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More than 1.5 million Ohioans live in poverty, which holds big risks and few ways out.

A new program looks to bring vision care to kids who need it.

And there's been no power this week at the statehouse.

And that has nothing to do with politics.

We'll explain this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

A new report says Ohio's poverty rate dropped a bit between 2022 and 2023, but it's still higher than the national average and has been since 2007.

The Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies Annual State of Poverty in Ohio report notes that living in poverty shortens life span, with a 12 year gap between the average life expectancy in Delaware County, one of the state's wealthiest, and rural Vinton County.

I talked about the report and some of its conclusions with Phil Cole, who's been the executive director of Alaska for 36 years.

He's retiring at the end of this month.

talking about this year's State of poverty report for Ohio, the poverty rate has dropped only slightly from last year's report, 13.3, down from 13.4.

But that's not the focus of this year's report.

In fact, it's rarely been the focus of the state of poverty.

The reports you've put out, and I have a couple of them here in the stack.

This year's focus is on resource deserts, which is defined here as people living in these deserts lacking a key resource essential to their well-being, which forces them to put more of their time and energy into getting food or medications or other resources to survive.

And the report also says this can have a cumulative effect.

Tell me about resource deserts and why you're focused on that in this report.

We're focused on that because, you know, poverty is is, something we all know about.

But most people don't realize it's a human creation.

People say, oh, yeah, the people choose to do bad things.

They make bad decisions.

Well, some people do, all right, but most people are in poverty, were born in poverty.

And as far as I know, no one ever chooses who the parents are was or born.

So and six and I think it was a Pew Research study that says 68% of all people born in the lower half economically in this country will never get to the upper half, not even for one day.

So we said, why is that?

What is it that holds people back?

Well, we began to look at, these deserts.

And like I said, the poverty created by by human choices, not by the by those who are poor, but by public policy.

There was a or there was a big employer around 1900s called ENP.

People have heard about that.

Some people heard about that, at the grocery store, the grocery store, a big grocery store chain.

And they began to do something which is going on right now.

But Congress said, no, you can't do that.

And that was, require their food suppliers to give them better prices than they give anybody else.

And the Congress passed a thing called the Robinson Patman Act of 1936, which said, you can't do price discrimination.

And if you got what you get, what you give, then you got to give Bob's market down here.

And so, you see, when I was a child, many years ago, there'd be all these little grocery stores in neighborhoods, and, in the 1980s, in the Reagan administration, they said this Robinson Patman Act thing is not efficient.

So they said, we're not going to force it any longer.

And they encouraged, efficiencies, as they called it, by saying if you buy big prices, you get better deals, which creates Walmart and Kroger and these big chains and these and Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, they pushed the little guys out of business.

The and so that created these food deserts also created some unemployment too, because those places were gone.

And that became, that was the first part of the effect of not enforcing this law any longer.

And then it became, other things.

And you see, now in Ohio especially, the pharmacy is disappearing, you know, these, pharmacy benefit managers who who just set prices and, you know, this was debated for a while in Ohio.

The general said they looked at it and they did nothing.

Yeah.

You also, maternal health care, deserts, there are, legal deserts now.

There's no lawyers, I guess in county there are two lawyers.

When it was over, the bar association talked to them about this, and I, fell over and they showed me these numbers.

There are just so many problems in so many deserts.

Yeah.

And you even cite in the report behavioral health care, deserts, transportation, deserts where there's no public transit and people have to have cars to get anywhere.

And that's an expense that some folks can't, absorb.

I want to put some actual numbers on this food deserts, which is what you started talking about 67 counties have at least one food desert, and nearly all food deserts are in areas where the poverty rate is at the state average or above 41% are in areas where the poverty rate is double the state average.

So these are an areas where people are already struggling.

Right, right.

And and the struggle gets worse because there's no grocery store around.

They're buying it.

By fast food, you know, getting fast food meals or they go into Dollar General, which Dollar General is a nice store, but it's not known for its fresh produce.

You know, it's not known for its healthy food.

And so this leads to other problems, which usually medical problems, obesity, malnutrition, those kind of things, which which compounds is all the other problems.

You need a doctor, but the doctor's on around it.

And when you do get to a doctor, they prescribe a drug, but there's not a pharmacy, you know.

Yeah.

And the pharmacy deserts, 67 counties have at least one pharmacy desert.

And there's been a 16% drop in pharmacies across the state over the last decade because a lot of these smaller, independent pharmacies have closed or pharmacies have consolidated because of large chains purchasing them.

But this is not just a problem in rural areas.

You're seeing this in urban areas as well.

And that's the case for food deserts too, right?

Actually, it's it's a bigger problem in urban areas.

It's just because they just they do say that we can't we're not going to be profitable building.

And, you know, being in these places much better if we go out in the suburbs or in certain places in the cities, though, the bigger stores, you know, offer more things and people can come to us and they can get there.

What can the state do about these things, though?

Because like you mentioned, the food desert situation was created in large part by federal policy changes.

What can the state do about these things?

Well, first, I say you mentioned federal the Trump administration could say, well, law enforce the, the Robinson Patman Act as is still there.

You know, they can enforce it.

They enforce a law.

Congress could pass something else, even tougher.

The state, can pass the state's always big on tax cuts.

You know, we love our tax cuts in this General Assembly.

They can they can offer real tax incentives to some of these grocery stores or to this food suppliers.

Or they can say you can't favor one over the other, which would be the the best way to go.

Which they would.

And you mentioned, PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, the state has not taken big action on those.

Is there something the state could be doing to try to help people have better access to pharmacies?

Sure they can.

I mean, it's the same thing.

First, you could regulate pharmacy benefit managers.

They just chose not to do it.

You know, they say you can do price discrimination if you want.

You can you can say for your big you're big customer over the small ones.

They can stop that.

They can make that illegal.

And some of these other deserts, 60 counties have at least one pharmacy desert and one food desert.

Plus you have these other ones that you mentioned maternal care, legal assistance, behavioral health care, transportation.

These are huge areas where can state policy really make any difference?

Or you would have to have wholesale changes in some state policy for some of these things to make a difference.

I mean, public transit is just not available in some parts of the state.

Well, you're right, you would have to have wholesale changes because that's because they put off the problem.

So on, you know, if you got a you have to do solutions.

And the longer you wait to do your solution, the harder it is.

You know, we could do, transportation.

I think about by the time I went down, that was Jackson.

I looked at this, little railroad station.

They still had their.

I think it was Jackson in the Jackson MacArthur.

They kept up a really beautiful.

But it was a way to get to Columbus.

Of course, it's gone now.

The state can rebuild those things.

And you know why they want to do Amtrak here is just baffles me.

Yeah, that would be that would be a good start to get people from Cleveland to Columbus and have all the stops in between, get people around to different places.

All these things cost big money, though.

The state has been talking.

The state leaders have been talking about cutting the income tax, eliminating the income tax, property tax cuts, and relief.

I mean, this is stuff you're talking about, investments that don't cost big, big money, right?

That's exactly right.

I'm not going to shy away from it.

Yeah.

If they, they would have done it before when they first knew what the problem, they'd be solved by now.

The problem, the thing the question is, are you going to solve the problem or are you just going to let it fester?

And over the over the years, you've done how many of these, growing up in power of these, state, 32 or 33.

So over the years, I've kept a couple of these additions here.

In 2024, you talked about growing up in poverty, specifically focused on kids 2023, vulnerable to the disruption, learning loss, mental health, transportation.

This one was interesting.

2022 the face of poverty may surprise you about people who are at risk of going into poverty, who you might not suspect.

I mean, what are some of the things that you think people don't know about those who are in chronic poverty or come in and out of poverty?

People don't.

People don't realize that those are the two types.

Most people in poverty were born into it, you know, not going to get out of it.

It's going to be hard anyway that you can really work at it.

But the public policy is making it harder, because the best way out of out of poverty is education.

Yeah.

We did a in one of our reports, several years ago, we talked about how I think I pulled Miami University off and I said in 19, 80, whatever it was, the state paid over half the cost of it.

State student to go to to go to Miami.

Right now it's less than 10%.

And which is one of the reasons for these jacked up costs for students.

Nobody can afford to get an education anymore.

If you do, you come out with these big debts.

There's there's so many solutions and they're there.

If the General Assembly will just realize that total libertarianism is not the way to go in a free society, if you want to be a democracy and you want to have a free society, you've got to support the society.

you mentioned at the beginning of the interview about, poverty is because of choices.

Some are policy choices, some are personal choices.

People do make bad choices.

That I think is the focus of a lot of folks.

When they think about people in poverty.

Well, they could have made better choices.

They could pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that kind of thing.

Do you do you respond to that?

And you kind of shook your head there.

That's, that's a nice thing to say.

And it used to be true.

It's not as much anymore.

Like I said, most people in poverty were born there.

You can't pick where you're born again because your parents are, and we've made things.

Like I said, public policy has made things more difficult.

So if you, if you end up in a bad situation, it's harder to get out if it was your fault or not.

Yeah.

You've been doing this for 36 years.

What is the one thing that you were hoping to see get resolved or move forward in some way that still is unresolved?

As you leave this position?

Well, open, my head would turn back to this good outcome.

But, I'd really like to see them, come up with more support for education because that's such a way out for people, bring back, affordable colleges.

Yeah.

If if, if Ohio is no longer, going to support public education, you know, the like I said, Miami, it was over 50% of the cost.

Was now it's less than ten.

Is it still a public university?

Yeah.

We need to do that.

We need to make sure people are fed.

We need to make sure people have affordable housing.

There's really not just one thing.

I mean, Karen, it's just a question of when are we going to quit putting off the solutions?

You know, we've got to quit living in this dream world that if we cut taxes, everybody's going to benefit.

But legislators, Republican legislators will say, hey, we did cut taxes.

We we eliminated income taxes on people making under $26,000 a year.

Taxes are now lower than they've been, you know, going almost back to when income taxes were created in Ohio.

And and that that's helping create jobs which will help Ohioans.

They say they're doing policies that will help people get out of poverty.

You know, we've, our national I mean, our poverty rate has trailed the national average for 18 consecutive years.

So how is that tax cut working?

Cole says one thing he thinks could help is if term limits were repealed, which he says would keep lawmakers and the institutional knowledge they hold in office longer.

There's $10 million in the budget for a new kid's eyesight initiative.

From governor Mike DeWine.

Called the Ohio student eye exam or Ohio's.

See?

It looks to get kids who fail eye exams, more care and glasses if they need them.

My Statehouse News Bureau colleague Sarah Donaldson spoke to Cincinnati Optometrist doctor Terry Gothard about the vision behind the Ohio C program.

We know that one out of four children in Ohio has an undiagnosed vision disorder.

This is CDC numbers.

And yet, you know, it's a very, very small percentage of students that actually have an eye examination prior to starting school.

One out of eight in the state of Ohio.

And even more challenging is that by the time they graduate as Ohio students, only half of them have had an eye examination.

So that's an awfully long academic, marathon to be running without glasses or in this case, shoes as to how I like to think of it.

So, certainly, Ohio has mandated vision screenings that are helpful in identifying when we have children that are at risk for having vision problems that will delay their ability to see and learn.

But we know that even if we screen these children, only 30% of the screen fails.

Actually get to a doctor to have any potential vision problem addressed.

So it's a real challenge.

Certainly, we've got a lot of energy and momentum in the state of Ohio around how to address that.

And that's why I'm just really excited to we're here to talk about it.

So I kind of want to first ask before we get into the Ohio C program, what should parents listen for or look for if they have a kid that they suspect has some issues with their eyes because it can't always be, super easy to kind of say, you know, I can't see.

Yeah.

They don't know what they can't see.

Right?

One of the most common, things that I hear from patients when you put their first pair of glasses on them, if they're nearsighted, there's leaves on the trees.

They didn't know that those green, leafy things were supposed to have have actual leaves on them.

But as far as a parent and raising children, you know, sometimes the children will tell you, but most of the time they won't.

You might be lucky enough to catch some behaviors like squinting and moving closer to see things.

Oftentimes, uncommon head positioning or covering up one eye in order to see clearly.

But the challenge is the students and the children don't always know what they're doing or know that what they're seeing isn't normal.

So we really recommend, both here in Ohio and nationally, that the first eye examination by children happened within the first year of life.

It's really, really important that you make sure that the eyes are developing equally so that the child can see clearly and comfortably and then have them at an eye doctor at age three.

And then, depending on what you're finding, certainly in kindergarten and then every 1 to 2 years after that.

Unless you go through the rigor of a comprehensive eye exam, there are going to be a lot of, covered problems that need to be addressed.

There are regions of the state and specifically thinking about somewhere like southeast Ohio, it's more rural and there maybe aren't as many optometrists in the area.

Are there ways that the Ohio C program addresses this at all?

Yeah, absolutely.

So a whole whole lot of reasons with respect to access, number one is do we have a doctor nearby?

Now, I'm happy to report that out of the 88 counties, we have doctors of optometry and 87 of them.

Certainly, though, they're just because we have them in the county doesn't mean it's easy for, the child to actually get to that doctor, you know?

Does the doctor have hours that are inevitable to a single parent?

Do they have, the right kind of insurance coverage?

Do they do they have spots or are they booked out three, three months?

So that's where the, Ohio project is really going to be helpful.

Were coming into the schools, to help deliver that.

And in conjunction with our foundation as well.

So we're going to tie them to local providers.

But I also want to call out it's not just in in rural areas.

So I live in Cincinnati.

We have the city of Cincinnati.

I was shocked as I started to work, in a school based health center down here in Cincinnati and discovering the lack of access that children that, you know, are in my neighborhood have to actually getting care.

So, we know that we have to address this from a lot of different avenues and, are really grateful for the energy and the attention that it's getting.

DeWine's office asked for $50 million to create Ohio C originally, but lawmakers pared that back to $10 million.

It's been a weird but historic week for those of us fortunate enough to work in the Ohio State House.

The building has been dark for most of the week, literally because there was no power.

Crews have been replacing the electrical and Hvac systems that were initially installed.

When the 164 year old building was renovated in the 1990s.

My Statehouse News Bureau colleague Joe Engle spoke with Megan Wyckoff, the executive director of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, which oversees the statehouse and surrounding property.

for the electrical project and there are 6 or 7 capital projects, and it's I think it's going to be spanning like 5 or 6 years.

And then over several budgets.

So I think that for the electrical and Hvac replacement is in the neighborhood of $20 million for for those those two specifically.

And is that taken care of by the Foundation?

Does it come out of general fund?

I mean, who pays for that?

The taxpayers, it's, it's state funded.

So, yeah, all of that was secured over the last couple general assemblies, and we're so grateful that, the, legislature sees the importance of, of keeping this building.

Working properly so we can maintain it for state government and for the public and for decades to come.

So recently we had, the House members come back to the veto override.

Yeah.

And they did it in the Senate.

And there was a reason for that.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah.

So that was also it's a year of, of, historic things happening at the state House.

I think it might have been the first time the House of Representatives had ever met in the Senate chamber.

So, the, the House side of the building.

So the south side, does not have any air conditioning this summer because of their air handlers.

They're being replaced.

And so, the the house wanted to come back and override some vetoes.

And so they met in the Senate chamber.

And that was also there were logistical opportunities there to figure out.

And technology really helped make all of that possible.

Yeah, I know in the House there's that big board that lights up when they vote.

And there were other alternatives there, right?

Yes.

Yep.

It is all IP based.

It's all, on a network.

And so they were able to use that same technology but just in, in tablet form.

Yeah.

And then it kind of moved.

There's only so many deaths, 33 deaths.

So they kind of moved into the gallery area where normally other people sit.

And you saw lawmakers on there.

Yes.

Yeah.

And normally it's the other way around.

If there's a joint assembly which happens a couple times a year, it happens in the House chamber because it can accommodate a few more people, even though they are the same size room.

So all this working around it, is it working.

I mean, is are people really willing to move and is that causing headaches and have to kind of, move people around?

I, I imagine it is causing some headaches, among our stakeholders.

But everyone has been so gracious and understanding that the reason for the temporary discomfort is really for the long term, success of the building.

And to make sure that that we can, be the seat of state government for as long as possible.

Ohio State House is very, very old and, the age of the building, means that repairs are just not simple.

Plus, it's on the National Historical Registry.

I would assume that that kind of causes some more frustration or maybe adds time to the project.

Does it?

It does.

And so the our agency, the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, was, created during the first renovation to, really has, preserve the historic integrity of the building.

And you know, that buildings aren't built like this anymore.

And so it's so important, to preserve the grandeur of it and then tell its story.

And, yeah, there are special, concessions that we have to make to make sure that we can, work around not only the people in the building, but the really, rare craftsmanship that's in every room of this building.

And the folks that, the volunteers, that lead our tours and our museum and education staff, point those things out all the time.

But, yeah, there's there are a lot of conversations to have to make sure that we, not only, you know, complete the project, but complete it in a way that we can preserve those really unique characteristics of the building.

And unlike other state office buildings, the state house is open to the public.

And and there are a lot of people who come through the state House every year.

Right.

Yeah.

We see about, 250,000 visitors per year.

That could be anyone from, constituents coming to visit their lawmakers.

Lobbyist come in to advocate for policy and legislation, guests of the governor's office and state agency as guests of the legislature.

But, during the school year, we love to see the groups of of kids coming through.

Oh, yeah.

Lots of kids.

Yeah, lots of kids at the state House.

So what is this project supposed to be complete?

So the electrical project, is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year.

And then, our mechanical project, which is the the Hvac, we have about a year and a half left on that.

So we will have a few more, pauses in certain areas of the building while we replace air handlers and all the mechanical components.

We also we had a successful, helicopter lift last month.

I think it was the first time that had ever happened.

Tell me about that.

Yeah.

So, to get the equipment on to the south side of the building, we lifted it from the ground, to the to the roof and then brought it in through the attic.

And the the last time we did it on the north side, it was by Crane, which folks who have been around Cap Square probably remember that last summer.

But this time it just made more sense to, transport those materials by helicopter.

And it was really nerve wracking, but really exciting that it was successful.

And so we'll see a few more things like that come up in the next two years.

Well, another project underway at the statehouse is the Ohio Women's Monument, which is slated to be unveiled next year on the South Plaza.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the statehouse.

News for Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

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Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.