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Money troubles and internal struggles.

And Intel raise worries about its huge central Ohio project.

A lawmaker suggests solving concerns about redistricting by adding more lawmakers.

And a longtime legislator is honored at the state House this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

Computer chip maker.

Intel has been facing mounting economic pressure for months, as the federal government hands out its long awaited Chips and Science Act money.

Intel's chief executive officer is out the door after only four years in charge.

All this has and could certainly continue to affect this huge New Albany project, which the state is pouring dollars and resources into.

As the single largest private sector investment in Ohio history.

State health correspondent Sarah Donaldson reports.

Intel is getting nearly $7.87 billion in direct federal funding awards through the Chips act for various projects nationwide, including those in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Ohio.

It comes as Democratic President Joe Biden prepares to leave office and Republican President elect Donald Trump to take it just before the November election.

High profile Republicans, including Trump and US House speaker Mike Johnson, cast doubt on the future of the Biden era bill.

But in Ohio, GOP state executives see it as a lifeline for the eventual plot of computer chip plants east of Columbus.

We've been waiting for over two years to get the Chips act funding to Intel so that they can pick up the pace of their project.

They have been cash starved, essentially, which means that they couldn't build as fast as they had intended to.

It's a hefty piece, but it's not the whole pie for a project reliant on government dollars.

The state has also already disbursed $600 million in entrepreneur grants for Intel.

Houston says Intel got those grants under clear conditions for the deliverables on the other end.

Build the fabs, create the jobs that are promised or or we can get the money back.

Intel is under contract with the state's Department of Development to deliver on those job creation and investment commitments by 2028.

But the federal Department of Commerce contract might afford Intel additional leeway, according to Bailey Sandin, with left leaning research group Policy Matters Ohio.

It seems to give until 2030 for the second fab.

That's short term for Intel's fabrication plans.

What we can ultimately see is that the governor is not putting pressure on Intel to make sure that it's fulfilling its promises and operating under the timeline that it was supposed to be operating under 2030 would be a serious shift from February, when an Intel spokesperson first confirmed it wouldn't meet its aggressive project finish date to be online by 2025.

The spokesperson declined to pinpoint the date then, but said based on prior project timelines, construction could continue through 2027.

And since then, its stock only sank further.

Intel put out a global cost cutting plan with job reductions and restructuring.

And earlier this week, according to Bloomberg CEO Pat Gelsinger was forced to retire by Intel's board of directors.

Gelsinger was crucial to Intel's announced investment in central Ohio.

He stood his faith nonetheless, because America needs to build chips in America.

Chips are essential to our economic and national security.

We're utilizing taxpayer dollars to invest in the state of Ohio, and that this isn't something that is special or unique to central Ohio.

This is something that is going to impact the entire state for generations to come.

At a projected 7000 construction jobs, 3000 fab jobs, and thousands more indirect jobs, and with billions of dollars on the line, it's been heralded as the biggest public private partnership in state history.

Sarah Donaldson, Statehouse News Bureau.

Lawmakers are wrapping up the two year session with hundreds of bills introduced, but only a handful close to the finish line.

But some people in Columbus are already looking forward to next year, both to the new General Assembly and to future elections.

Governor Mike DeWine has said he wants lawmakers to deal with redistricting right away, after voters rejected a plan to create a 15 member commission of non politicians to draw maps for Congress and the state House and Senate.

One of his fellow Republicans has an idea that he would like his colleagues to consider adding more legislators into the mix, upping the House from 99 members to 153 and the Senate from 33 to 51.

So it doesn't actually change the redistricting process.

And I would, you know, point out that whether it is whether issue one had passed, whether we stick with the status quo, whether we do it.

Governor DeWine seems to be intimating which is the Iowa plan.

It doesn't change any of that.

What it simply does is recognize is as you get more seats, you get closer to proportional representation organically.

And the best way to think about that is with, you know, when you look at a statewide district, you know, it's either 100% Republican, 100% Democrat statewide splits, 5545.

That's about as far out from proportional representation as you can get.

But take it to the other extreme.

If everybody's their own representative, which would be a direct democracy, you get proportional representation by definition, but obviously direct democracy has its problems, too, but simply illustrates that proportional representation is, at least in part, a function of the number of seats that you have in the state.

So, I thought of it as just an organic way to help the proportional representation problem, irrespective of who has the pencil.

So, like you just said, the House, 68%, Republican Senate, 79% Republican, not representative of the 5545 split that we just saw in the 2024 election.

But you say that this would guarantee more closer to the 55, 45 and not just more lawmakers in the supermajority.

Correct.

And so, I mean, you said it yourself, listing the percentages.

They're 79% Republican now, 68% in the House.

And roughly 55, 45 is the statewide split.

Republicans have had the pencil for the past 3 or 4 cycles.

Yet, at least in my memory, I don't think the House has ever been able to get over 70% Republican.

However, the Senate has remained over 70% Republican, at least in my time in the legislature dating back to 2013.

And to me, that's illustrative of this actually works, because the House districts are one third the size of Senate district.

So I think what you would see happen if something like this were passed, all things considered equal, you'd probably see the Senate percentage, which, you know, this next General Assembly will drop to 72%.

The House will go down to 65.

I think you'd see the Senate dip a little bit below 70%, maybe to kind of where the House is now.

The house might actually dip to 60 or maybe high 50s.

Now, the you mentioned governor Mike DeWine has been talking about the Iowa plan, which is a nonpartisan legislative agency that would draw the maps, but lawmakers are still heavily involved in that.

I can imagine that there are folks who would say lawmakers have been the problem here.

Why would we want to add more of them to the mix here?

Is this a better idea than the Iowa plan, for instance?

I need to stress it's not an either or thing.

I think that this actually enhances the Iowa plan.

It enhances current redistricting.

Excuse me, current redistricting process.

It would would have enhanced issue one had that passed.

You can do both at the same time and one doesn't really impact the other other than you know, I think that this positively impacts, that proposal.

So, you know, while I'm, you know, agnostic on the Iowa plan right now, I do know that if that went through, this would simply help it.

And you've said that this could potentially mean less money in politics because you would find people running in smaller districts who basically would find it easier to get elected without raising huge sums of money.

That's absolutely right.

I mean, it's and there was a, I wish I remember the name of the professor was on NPR yesterday that explained that exact issue, taking place.

So, you know, when you have districts like the Senate District 360,000, that's roughly like what a congressional seat was a generation ago.

And these seats can be incredibly expensive to to run.

I mean, it's not uncommon to see competitive seats, you know, go over $1 million in funding.

You know, congressional seats can be even worse.

We saw that in Cincinnati and up in northwest Ohio.

But when you get smaller and smaller and smaller, the, the effect is, is something like this.

If you're a well known teacher in, like I will say, Northwest Local School District, all of Coleraine, part of Greene, even a little bit of, Fairfield, Springfield Township.

You know, if you're a long, long time well known teacher, families know you.

You don't need as much money.

You've built up a lot of name ID in that particular area.

That is a huge advantage for somebody who, frankly, is a teachers or a group of people that aren't really well represented in the General Assembly.

So I think in the end, the net effect would be, less expensive races, and you'd see a general Assembly that would look more like the electorate.

Right now, if you look at the Ohio Senate and there's nothing wrong with this, but they tend to skew wealthier, they tend to skew older, and they tend to skew towards people that have passive streams of income.

You don't see a lot of electricians and teachers and folks like that.

I think you would see more of that latter group if something like this were to pass.

One of the complaints about gerrymandering is the money that's involved in politics and how it creates that.

But another complaint is that it creates extremism.

Do you think that this would deal with that problem and potentially make it so that the legislature is not as extreme as it is right now, with on both sides of the aisle?

It's I don't think so.

I think if anything, it would be just sort of a plus.

It would be neither good nor bad in that respect.

Because, you know, when we look at districts throughout the state, you know, your urban core seats are always pretty much going to be Democrat, at least the way things stand right now, rural seats are Republican.

And really the most competitive areas are the suburbs.

This obviously wouldn't change that.

There probably would be in terms of real numbers, an increase in the number of competitive seats because the suburbs you know, there's just more seats generally.

But I don't think I think you'd still have, you know, communities that are very swayed one way or another.

And that would be reflected in who they elect.

But, you know, that's their choice.

And, but the interesting part about this is, is you might have, you know, more, moderate members on both sides of the aisle that the, you know, since there's less money in general, you know, you see, like the the caucuses will defend their members in the primary.

That might be less of an issue.

So you're more moderate members might actually be able to overcome to some degree the primary.

Whereas now, you know, the caucuses obviously protect incumbents and whatnot.

So maybe it helps.

But really it just seems like speculation at this point.

Top line on that, there are some practical downsides, of course.

Behind you is a picture of the House floor and you hard to squeeze some more people in there, but what would be the actual cost of increasing the number of legislators and their staffs and all of that?

So back of the napkin math here, just in terms of salaries would be about 5 million per fiscal year.

I would just multiply that by three to, you know, include, you know, possible pensions, staff costs like that.

But 15 million in the grand scheme of things is a rounding error when we're talking about state budgets that are $90 billion.

And so this is something that is easily achievable.

And again, I wish I could remember the gentleman's name yesterday.

You know, on NPR that said that that states with smaller districts, their constituents seem to be happier with their representation, which makes sense because they're presumably more responsive given the size of their districts.

You're a Republican, and Republicans benefit right now from the process as it is.

How do you get Republicans on board to change it?

So that that is a good question.

And I have had, you know, obviously, Democrats coming out of the woodwork and saying, look, we like this idea, interestingly enough, and I won't name names.

There was a Republican who reached out to my office and said, I love this idea.

And at the risk of sort of, you know, by saying this, you're like, okay, well, now we can figure out what area of the state.

But, you know, they were telling me that their district is huge and it's it's, you know, very difficult to get from one end to the other.

And there's very different cultures within the district.

And, you know, it's it would be a lot easier to represent sort of a consistent culture in a smaller district.

You know, they could easily represent their district and that would be that.

And I think that's a fair point.

The other thing that I would tell Republicans on this is it's not like suddenly they're going to lose their seat.

The number of Democrats would increase, obviously, with this plan.

But so when the number of Republicans is just the statewide split, that would change.

It might put it put Republicans in a position where they lose the ability to easily override the governor.

But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing to lose.

The key point is this, you know, for me at least, we had an election for president.

Trump won the state by 11 points or so.

Now, Republicans have unified control of Congress and the white House unified control of state government in the governor's mansion.

And historically speaking, midterms have been bad years for Republicans.

And I think part of why Republicans were elected, right or wrong or indifferent, was people's attitude towards the cost of living.

They felt like the past four years the sky has been falling, and I'm not pointing fingers at anybody, but I think that was there.

General consensus.

If Republicans cannot deliver on the cost of living crisis and getting people back to where they wanted to be.

I mean, I have heard a number of people say, we just wish we could go back to 2019 if that's the case, it could be very ugly years for Republicans in 24 or 25, 26, 27 and even 28.

And you could find something at the ballot, that will pass.

That might be a lot more detrimental to Republicans than a proposal that I'm pushing.

My point being that I think now is the time for the Republican Party to say, look, we do think that people, broadly speaking, would like to see some redistricting reform.

Let's seize that and go ahead and, you know, do the reform and be organic about it and do it our way.

You'd likely need bipartisan support.

Oh, yeah, it would.

You would have to have bipartisan support.

And Senate President Matt Huffman, who has been involved in redistricting for quite a long time, has said that there would need to be bipartisan support before he would back anything coming forward.

But you also have said that you'd like to get Common Cause and League of Women Voters and some of these other groups that were involved in issue one on board.

This is there are a lot of bad blood here among these groups that it'd be very hard to bring everybody in this pool that we're talking about together to back a new issue.

Yes.

And I absolutely.

That's the case, I think, you know, and I did I did reach out to, you know, Catherine Tauscher, for example, like before I dropped this to say, look, hey, this is not, you know, me trying to stick a thumb in the eye of reformers.

I just really want to get this out there for discussion, because I don't think this issue is going away.

I can also appreciate just how exhausted people on both sides of the aisle are after the issue.

One fight, which was expensive, brutal, bruising, But again, I don't think this this area of policy is just going to fall quietly away.

And I think we do need to act in good faith.

And I think this is one that just my sort of sense that I get from talking to people offline is that, oh, we can we can live with this.

One of the reasons that you thought about this is because of issue one, which was a redistricting proposal that was expected in 2023, when Republicans brought forward the idea of increasing the threshold by which voters would have to approve constitutional amendments to 60%.

Of course, that failed.

This is the this was the sixth redistricting proposal in 60 years that voters saw, and Republicans have long claimed that it's too easy to amend the Constitution, which those who've tried would take issue with that, of course.

But that maybe the idea should be to go to citizen initiated statute, a law rather than an amendment, and you have a proposal that would actually deal with that to try to steer people toward and groups toward laws rather than amendments.

Right.

That's exactly right.

And I would, you know, preface this all all by saying this, this proposal does not in any way change the constitutional amendment process.

And that's by design, because it's very clear after, you know, I know that we've had so many issue ones, it's tough to keep them straight.

But the 60% threshold, you know, that was defeated handily.

I think people like having that oversight over their, their, legislators.

Fair enough.

But I do think SQ5, which broadly speaking, makes the initiated statute process a lot easier for reformers.

And and I shouldn't say significantly harder for legislators, but it does make it harder for them to just turn around and change it.

I think just by having that in place, reformers will look at the signature threshold.

Hey, 10% for a constitutional amendment.

3% for this initiated statute.

And oh, by the way, if we pass this initiated statute, the General Assembly needs at least a 6,060% supermajority, for a two year period to amend it.

Well, I think we're going to go with this.

And frankly, you know, that's the right effect.

I think that having the easier it is created statute, you know, avoid some of the constitutional amendments.

And and this is a selling point to Republicans, as you know, reformers.

Now, if we were to pass five have to justify to the press to, Ohioans generally why they chose to go the constitutional amendment route as opposed to initiate it statute.

Right now, it's very easy for them to say, and I saw this with the minimum wage debate.

The General Assembly could just turn around and erase it.

So we're going to go to the constitutional amendment route because we have a lot of security with that.

Yeah.

Because if you're going to spend the money to go out and get the signatures and pass the issue, you want that issue to stick, which a constitutional amendment does, and a initiated statute would not.

But what you're proposal would be would be basically the legislature and the governor could override the voters.

And there's a time limit, though, on how long.

I think it's two years, right?

Yes.

So the way it works right now, you know, if if you pass something by initiated statute, the General Assembly could if they wanted to just repeal it right away and they could do that with a simple majority, and this would increase that instead of needing 50% plus one hour, 50 members in the House or 17 in the Senate, now you need 60%.

And I would say 60%, you know, is just a threshold that I picked because it mirrored the gubernatorial override threshold.

So, okay, we'll go with that.

But now with that, that two year period after passage at the ballot, you would need 60% of the House and 60% of the Senate in order to amend it in any way.

And my thought with that was is it adds security one, but two, it also fosters a degree of bipartisanship.

So, if you know, something is really egregiously wrong in it and you can get Democratic support to, you know, amend certain parts of it, all bets are off if you get 90, 90 members of the House and 30 members of the Senate to amend something.

Well, that's that's but but most people would see that as okay, that's good.

If they're if they agree that much there's probably something wrong with it.

Would you say this is an easier sell to your colleagues than the Constitution or the, expanding the size of the general Assembly might be.

Absolutely.

Because this was, you know, touched upon this idea was touched upon in the Constitutional Modernization Commission.

However, I think the constitutional Modernization Commission also had this, you know, we're going to make initiated statute easier, but we're going to make the constitutional amendment process harder.

And it for anything, as we had discussed earlier, to pass at the ballot in this space, I am convinced you absolutely need both parties in support of it.

And right now, I don't think there is any way Democrats would support any change in the threshold for the constitutional amendment.

But again, I think on this just this piece alone, since it makes the job easier for reformers, I think you guaranteed get the Democrats on board.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But I like to think that they they would be, Republicans do get the benefit of hey, this I'm reasonably confident with the state that the incentives in place that this will avoid some constitutional amendments.

Does it mean that you are going to have to deal with some initiated statute that you may not like?

Probably, but you still have the opportunity to amend it, which you do not have with the constitutional amendment.

So they're selling points on both sides of the aisle.

And again, you know, just the, you know, you know, sticking my finger into the one here and asking folks, they do seem to like it that, okay, if this had been in place, you know, for people that were, you know, very, very much in favor of, of pro-life laws and things like that, they look at this and they're kind of like, that would have been a nice to have in place back then, because maybe, you know, the abortion issue one would have went through initiated statute.

There would have been an opportunity to find a compromise.

Obviously, now that won't happen.

But I it did after that experience.

I do think seeing this, it has gotten, you know, the gears turning and thinking, we might want to do this.

By the way, Ohio is the seventh most populous state, but 31 state legislatures are larger than Ohio's, which has 132 members.

The largest legislature by far is New Hampshire's, with 424 members.

Pennsylvania is second with 253.

A lawmaker who served more than three decades in the General Assembly was honored in a state House memorial this week.

Kirk Suring of Canton, was Senate president pro tem when he died last month.

He was also acting House speaker in the tumultuous period in the spring of 2018, between the resignation of Cliff Rosenberger and the election of Ryan Smith after a marathon session featuring 11 rounds of voting.

Shirring worked on shoring up the state's unemployment compensation fund, on helping communities create jobs through economic districts and on the state's film tax credit.

He was praised by his fellow Republicans and by Democrats as a model legislator who was smart, committed, principled and funny.

Sharing had been fighting cancer for months, but kept working, at one point calling his colleagues from his hospital bed.

Kirk Suring was 72 years old And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State news.org or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

You can also hear more from the bureau on our podcast, The Ohio State House scoop.

Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for watching and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Right.

That tree.

Hey.

All right.

Thank you, Santa.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mrs. Claus.

Here.

Seven of us here.

Santa Claus, right?

I have lost my big Santa, my channel, his reindeer calling, all the rest of the children singing.

All right, so I have brought us all here today.

Our Christmas Santa Claus comes to us all.

Santa Claus here comes right down to us.

Gosh, boys and girls, you know what I'm gonna do most of my time here?

Until I have a Santa 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.