(intense ambient music) - The state budget sails through the Ohio House.

Now the Senate takes its shot.

The Akron mayoral primary is Tuesday, and a new poll says it's a three-way race.

And urgent repairs are needed for Cleveland's West Side Market, and they're being pitted against the need for neighborhood investment.

"Ideas" is next.

(intense ambient music) Hello and welcome to "Ideas".

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks so much for joining us.

The Ohio House passed its version of the State's two year budget this week, and it includes a tax cut for middle income earners, raises for teachers, and expanded private school vouchers.

The budget now goes on to the Ohio Senate where there'll be plenty of changes.

As Akron navigates the aftermath of the Jalen Walker special grand jury decision and continuing intermittent protests since then, voters prepare to choose from among seven Democrats for mayor.

Since no Republicans are running, this primary will likely determine the next mayor.

A new poll shows it's a three-way race, and undecided voters can have a big impact.

Cleveland's West Side Market needs urgent infrastructure repairs according to beleaguered vendors.

This week, the last working freight elevator conked out.

Some vendors closed, others carry product from the basement to the market floor up the stairs.

The new nonprofit running the market says the city needs to invest, but some on city council are pitting it against neighborhood needs.

And the effort to put an issue before voters to make it harder to amend the state constitution is working its way toward a vote in the Ohio House, but how many votes does it need?

We'll talk about those stories on the rest of the week's news on the reporter's round table.

Joining me this week from Idea Stream Public Media, Akron Canton Reporter, Anna Huntsman, and education reporter, Connor Morris.

In Columbus, Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau Chief, Karen Kassler.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

The Ohio House passed its version of the $88,000,000,000 two year budget with bipartisan support this week.

It features a tax cut from middle income Ohioans, and a boost in base salary for some public school teachers.

Let's talk about the tax cut that's in there, so there has been some talk about a flat tax across the board that didn't happen, but what did?

- Well, there are several bills that would create a flat tax and Republicans have wanted to move to a flat tax for a long time and even move to a flat tax and then get rid of the income tax entirely, but that's not what this budget does.

This budget takes anybody who makes under $26,050 a year, they no longer will have to pay income taxes, and then it collapsed, there are four tax brackets left then, it collapsed the bottom two tax brackets, so if you make under $96,000 a year, you have a 2.75% rate, which is down from about 3.2%.

So it is a middle class tax cut, at least in that respect.

Now when it goes over to the Senate, Senate President Matt Huffman, and I asked him, "Are you going to expand on that?"

He hinted that yeah, they're gonna expand on it and possibly look at the top two tax brackets and maybe lower those.

But what's interesting when you look at the overall tax rate that when you combine everything, the people who are in those top two tax brackets, especially the top tax bracket, are paying a lot less than two and three quarter percent in taxes overall.

- Hmm.

Let's talk about education in this budget, there's been something called a "backpack bill", which would basically say your funding, your public funding goes with you wherever you go to school, whether it's private or not.

That didn't get folded into this budget plan, but there is an expansion of that voucher program.

- Yeah, and this comes, Governor Mike DeWine, his initial budget had proposed this expansion going up to 450% of the federal poverty level.

That's I think around $120,000 a year for a family of four.

So a lot of kids, I think I heard on the house, like three quarters of kids in Ohio would be eligible to get this if it does pass like this.

But the Universal Vouchers program, the so-called "Backpack Bill" did not get funded, which is interesting because that bill was on the priority list of both house speaker Jason Stevens, and also his rival force, the speakership, Derek Maron.

And so I think in the Senate, there will be a further expansion of taxpayer paid school vouchers, but for right now, that's where this is.

And I know one of the amendments that was going to be proposed on the floor before Speaker Stevens just cut off all the debate and went straight to the vote, was one of the amendments to expand the backpack bill, and kind of put that into the budget.

- The current income limit is 250% of the federal poverty line.

That's $70,000, $75,000 a year for a family of four.

The newly revised budget bill would lift it, as you said, to 450% of the poverty line, that's equal to $135,000 in annual income for a family of four to lay that out.

Connor, the expansion of vouchers, which Karen notes will probably get even more robust in the Senate version of this budget, is a controversial one for particularly urban school districts, you hear a lot of teacher unions talking about the nefarious effect of this.

- Sure, yeah.

I mean, it's just a continued sort of, it's all about priorities, right?

So what they're saying is that the state's priority is to funnel money away from public education to private schools, and they're saying that that's gonna continue to have a deleterious effect on the public schools.

So the quality of education you receive there is gonna be worse and worse versus these private schools, which are, I believe, from what I understand from the statistics I've seen last, a majority of white kids are going to them versus students of color.

So there's almost kind of a segregation effect that happens there too, as well, opponents are saying, so that.

- Debate would continue.

One thing though, that it would seem public school advocates would like, is the idea that there would be an increase in pay for teachers?

- Yes, for sure.

And so this is kind of increasing like the base level, so for somebody with no college degree or no experience, it's like 34,000 up from 25,000.

Somebody with a lot of experience, it would be from like 48,000 up to like 64,000.

- As a minimum.

- But, yeah, and the thing is that you'd already see starting salaries at some of our bigger urban school districts around 45,000, 50,000.

So it's really like the rural school districts that are kind of struggling a little bit more, and charter schools as well that are struggling more with finding teachers who are willing to work there for the salary that they can offer, you know?

- Right, so retention and the idea of teacher shortages, that's a big driver on this.

- Sure.

So some of your big urban schools, they're not having as much trouble, but then the more rural schools and schools with smaller budgets are having more trouble, and this might impact them a little more I think.

- Karen?

- Yeah, I wanted to add in that this budget also, while it does expand vouchers, it also fully funds for the next two years what's known as the "Fair School Funding Plan", which was the plan that was agreed on in the last budget.

It needs a six year phase in, but it was only funded for two years in the last budget.

And again, I'm way, way simplifying this, it basically creates a formula that adds in not only property taxes from school districts, but also household income.

And so it is designed to make it a little bit more fair, at least that's the Fair School Funding Plan.

And it also uses inputs or data from 2022.

The previous budget had used like 2018 data, so it really updates the data and makes the costs more realistic.

It's about $1.3 billion in education funding here.

And so I think that's really interesting.

While they're doing the one side with the vouchers, they're also doing the regular traditional public school funding, but there's a lot of money in this budget, extra money from federal Covid relief funds and that sort of stuff.

I'm wondering what's gonna happen in the next two year budget when that money won't be there.

- Who's for scrapping the rest of the show?

Taking 45 minutes for Karen unscripted to give us every detail (laughing) of the funding formula.

Could you just go ahead and get.

(laughing) Makes my life easier?

- Oh, no, no, no.

Oh, no, no, no.

(laughing) - Connor, I wanted to ask you about the proposal from Governor DeWine that was removed in this house budget that would give a $5,000 in scholarship money to those finishing in the top 5% of their class if they go to an in-state college.

It seemed popular, but not popular amongst the house.

- Sure.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the price tag was there.

I don't know if Karen knows off the top of her head, but maybe that was what the, there was sticker shock there for the house.

But it seems like this was part of DeWine's initiative kind of to try to bring more families to Ohio, making a more popular place for people to stay, because I mean, a lot of students are going outta state, they're leaving Ohio to go to college.

So that seems like what the impetus was.

We'll see what the Senate does with their version of the budget bill too, so.

- Before we get to the Senate though, Karen, we mentioned how easily this seemed to pass outta the house, but it wasn't without some infighting.

The faction led by Derek Marin, who didn't get the speakership and lost out to Jason Stevens on that, proposed several amendments, but he didn't, Jason Stevens didn't even recognize those folks, and there were a number of other amendments that had been put forth both by Democrats and Republicans, and those all got pushed to the wayside too, in favor of voting on the document as it was.

- Yeah, one of the other people who was not recognized was Democratic representative, Casey Weinstein, who wanted to propose a repeal of the remaining parts of the corruption tainted nuclear power plant bailout law known as "House Bill Six".

There are still subsidies in that law that go to Coalfire power plants that are owned by some utility companies.

And Derek Maron said of Jason Stevens that the reason he didn't recognize that was because he was trying to protect utility interests.

Now, we would've liked to have asked Jason Stevens, "Hey, why didn't you recognize about", I think there were like two dozen amendments that were being proposed that weren't recognized.

He came out and made a statement and then walked away from reporters, which is very unusual.

Typically, the house speaker just walks down and speaks directly to the media, takes our questions, but this time he just made a quick statement about how he's happy the budget passed and just walked away.

- Hmm.

- So we're not really sure.

When you look at the final vote, the Republicans who voted against this budget are all Derek Maron's core supporters here, and then of course, the two Democrats who voted.

The rest of them, the other Democrats actually supported this budget, which I think, it was 77 to 19, that's a pretty big swing for Stevens and his people.

(intense ambient music) - Akron's fledgling Citizen Police Oversight Board will eventually take on the work of reviewing the Akron Police Department's internal investigation of the Jalen Walker shooting.

A special grand jury declined to indict the eight officers involved last week.

Anna, before the Civilian Police Board can do the investigative work, it still has to finish its own internal workings.

- Correct.

Fledgling is a great word for it, this board was just recently seated back in March, and so it's so interesting that it was seated and now this is all going on, and so one of its first big tasks is gonna be looking over this internal investigation.

But yes, as you mentioned, I mean, the steps that they're taking in the meetings currently are just kind of figuring out their own infrastructure.

They just recently voted to break into subcommittees focusing on making sure they're following the charter, and their own rules that they were prescribed by voters, making sure that they're figuring out their own budget.

I don't know that a lot of people know, but they actually do have a budget, and they are gonna be starting to hire positions, so they have a committee focused on that.

And then this other committee focused on community engagement.

And that's something that Kemp Boyd, the chair of the board told me, is they really wanna focus on continuing to listen to the community, they're getting a lot of response from the community in the aftermath of this.

- Sure.

- So that is part, and I wanted to mention too, that community members will actually be able to serve on these committees too, which is kind of interesting.

No, we don't know when that will happen, but that is something that they're really interested in.

- We've seen a grand jury say that there was no crime committed here.

So what is it exactly that the Citizen Police Oversight Board would be looking into?

- They would be looking into, are there any policies that should be changed?

What led up to this incident?

Perhaps the chasing, the police pursuit policy of the police department, perhaps even just traffic stops.

You know, this all started because of a broken taillight.

So looking into those kind of policies.

So that's what the police department is looking at right now is, did they follow our internal policies that night?

And if they did, then the Police Review Board is gonna be looking at, do they need any amendment?

So that's kind of their role.

And this is supposed to take, I think, a couple of months is what I was told.

- Now, there have been protests intermittently ever since then.

One, we talked about, or you all talked about last week when I was off where pepper spray was used, reporters were hit with it.

- Mm-hmm.

- There have been other protests too, and they continue throughout the city, but the city is also moving back to a little bit more normalcy.

- Right.

- Removing barriers, removing.

- Downtown is kind of open again, the roads are open, buildings are open, you can go in the court now, you can go in the municipal building, the review board was able to meet because city hall is open.

So the city does appear to be returning to normal in that sense.

But as you mentioned, protests do continue, and there are these continued tensions between the police response and what the protestors are doing.

So often they're marching and blocking one side of the road, at least.

There have been reports in some social media videos of the police kind of trying to disperse the crowd, and declaring things as happened last week, which it feels like, I mean, this week has just felt like a month, so it feels weird, even say that was a week ago.

- Indeed.

- But yeah, there's still some continued tensions here, as I mentioned.

And so this is kind of an interesting time where the review board, I asked them about their thoughts, they had a public comment period, and two residents spoke up and said, "You need to take action criticizing the police."

I've been also working to get a response from the police about their policies and responding to some of the social media videos.

So it's, as I said, it's an interesting time.

- Still digging into it.

(intense ambient music) The Akron mayoral primary is Tuesday.

A new poll of likely voters commissioned by Idea Stream Public Media, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron found essentially a three-way tie between Shammas Malik, Tara Mosley, and Marco Somerville.

There's some things about that survey as it was done prior to, I think the final debate, and certainly prior to this decision that was made.

- Yes.

- By the grand jury.

So things could have shifted since then, but what it does show is a good number of candidates that have very low support, at least as of the time of the poll.

- Right, the bottom four candidates are each polling at about three or 4%.

Shammas Malik, who was found to be at the top here at about 18%, I mean, he's polling better than all four of those combined.

- Right.

- But as you mentioned, it is essentially a three-way tie, it's like 18%, 17% Somerville, and then 15% for.

- All within the margin of error.

- All within the margin of error.

And the key here is that 33% of the likely voters that were surveyed are still undecided.

And so as John Green, who is the director emeritus of the Bliss Institute, told me, if these undecideds go, it wouldn't take much for them to flip that.

And if they all break for one candidate, Mosley could pull it out, or Somerville.

It really is still, as you set a three-way tie, and it will probably come down to the undecideds, and we don't know if they are following the, well, I'm sure they are, the grand jury decision and the protests, and that could impact their thoughts.

- Or what role that will have on who they vote for.

You could dig in deeply to this poll, and we're not gonna have time to do a lot of that, although you can read our coverage on ideastream.org.

Right, the rest of the time we'll just set aside for (indistinct) - Oh, thank you so much you guys.

- Younger voters appear to be motivated by a desire for change, and a lot of those folks are behind Shammas Malik.

- They're behind Malik and Mosley are the ones, Somerville is by far doing the worst with the younger crowd, but he's doing well with older folks, middle-aged folks, and people who think the city is on the right track.

Whereas 51% of the people who said they would vote for Malik, say the city is going on the wrong track.

So it is clear that Shammas Malik is doing well with people who think that the city needs significant change and things aren't working right now.

So again, yeah, we could go into more demographics, but it does seem, if you just kind of isolate the voters who say they are 100% for sure going to vote, Malik is ahead.

If you isolate the people who are leaning toward a candidate, most are leaning toward Mosley.

So there's so many different factors here.

I'm really curious to see what happens on Tuesday.

(intense ambient music) - The Ohio House is moving toward a vote on creating a special August election where voters could decide whether to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments to 60%.

But first, lawmakers have to decide on how many votes they'll need to pass the measure.

Karen, in a full house of 99 members, passage would mean 60 votes, but there are a couple of vacant seats, so we're hearing some say "59 are needed", others are saying, "No, it's still 60."

Why is this such a big difference?

Are we coming down to a one vote margin?

- We could be, I mean, it could be that close.

I talked to majority floor leader, Bill Seitz about that this week, and he said he knows it's gonna be close, he's not counting the votes himself, but he knows it's gonna be close.

So it could come down to whether it's 59 or 60 votes.

And that idea of these two vacant seats, these are both seats that were occupied by Republicans.

Brian Baldridge, who's now the Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, and then the late Chris Jordan.

These are the two seats that are open.

Republicans can put somebody in those seats at any point, and they tried to replace Brian Baldridge, and that effort failed back in March.

So once again, it's this struggle between House speaker Jason Stevens and his rival for that position, Derek Barron.

And so could this come back to be an issue here when it comes to how many votes are necessary?

That's really, I think we're gonna be all watching this.

And when it comes to the floor, I presume if it comes to the floor, it's going to pass, but you just never know.

- So, we have heard these constitutional law professors, Jonathan Adler at Case and Steven Stein Glass, formerly of Cleveland State, and a bunch of others that have been quoted saying, "Boy, this is kind of a cloudy area."

I'm not sure, or they're giving their opinions on this, but they're not gonna be the ones that decide, who does decide what the number is?

- I'm not entirely sure.

I mean, the house clerk is the one that's saying 59, but certainly this could end up in court, I guess, if it's really close.

And one of the reasons Steven Steinglass says that he can't really offer an opinion on this is because it hasn't happened.

I mean, this is really an extraordinary set of circumstances where you've got two seats that are vacant, that the super majority party could be filling that they haven't, and these votes are very close.

I mean, the idea of the 60% to require, a requirement of 60% voter approval to amend the Constitution, there are a lot of people who potentially support that idea.

The question is, are you gonna put it in an August special election when turnout is gonna be very low, and make that kind of permanent constitutional change when so few people are gonna turn out?

- Mike Curtin, the former democratic lawmaker and associate publisher and editor of the Columbus Dispatch, he was on with Amy eddings basically saying, it's unprecedented that you would amend the Constitution in a special election where you know nobody is coming out to vote.

- Right, and Mike Curtin, if anybody knows about constitutional history, it's Mike Curtin, former democratic member of the House and former associate publisher of the Columbus Dispatch.

He was on the Constitutional Modernization Commission, which looked at the constitution several years ago and suggested that, "Yeah, we could go up to 55% required to amend the Constitution, but there would also have to be some sort of change to the process that citizens can go through to pass laws."

Because right now that process is difficult, not nearly as difficult as it is to amend the Constitution, 'cause that's more permanent.

But there's a lot of moving parts here and a lot of potential permanence that could be decided in an election that a very small number of people could turn out for.

- Let's talk about who's opposed to this.

So it may pass in the general assembly, but there are a number of folks, including a number of former governors, Democrat and Republican who are opposed to this.

There are a number of other groups that have said this is a bad idea.

- Yeah, the four living ex governors have all said they don't like the idea of doing this bad policy in an August special election.

And remember, there are two parts of this, there's the resolution that were put before voters, the question of whether 60% approval should be required to amend the constitution.

That only needs the house to pass, so it could go to voters.

But then this August special election is an actual piece of legislation that Governor Mike DeWine would have to sign, and he's already indicated, in fact he said he's going to sign it.

But yeah, there's more than 200 groups that say, "This is not the time to do this.

You don't wanna make this kind of a change basically to just kind of thwart what's happening in November."

You've got this group, several groups that are working on gathering signatures for an amendment that would guarantee reproductive rights and abortion access, that would go before voters in November.

In other red states, it has not passed by 60%, it's passed in other red states, but not by 60%.

And that's the key of getting that 60% voter approval approved before November.

(intense ambient music) - Vendors at Cleveland's West Side Market, say the city must address huge problems at the iconic site right now.

This week, the last of the market's freight elevators quit working, leaving vendors to either shut down or carry by hand their products up the stairs to their stalls.

Has there been, the mayor's side is basically saying, "We do need to make this investment."

- Yeah, yeah, exactly, and you know, and folks are also saying too with the argument that some of the council members are making, then why would you support money for like the Brown Stadium for example, or other major like assets in the city.

But the argument is that, investment in the West Side Market is kind of something that would lift all boats.

people are coming into the city for the market.

They're gonna go to get lunch somewhere else, they're gonna go explore the city a little more hopefully.

And people still call the West Side Market a gem, you know?

I mean, it's a big draw for sure.

But yeah, I mean, I've reported on this a little bit earlier this year and the, one of the many reports that has been done on, what needs to be done to the West Side Market with sane, there's all sorts of issues, electrical, heating, cooling.

- Right.

- Saying that, there's like 10s of 100s of 1000s of dollars in water that's wasted every year because of the refrigeration system.

The management team has long been understaffed and under-resourced, there's no marketing for the market really.

So that's why there's been a non-profit manager that's been put into play here, but they need their, the city is saying they need money in order to affect those changes that are needed.

- You were mentioning that council members were saying, we should invest in people that live in the city.

I would say that, I know a number of people that looked at, Charles Slice tweets on that, and we were taking aback a bit because at one point he said, "We should invest in something that isn't a place where suburbanites come in once a month to quote, "play city".

- [Connor] Sure.

- And I wonder about that dichotomy.

- Sure.

- Isn't it the idea of the market, something that does draw in people that aren't necessarily from Cleveland and that benefits then Cleveland?

- Yes.

Well, I mean, they're bringing their money here, you know, versus elsewhere.

But I do understand that, I mean, from some, I can't remember where I saw this, but there are smaller farmers' markets in other parts of the city that don't get near the level of support, and also just local businesses in general, just storefronts that are serving parts of the east side that don't have a grocery store nearby.

You know, so the idea of food and food access is at play here too, as is equity and fairness.

So it's a tough topic for sure.

- Let's move on to one other issue that Mayor Bibb is dealing with.

He's recommending a consulting team to conduct a study on the possible repurposing of Lake Burkefront Airport, another hot topic in the city.

E-consult solutions of Philadelphia will perform a four month study of the property, 445 acres in all.

We've talked about this in the past.

One of the mayor's campaign promises is to look at Burke and say, "Should it be an airport when it's sitting in this prime piece of property right on the lake?"

One of the things that the consultant will need to do is figure out what the airport's really built on.

It could be, I mean, it is landfill, is it a bunch of washing machines (chuckles) and construction debris and is it something you could actually build things on?

- Sure, yeah.

And so this would be pretty limited in scope and it mostly be looking at economic impact of it remaining an airport versus turning it into something else.

You know, is that something else, a park or some other sort of amenity?

They're not sure, but it's, yeah, a $115,000 study.

So somewhat sizable, but again, limited in scope as far as that goes.

I don't know that they'll actually be looking into what's underneath the runway or be able to with that scope.

So.

(intense ambient music) - Monday on "The Sound of Ideas" on WKSU, we'll hear from Ted Gin Sr. who's been coaching young people on and off the football field and track for nearly five decades.

His Glenville Tarblooders has brought home a state title in track and field and football last year.

I recently talked with Gin at a city club of Cleveland Local Heroes event about his long career and his life's mission.

(upbeat ambient music) I'm Mike McIntyre, thanks so much for watching.

And stay safe.

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