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The push toward next year's ballot is on for activists who want to change how lawmakers districts are drawn.

The controversial bill that seeks to address concerns conservatives have about higher education is dead for now And breathing life into Ohio's Appalachian communities devastated by decades of boom and bust.

Some researchers say the solution is a different approach in coal country.

All this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

Volunteers are now fanning out across the state to gather signatures on a proposal to change how the maps of politicians districts are drawn.

Their amendment will replace the seven elected officeholders on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, with a 15 member panel evenly split among Republicans, Democrats and independents, none of whom could be politician.

That's a clerical error for the group citizens, not politicians, to redo part of the initiated constitutional amendment process, which needs to be finished by July 3rd to make the November 2024 ballot.

Statehouse correspondent Sarah Donaldson braved the cold earlier this week as two Columbus based volunteers were among a number on the streets kicking off signature collection.

I'm asking you to get here.

Citizens, not politicians, had to go through the attorney general's office and the Ohio ballot board not once, but twice because of an incorrect date in its first petition.

That tiny error put them back a few weeks and prompted them to miss Election Day, often a big one for signature gathering.

But as citizens, not politicians spokesperson says, the campaign still has plenty of time to meet the threshold and the first signatures are now inked on Tuesday.

Elizabeth Greaser and Amber Decker bundled to canvass High Street near the Ohio State House.

Decker is registered voters and collected signatures before.

And a lot of the.

Young voters I've talked to are really frustrated with the politics in Ohio.

But she says this issue is different for her.

She's really excited about the possibility of putting it in front of the voters.

I think it's really important in.

Ohio that the voters get to choose their politicians.

The politicians don't get to choose their voters.

That's the campaign's elevator pitch.

But Grazer and Decker say this period of signature getting is valuable for reasons other than making the ballot.

To answer questions and to get voters registered, period.

High schooler Malcolm Lane Jr. Is a freshly minted eligible voter in Ohio.

Decker got him registered.

I actually was planning on it for a while now.

My family member is my aunt.

She actually was getting on the ballot signing, so I definitely had to get that taken care of.

To qualify for the November 2024 ballot, the campaign needs more than 413,000 signatures validated by boards of elections.

Now, citizens, not politicians, is aiming for double that because boards of elections often reject a certain percentage.

Sarah Donaldson, Statehouse News Bureau.

A Republican backed bill to address concerns conservatives have about higher education in Ohio is apparently stalled.

Senate Bill 83 bans Most mandate to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DTI Training in public universities requires so-called intellectual diversity to be expressed on specific topics and slashes university trustee terms to combat what supporters say is liberal bias on campus.

But it won't be moving in the House, according to Speaker Jason Stephens.

Oh, it doesn't have the votes.

The bill was strongly opposed by faculty and most student groups as well as Democrats.

But Republican Senator Jerry Serino, the sponsor of the bill, says he dropped a ban on faculty strikes from it to get Republican support in the House.

So he thinks Stephens and his supporters are wrong about the lack of votes.

In spite of the many accommodations that I have made.

It's it's still struggling in the House.

And so I can only surmise that he must not personally believe that anything in Ohio higher ed needs reforming.

A major backer of Senate Bill 83 is Senate President Matt Hoffman, who added it to the Senate's version of the budget to try to get it passed earlier this year.

Hoffman is running for the House next year and may challenge Stevens as speaker if they're both elected, which could mean if Senate Bill 83 does not pass this session, it could be taken up again in the next one.

Ohio's unemployment rate is 3.6%.

That's 3/10 of a point below the national average.

And near the state's all time record low of 3.3% set in July.

The state's highest jobless rate is in Lucas County.

But nearly all the rest of the highest unemployment rates in the state are in Appalachian Ohio.

Researchers at Ohio State University's Swank Program and Rural Urban Policy and the Ohio River Valley Institute say they've seen a way that rural communities like those in Appalachian Ohio can revive their economies with growth.

Not just development that can be subject to boom and bust cycles.

Their report is called A Bigger Bang Approach to Economic Development.

An application to rural Appalachian Ohio Energy Boom Towns.

The report centers on the coal mine town of Centralia, between Tacoma, Washington, and Portland, Oregon.

The mine's owner in that town announced in 26 it would be closed by 2025, affecting about a thousand jobs in an area of around 15,000 people.

But the mine owner agreed to set up a $55 million fund with the money going into three categories energy efficiency and weatherization, economic and community development and clean energy technology investments.

Centralia had a big turnaround after that.

I asked the authors of this report why that happened and why could something similar work in Ohio a long way from Washington?

The report centers on the coal mine town of Centralia between Tacoma, Washington, and Portland, Oregon.

The mine's owner announced that 26 of the mine would closed by 2025, affecting around a thousand jobs in an area of about 15,000 people.

The mine owner agreed to set up a $55 million fund with money going into three categories energy efficiency and weatherization, economic and community development and clean energy technology investments.

And Centralia had a big turnaround after that.

So, Mark, I want to ask you, why do you think that is and why do you think something like that could work in Ohio, which is not Washington?

Well, what they did was rather it was a rather remarkable turnaround.

If you look at the data and where it was, where you really see it is it created a lot of small businesses and existing small businesses hired more workers and in particular in construction.

It was just a wave of construction.

And that came from the energy efficiency investment.

So there was a a double or triple dividend there.

That one, they got the the jobs created for the energy efficiency, too.

They got the double dividend of people saving money on their energy bills.

And then three, they were doing something that was environmentally friendly.

So let me ask you, Nick, you're sure it was these three parts of this $55 million investment and not something else that created this boom?

Yeah.

So when you look at the data, there's a correlation.

But our job and the research we do as economists is to try to dig a little deeper than that correlation and get towards causation.

And one of the things that we did in our study is we actually constructed a algorithm that built a counterfactual Centralia, Washington.

And so we actually looked at the other 38 counties in Washington across about 40 or so variables about their economy, their demographics, their geography, and weighted each of those things to try to essentially build a counterfactual, controlling it like a treatment and control and a drug trial that they might use in pharmaceuticals.

And what we find is that when these grants start rolling out what we expect to happen in Centralia and what actually happens in trail, you diverge almost in that exact year in 2016.

So these grants start hitting shovels and you actually start seeing that before that, 2013, 14, 15, they're moving perfectly together.

2016 boom.

The real Centralia, where the money hits shovels, starts performing better economically, it starts having better job growth, it starts having better personal income growth.

And as Mark mentioned, the real the real kicker is that you see this huge divergence in small business, you know, self-employment income where businesses start actually doing this work.

Now, Mark, you said in a webinar about this report that Centralia moved away from coal and the underlying supply chain to the power plant.

It was also there.

But in Ohio, Appalachia has doubled down on the oil and gas boom.

We've seen that in the shale development in eastern Ohio and most recently in fracking being allowed on state lands and in some state parks.

And there's also this continued investment into this ETF and cracker that's been talked about for Belmont County since at least 2018 that I can remember.

So and the state spent $70 million on that cracker already.

So why two different approaches here?

Why is Ohio vested in this approach when there's another approach?

Well, I think I think you've raised a really good question.

The oil and gas boom, you know, despite all the hype, if you look at the population growth in the main counties that were affected, they actually lost people.

And they actually lost more people in the decade of the oil boom than they did in the previous decade.

So it's not been a great job.

Economic growth contributor.

So what's different about this is it relies on the local people, relies on the local citizens, and it requires entrepreneurship and small businesses starting up.

And the one of the nice things about small businesses as opposed to a large corporation is the money stays local.

In other words, the profits stay local.

Also, small businesses tend to hire more workers, more labor intensive kinds of jobs.

So there's there's more workers involved.

And and then also small businesses tend to buy a source of inputs locally.

So they're buying locally for their inputs.

And so you get a much bigger bang for small businesses than you do from large companies where a lot of that economic development just trickles out.

And when companies leave and there's this big vacuum in communities, the thinking has been to go try to find something similar to replace that a manufacturer lead.

You go out and try to find another manufacturer to replace that.

But that can mean that sometimes doesn't work, as you kind of described in this report, right?

Nick?

Right.

You end up in in what economists really term a race to the bottom in those types of situations where you kind of get into a panic.

The traditional thinking has been, well, we need to recruit a new a new company to come in and save these jobs.

How do you recruit a new company?

Well, we'll offer tax incentives.

So we'll give property tax exemptions.

We'll give income tax exemptions, and we'll try to be a attractive spot for a new company to come in and build a factory or replace the old one.

But the problem is everybody's doing that.

And so if you're a county in Ohio, you're not only competing against other counties in Ohio, but you're also competing against counties in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky for these types of of of investment.

And so what you end up with is a lot of situations where the community has lost more tax revenue then economic benefit that it's gained from bringing in a new firm with new jobs.

And the clean energy or energy tech transition.

Part of this grant program had a lot of matching investments coming in from corporations, from the state of Washington itself.

Coal is king and was king in southeast Ohio.

Those residents and some politicians, many of them were Republicans, aren't necessarily convinced that energy efficiency programs and these things are the way to go.

So how do you convince them with just this example from just one town?

Well, I think I think one of the things they have to look at is, is is what they're doing.

Is it working?

Because they've been trying the same strategy over and over again.

And and it hasn't really worked.

And if you mentioned coal, I think we're down to around 400 jobs is all that's left.

And coal in Ohio in terms of coal.

So what's different about this is that it doesn't take a large investment.

You know, you talk about the intel plant, for example.

You know, there was billions of dollars, millions of billions of dollars of incentives.

You know, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars in terms of and that stays locally.

You know, it doesn't go to some corporation and the other feature is, is that it relies on, you know, something that I would think Republicans would appreciate is small businesses in small business development and entrepreneurship.

And so I think that's something Republicans could gather around.

The one advantage, though, that clean energy has over brown energy, I should mention, is it's it's something that's going to be growing.

By contrast, manufacturing due to a lot of reasons, productivity growth is going to be shrinking.

So if you're trying to get a bigger piece of a shrinking pie, you're not going to get a lot where with clean tech, you're going to you know, it's a growing pie.

And I think a lot of times we focus on big companies, lots of jobs rather than smaller companies where you only have ten, 20, 50, whatever jobs.

But in some of these industries, as technology improves, the number of people who are needed actually does not grow like it used to.

Right.

And I'll give you an example.

You brought up the name Cracker Plant.

They opened one recently in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

And even the direct jobs estimates from that facility are lower than they were projected back in 2012 because you've seen advancement and automation take over even in just the last eight or nine years.

And so I think what we are thinking about in this report and what the results show is that the secret not only small business, but diversification, is that if you put all of your economic eggs in one basket and then something happens where automation comes over, you need a lot fewer workers, suddenly you're kind of up the creek without a paddle, so to speak.

Right?

Versus if you have made smaller investments and a diverse collection of industries and businesses locally, then you're much more resistant to global changes in marketplaces and resistant to automation and technological shifts.

And so when we think about coal or natural gas or coal has been affected by this shift towards natural gas, and now natural gas is being impacted by events in the Ukraine and other places around the world.

And that has ripple effects in small communities here in Ohio.

And so when you diversify, you don't necessarily get those same big shifts when something major happens in one market in the world.

One of the other things you talk about in this report is quality of life being an issue to try to bring in companies and people and that sort of thing.

Appalachian Ohio has been exploited through the boom bust cycle over decades of companies coming in and then leaving.

So, Mark, you talked in that webinar about changing attitudes in the community and trying to encourage investment that way.

How do you do that when you're dealing with people who've been there, done that, seen it all before?

They don't trust that this is going to be the solution, right?

You're exactly right.

They've heard so many solutions that haven't worked.

And, you know, there's reason to be skeptical.

However, with this, I think that the the big the big difference is that with the diversification that Nick was talking about, with the fact that in other research we've done, small business development creates about twice as many extra jobs, spillover jobs than you get in from large businesses.

This is something that that can work.

And in terms of the attitude, the psychology you're talking about is that when you're declining place, one of the things that's really hurting them is everybody saying this place isn't going anywhere.

Why should I invest here?

Why should I stay here?

Likewise, outsiders are saying, why would I want to go there if if, if the place is in decline?

So by changing the attitudes like they did in Central when they saw this thing was working, all of a sudden, Oh, this place is growing.

We can invest here.

We can I can stay here.

You know that once that psychology turns around, that's when a place can sustainably begin to economic growth.

And what are the things that can come along with that?

I mean, quality of life issues?

What are some other things that can come with that besides just a single company starting up?

Right.

Well, I think Mark kind of touched on it earlier.

But when you have places that like southeast Ohio, where you have beautiful geography, you have really you have the potential for some really vibrant comeback communities, Right.

If you've driven through some of the downtowns in these and these places.

And so when you start attracting population growth, that's really an indicator of economic growth.

So it's not just about having jobs, but it's about building up an area of the state that is beautiful, that has a lot of pride in its history and attracting people there.

And I think that there's also a lot of opportunity.

You mentioned technology as remote work becomes more and more of a thing across the country, you have the potential to really attract workers to places that are high and quality of life.

They have clean environments, they have vibrant downtowns.

You don't have to be a large city to have a vibrant downtown.

You have some of those amenities local businesses, local restaurants, you have outdoor entertainment, great hiking, great, you know.

Nature and low cost of living and.

Low cost of living.

So, you know, it's a much, much more affordable in terms of living costs.

And so you can attract people.

And when you attract people, you can grow your population.

And that's usually a recipe, a key to part of the recipe for for economic recovery.

And if I can if I may, just if I may, I just to add to that, the Western U.S., the Rocky Mountain areas was a very similar economy boom bust, relying on timber, mining, you know, the same kind of industries you see in Appalachia.

And they went through the transition earlier.

They were for they were forced to by various environmental regulations and so forth.

So they're forced to go through this.

And the very unhappy you could see why they were losing their jobs.

However, very nice place.

It turned around because of a quality of life issue.

You know, the quality of life was very high.

People started moving there.

And why?

You know, the question is, why can't Appalachia still do that?

I think there's a big obstacle in Appalachia in that broadband is still not as available.

There's still big pockets of the state that don't have broadband like it is in the major urban centers.

And that hurts.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think we've seen both Republicans and Democrats in the last four or five years make big commitments and investments and hopefully all of that comes to fruition and the money actually goes out and helps install broadband into these communities.

It is challenging in Appalachia because of the geography and the mountainous terrain.

But, you know, we've done some research on that as well.

And there are a lot of dollars being invested in broadband.

And I think that kind of goes hand-in-hand with what I mentioned with remote work and what I mentioned with the quality of life.

Having access to to the global marketplace will be big there, too.

One of the other conclusions of this report is economic growth and economic development are two different things, that there's that boom and bust.

And just because you have economic development doesn't mean you're going to have economic growth.

And so how do you make sure that people think that this is something that translates?

This is just one town that you looked at how does it how are you certain that this does translate throughout different areas, not just Appalachian Ohio, but maybe other parts of the state, other parts of the country?

Oh, for sure.

This is the kind of thing that could work anywhere.

Know, it relies on an entrepreneurial climate and small towns.

And so this is not something that is specific to Centralia, Washington.

Also, you know, we get a lot of work on this with Centralia.

And one of the things that that stands out is this We're talking about a very similar geography.

We're talking about, you know, a similar rural culture, you know, things, you know, very conservative culture.

You know, I mean, there are very you know, there's a lot of things that are very much like they're both on a major interstate.

They both have very good transportation access.

So I think there's no reason to think that it can't work in Appalachia because this is some sort of weird special case.

And then as I already mentioned, you saw this across the Rockies already.

It was a different kind of a transition, but one that also Appalachia could participate in.

One of the other side effects of this is they could help deal with some of the problems that rural communities have been having with the opioid crisis, which you've also looked into as well.

Oh, exactly.

I mean, it's not the only cause, but one of the one of the key causes is lack of economic opportunity.

You know, And right now you have the depths of despair is what they recall with suicides and and overdoses and so forth.

And by turning around the economy, that gives people hope.

And you see fewer opioid deaths.

So overdoses.

So this is something that all around is a game changer.

So, Nick, final word here.

This all sounds very positive and very sunny, like just do this and it will be easy.

It takes a lot of time, many years to see the results here.

How can you tell people and reassure them that if you hang in there, this is going to work?

Yeah, I think there's there's phases of this and you see the results start to happen as soon as money hits the shovels.

But you're right that it's taken six, seven, eight years.

If you go to Centralia, Washington, now, it looks very different than it did ten years ago on the ground in their downtown.

But I think one of the advantages is when you use local labor, local businesses, you start to see that impact right away as opposed to if I'm investing money in building a fracking drilling site and building a pad and building a road in, you're not going to see that impact immediately, right?

You're not going to see that there's going to be overnight some kind of change in your neighbors or in your community.

And so I think one of the things that people really need to think about as they consider this approach is that, as Mark said, it takes less money upfront.

And so it's also a lower risk, you know, to try to to go down this road.

And then also because it uses local folks, people are going to feel the impact much sooner than relying on an outside multinational company to change economic fortunes.

Any final thoughts?

I think my my final thought is, is that we've been trying the same thing over and over again for the last 30 some years.

You look at site selection, magazine tracks, large firm start ups.

Ohio has been first in the country eight times.

I don't think we've ever been below four in the last 30.

In other words, we're really good at attracting manufacturing facilities.

Yeah.

When you look at the results, it just hasn't translated into growth.

And so it's time for a new approach that that is not very risky and has been shown that could really make a positive change.

You mentioned that Site Selection magazine.

We've covered that in the media before, but there's a big difference between attracting the company and what happens afterwards.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, what comes back to one of those things is if you're focusing on a declining industry manufacturer in terms of jobs, you really then trying to get a bigger piece of a shrinking pie and it's hard to win that game.

The full report is available at the Ohio River Valley Institute's Web site.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse Museum of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our Web site at State News dot org and you can find us online by searching the state of Ohio show.

Please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

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 dot com the law offices of Porter right Morris and Arthur LLP.

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

More at Porter recom Porter right inspired every day the 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.