifically who are affected.

It's interesting that this idea came about because there are so many victims.

So there will be various expenses, medical bills, as you mentioned, and other things.

It's modeled after a fund created after another Ohio mass shooting.

There was one in 2019 in Dayton, and that killed nine people, wounded dozens of people.

And there unfortunately, they have to use that as an example for what they're going to do here in Akron.

And how will the distribution be handled.

That's going to be through the Akron Community Foundation.

And there's an advisory board who's going to look at it.

There's people from Summa from Arlington Church of God, Huntington Bank, and they're getting together and sort of evaluating all the requests and the people who who might be impacted.

I was interested to see, too, that if there's enough money, they would not only assist victims, but assist witnesses as well.

And but when the question was asked about why would you expand it to that, the mayor said trauma is trauma.

Yeah, that's and he's absolutely right.

There were definitely witnesses and the people.

That's why I said initially it's victims.

And if they do get to expand it, the witnesses might need money because their car was towed or impounded because it was part of the investigation.

Maybe a bullet had gone through one of the windows.

They need that for ballistics.

Maybe a witness, you know, has come forward and doesn't feel safe going back to their home in the same neighborhood.

They need to be put up somewhere at a hotel.

So some of those kind of things would would possibly, possibly be eligible if there's enough money in the fund.

Property taxes have increased for many Ohioans as property values rise, and two Republican lawmakers want voters to decide on a constitutional amendment to provide relief to taxpayers, possibly by this fall.

There is no shortage of other ideas to address the issue.

The amendment would limit property tax increases to 4% per year.

State Representative Scott Wiggin said some areas of the state are seeing increases of 30% and that his top concern is actually the top concern of his constituents.

They're talking about property taxes all the time.

I hear a lot, Karen, about this, about how property values are going up.

There's reevaluations in communities.

That means more property taxes.

There's a whole bunch of ideas in addition to this, this constitutional amendment to somehow rein them in.

Yeah, there have been several bills that have been proposed.

There's even a bipartisan committee that's looking into different ideas on what to do about housing and property taxes and housing costs and all of these things that are related in many ways.

And there's been a real question about whether the availability of housing is affecting housing costs.

And, of course, that's affecting housing values.

But this proposed constitutional amendment to Republicans, Scott Whigham and Beth Leer proposed it's and it would have to be voted on by lawmakers by August 7th.

A supermajority of both the House and the Senate would have to vote to put that before voters in November.

By August 7th.

That seems unlikely.

I don't see this as being on a fast track.

I could be wrong, but it seems like the kind of thing that is one of those ideas that's thrown out there toward the end here of just we need to deal with this.

Here's another idea that among the others that are put on the table.

So there's a balance here.

The one is that there's a lot of pressure being put on homeowners and that costs are going up.

And it's becoming really expensive to pay your tax bill on the other end.

There are local governments and school districts that rely on these property taxes.

So Casey Weinstein, the representative Democrat from Hudson, says he's not in favor of this idea because it looks like a one size fits all policy.

It could hurt local governments.

And that's been the concern about some of these bills.

This idea of a one size fits all or an idea of if you do this now, what's going to be the effect down the road?

You change, for instance, the homestead tax exemption or you do some of these other things.

What does that do when that expires?

If you make it temporary, if you make it permanent, that does other things.

And so all of this is a balancing act.

That's actually that's what Republican House Speaker Jason Stephens kind of referred to it.

He said, when you start getting into changing what the values are, it makes it difficult for different purposes.

He's a former county auditor, so he knows a little bit about this.

So he's kind of riding both sides here, I think, because you do have a lot of Republicans and Democrats who are very concerned about what's happening with property taxes and property tax values.

But what do you do about that?

This is the kind of thing that if you make a quick decision, you, Russia Bill, through it could have serious impacts down the road.

Right.

If you're slow, though, and people are paying these taxes, they're getting raked.

I mean, it's really tough.

Yeah.

And it's a problem that's been building for many years.

And this is something that we've seen in government entities all from the federal all the way down to the state.

The idea of keeping this not kicking the can down the road, so to speak, and dealing with it later.

But people are now a lot of this is coming and hitting people in their homes.

You know, second half of the year, property tax bills are coming out right now or are due right now.

And people are really seeing the impact of all this.

Right.

And I just want to clarify, in case anyone thinks they heard something and didn't hear it correctly, raked as in raked over the coals.

Yes.

Karen, one of the ideas that's coming up is one specifically for people 65 or older.

This one was interesting to me.

If you have a home that's less than or equal to a half million dollars in value and adjusted gross income of less than $50,000, they would benefit from this.

That, according to Casey Weinstein, would be about 80% of seniors in Ohio.

And once again, the question is, if you do that, what is going to be the effect down the road?

Because certainly there's a desire to help seniors who are I mean, we're all on a fixed income in a way, but seniors definitely on a fixed income.

How can you help those folks as quickly as possible?

But then the question becomes, what happens down the road if you do this, then how does that affect local governments?

How does that affect the other things that are involved here?

And so this is the kind of issue that's really complicated.

It takes time to work this out, and there just isn't time right now.

In terms of the legislative session.

There's one session left on June 26th and then they break for the summer.

They're the entire Ohio house.

And half the Ohio Senate is going home to campaign for reelection.

So there isn't a whole lot of time.

Republican State Senator Michael Rooney beat Democratic challenger Michael Cryptic in a special election this week for Ohio's sixth District Congressional seat really will serve the remainder of the term vacated by Bill Johnson, who left the U.S. House to become president of Youngstown State University.

Karen Ruby won by nine points.

That's a big margin, but it is much lower than Donald Trump won the Eastern Ohio district in the past and way lower than Johnson's 30 point wins.

Low turnout, though.

So is this indicative of anything?

Well, and that's the important caveat here, is that this was low turnout, 60,000 votes.

Normally, this district is about 400,000 votes.

So what 15% of the electorate turned out for this?

And special elections, I'm told, tend to turn out more educated voters because they know there's a special election.

And so that could also be indicative of what's happening here.

But certainly Democrats and Republicans are both looking at this as this was an under-performance by the Republican candidate here, because Michael Cryptic was really very underfunded compared to Michael Woolley.

He had raised like four times what Kupchak had and truly had the name recognition.

He certainly was well-known in the area.

Like you said, because of the grocery stores.

He's a state senator.

And so, yeah, there there's a question about whether this is maybe a predictor in a part of the state where U.S.

Senator Sherrod Brown really needs to do well to be reelected to the Senate.

And Bernie Moreno, his Republican opponent, is looking at that area as well.

That's an area that has been popular with Trump.

It actually shifted more toward Republicans than any other congressional district in the country in the last couple of years.

This district covers 11 Ohio counties, too.

It includes all of Carroll, Columbiana, Mahoning County as part of Stark and Tuscarawas and our listening area.

But it is a number of counties in eastern Appalachia.

Yeah, and one of the things that happened that day was Republicans former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, who's involved in the anti gerrymandering effort, the citizens, not politicians, constitutional amendment that would create a new way of drawing district lines.

She toured the district that day to show just how big it is and how many media markets it covers.

And the argument being that this is not a fairly drawn district.

And so the results really kind of contribute to what opponents say is gerrymandering in Ohio.

It was interesting you mentioned that that his opponent did well.

Michael Cryptic did well.

He has no political experience.

He had to spend some time as an actor and done some other types of jobs, Move back to Youngstown, he says, to to help with his.

What really said about him is the guy is a hard worker.

That's why the numbers were a little closer.

Yeah, And really, he's been really gracious through this whole process.

I mean, he was in his final speech on the Senate floor talking about how the Senate is a a bit of heaven on earth or something.

It was really kind of an interesting thing to say, but that's what I really enjoyed.

He's clearly enjoyed his time in the Senate.

But yeah, that's and it also shows that even in gerrymandered districts, having the other party on the ballot can really result in some good news for the other party that feels that they are not being treated fairly in that district.

And so, you know, the idea of getting people on to the ballot in every district, even when they appear to have no shot, I mean, that that's something think about.

Akron Mayor Seamus Malik has withdrawn his proposal to offer a $400,000 cash buyout to a deputy police chief to entice them to leave the police department.

Malik said the goal was to encourage culture change.

Kabeer he made this.

I proposal in May.

A lot of backlash from council.

Council was not just the idea but the cost of the idea.

They were saying, you know, we need more police officers and yet we're trying to encourage one to leave and then $400,000.

I mean, think about that.

You can get you can get a nice house in Akron and enough cars to fill the garage for $400,000.

That is a lot of money.

Council member Sharon Conner, specifically, that's a quote from her, actually.

And so they were both she was saying another council person said that this would set a dangerous precedent.

And if the idea is to encourage culture change and advance Hardings, you know, administration, when there's a new administration that comes in politically, usually they bring in their new staff, the old staff leaves.

If this was kind of the idea for for for Chief Harding, there's other ways to do it was essentially what they were getting at.

You're mentioning the idea that it would set a dangerous precedent.

That was council member Linda Amobi, and she also said, listen, if you're in charge, you're the manager.

You can go ahead and take that number two guy and assign him to anything you wanted to do.

Yeah, we don't need to pay him $400,000.

So you don't have that management headache.

You're going to have to manage.

Exactly.

Yeah, you're going to have to manage.

You're going to have to you can reassign this person.

It doesn't have to be this plan of a huge buyout and then advancing three people into that position.

You're right.

I thought the mayor it was it was a he's so diplomatic sometimes.

And I think in this case he said we appreciate the robust dialog with city council members over the last several weeks regarding the legislation, but realizes it's a nonstarter.

Yeah, he I mean, he listened to his counsel and he withdrew the idea.

They're going to find other ways to to advance this that hopefully, you know, everyone gets along and they don't lose officers, they retain them and still bring up other talent to advance the vision.

I think that's the phrase he keeps using for Chief Harding.

The House move to combat hair discrimination this week by passing the Crown Act, which stands for creating a respectful and open world for natural hair.

The bill would prohibit Ohio public schools from penalizing students, especially students of color, for embracing their cultural identity with their hairstyles.

Karen It's one of those rare bipartisan bills.

Democratic state Representative Juanita Brant from our area, who co-sponsored the bill, said she herself has faced hair discrimination and it's part of why people are leaving Ohio.

Yeah, I mean, the idea of discrimination based on hair is something that we've heard from Republicans and Democrats.

Republican Jamie Calendar, who's also from northeast Ohio, who has very long hair.

He is one of the sponsors here and has even told a story about a mother who talked about how her daughter got ready for her first day of kindergarten, got a phone call that said that her hair was outside of the dress code.

And so this is the idea behind this bill to try to prevent those kinds of things from happening in public schools, because they do.

And it's real.

And when you say outside of the dress code, I mean we mean outside of the white norm.

Yeah.

I mean, and that that's important to mention here is you've got two thirds of black children, a majority white schools say they faced race based hair discrimination, according to a study that was in conjunction with this bill.

So that's a lot.

And that interrupts those kids educations.

They sometimes have to be sent home or they are taken out of class.

And it just perpetuates the idea that one way of wearing your hair is wrong, while another way of hearing where your hair's right.

Right.

Brant had said she doesn't feel like anybody should have to conform to Eurocentric values of having to have the hair straightened and that that's very stressful.

So originally the idea for this was that it was going to be not just schools, but there wouldn't be able to be discrimination like this in jobs and housing.

It was pared down to just schools.

Why?

Well, there's there's compromise in all of these bills.

And so that's the kind of thing that happens in negotiations.

And we see it with a lot of different measures.

But you also have local communities that have enacted this at the local level.

So there is some support in Columbus, Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland Heights that have all enacted a local version of this.

And this bill still has to pass the Senate.

And I think I said before, we're running out of time here in terms of legislation periods because lawmakers are on break, they're going to go home.

And so I'm not sure that this necessarily has enough time to pass.

It might it could pass in lame duck.

But I want to point out that the eight votes that were against this, a couple of them were white men who were follicles challenged, which I think is kind of interesting to note.

I think the other thing that's interesting about this is the studies that have come out about the health effects of some of the chemicals that they use to straighten hair.

And so while this is happening locally, there's a national discussion.

There've been a bunch of studies that have connected some of the relaxing products to things like uterine cancer.

So it's not just, you know, making sure that children are, you know, comfortable at school, but also there's these these health issues that are that are sort of coming up as people discuss this issue more broadly.

Right.

You're being forced to to to conform to a particular hairstyle.

And in order to do that, you're putting your health at risk.

Right.

Camels, animals that most resemble roller coasters went out for a stroll on the grounds of Cedar Point Tuesday evening.

They got out of the barnyard area on the park's frontier trail.

No, they didn't.

Get on the gas your weight scale.

They probably would have won all the plush toys.

Any idea?

Anybody, how they escaped?

They still don't know.

I think that they just ended up on the midway.

There's a petting zoo type area in the Frontierland, and I have to think that they jumped over under something and were able to get onto the midway.

There's stuff all over social media where you're seeing people or they're walking and you think, Oh, is that a camel statue?

And then they see an actual camel not walking around.

Yeah, yeah, there was one.

It looked like a close call.

There was somebody that looked like they were in a motorized wheelchair and the camel was doing a little bit of a dance right in front of them.

I thought, Oh, I hope that leg doesn't come down a little bit lower.

And luckily everybody was safe.

No one was hurt in this incident.

Yes.

I was just trying to figure out why Top Thrill Dragster two isn't working.

Right.

That that's been another thing on social media.

Why is that ride not working?

Yeah.

Would you, Karen, would you rather do top thrill dragster to or ride a camel?

I have ridden the camel and it's interesting.

Top Dragster two looks a lot of fun, though.

I hope that they can get that up and running soon.

Is there any is there anything Carole Karen has not done?

I know I've I've never I've never flown with the Blue Angels of the Thunderbirds.

And that's one of the biggest regrets of my life.

That would be awesome.

Have you ever ridden with a camel on top?

Thrill do.

No.

Again, it's not running.

So, you know, we got to make this happen.

Is the camel have a fast lane pass.

That's makes a difference.

Yes, it does.

It goes wherever it wants.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Monday on the Sound of Ideas on 80 97w KSU.

We'll learn more about the city of Akron's new Sojourner Truth Plaza and we'll preview a local Juneteenth event.

Juneteenth The federal holiday is Wednesday, June 19th.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching and stay safe.