Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, right, Morse and Arthur LLP.

Puerto Rico is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Puerto right.com.

Puerto right inspired every day.

And from 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 O-H e.org.

Sports operations rack up big requests for facilities, funding from the state.

And a chat with the leader of one of the most influential lobbying groups in the state, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.

That's this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Just.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

A $1 billion fund set up by the state to provide $400 million for sports facilities has received significantly more than that in requests from 22 sports operations.

Applications for funding from the Ohio Sports and Cultural Facility Performance Grant fund, obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau, show nearly $689 million in requests from most of Ohio's major professional sports teams.

But not the Cleveland Browns, which is already getting $600 million from that fund.

By far, the biggest ask in the applications provided by the Office of Budget and Management was from Hamilton County for pay core stadium for the Cincinnati Bengals and ask of more than $234 million.

FC Cincinnati asked for more than 136 million for its MLS facility.

TCL Stadium.

Franklin County requested $100 million for Nationwide Arena for the Columbus Blue Jackets.

The Cleveland Guardians asked for nearly $65 million for Progressive Field, while the Cavaliers and Rocket Arena next door are hoping for more than $40 million.

Several asked for in the 1 to $10 million range, going all the way down to two $10,000 request from a youth baseball team in Sandusky and a parkour facility in Miami.

The fund was created in the budget and was meant to be filled by a transfer from the state's unclaimed funds.

That is on hold because of lawsuits in state and federal court claiming the use of those funds is unconstitutional.

As you heard here last week, state lawmakers are on a tight deadline to make the multi-billion dollar capital infrastructure bill happen after finally getting the go ahead from Republican House Speaker Matt Huffman earlier this month.

The spending plan puts the money funded by state bonds toward buildings, universities, parks and many local projects.

Huffman says this year, there isn't a big influx of federal money and no $700 million of excess funds for local projects.

I think if you look back through the total capital budgets, it's, you know, probably less than what it typically has been over the last ten years.

You know, but it's all by comparison, I think.

You know, I try to remind the public, the community projects portion of this is, which is what they're dealing with with their legislators, is usually typically between 150 and $200 million, which is, you know, roughly about 5% of what the total project is.

So we'll look at those, we'll examine them.

But it's something the administration, of course, do and their various departments have been working on for, you know, the better part of a year, I think.

Huffman says he expects the capital budget will pass in May or June before lawmakers leave for summer break.

A ban on ranked choice voting across the state appears to be inevitable, as the Ohio House voted overwhelmingly to join the Senate in prohibiting local communities from allowing voters to rate multiple candidates on the ballot by preference, rather than just voting for one.

The ranked choice voting ban is bipartisan, but the vote in both chambers split largely along party lines.

Only two House Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for the ban, along with three of the Senate's seven Democrats.

The bill is now back in the Senate for change before it goes to governor Mike DeWine.

And it passed with veto proof majorities in both chambers.

Business is always top of mind for state lawmakers who have cited it as a reason for cutting taxes and regulations.

Offering and expanding tax abatements, and approving major energy policy reform and passing House Bill 15 to prompt new energy generation and overhaul utilities, as well as end subsidies for two coal fired power plants and the corruption tainted nuclear power plant bailout house Bill six.

And involved in all of these discussions and others, is the state's largest business advocacy organization, representing 8000 Ohio businesses of all sizes.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce had one of its regular summits at the state House this week, focusing on housing, I talked with the president and CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Republican former Congressman Steve Stivers, who says revising restrictive zoning laws and incentivizing local governments to support higher density development will bring down the price of houses and the cost of rent.

Yes, we think they will.

The laws of supply and demand work in housing like they work in everything else.

If we can increase the supply, the price goes down.

The demand is going up and we aren't currently building enough.

So, currently the opposite is happening where prices are going up because supply is fixed.

Not enough.

We are not building enough.

Housing starts compared to the number of new housing we need, whether it's multifamily or single family.

And as a result, with the supply being fixed, the price then goes up, on the demand curve as demand gets bigger.

So we think these supply related changes will increase the number of folks who want to develop single family and multifamily housing last cycle or in the last budget, we supported a state tax credit, low income tax credit, which doesn't help everybody, but it helps some people.

And on the margins, it helps increase the flow of housing.

Now the focus needs to be on unsubsidized housing, and for that we need to deal with zoning laws.

We need to deal with building codes.

We need to deal with density.

We need to deal with all those kind of things that will help make housing more affordable.

It is important to note that commodity and labor costs are going up, which are also driving housing prices.

But housing is a workforce issue.

If people don't have a place to live in Ohio, they can't work in Ohio.

We're seeing in migration in Ohio currently, and that means we need to build more housing.

And people are living longer, too.

So you add all those things together and it's a real, problem of circumstances, but we have the ability to fix it through policy.

And that's what today's housing summit, at the state House is all about.

Talking about the type of things that can without just throw in more government dollars, policy changes we can make that will make it easier to build the housing that Ohioans want, need.

Don't builders, though, need to start building more affordable houses rather than big houses that, cost a lot of money?

Well, Karen, the reason that developers build big housing is they can make money building expensive houses.

They can't.

They have a really hard time.

They struggle to make money.

In fact, they lose money on workforce based housing.

When you think that the cost of the lot, the sewage, the electric, the curbs, the roads, all of that for a small house, call it a 2000 square foot house.

The kind of house that was my first house was probably your first house.

Just the lot alone now is 150 to $200,000 before you put one stick or one brick up on it.

So that makes it hard to build workforce housing, that kind of we kind of look at workforce housing in that 300,000 and below, range, you know, and it's really hard to do when the lot costs almost $200,000.

So the policies that make it a lot so expensive are the things we're going at zoning, density, impact fees, all those kind of things.

And if that happens, I think it will allow them to build a house in that 250, 300,000, $350,000 price range that, you know, a family that has a $100,000 income between two working spouses or 150,000, they could afford that.

So it's, we've got to do more things to change policies, to make that happen.

But, you know, builders are going to build what they can make money building.

And right now they make money building more expensive housing because the market's there.

People can't afford it.

It is important to note when they build those houses, it does help because somebody moves to that house from another house so that the move up market means there's a house available in a slightly more affordable, tax bracket that people who make a lot less money and they can hopefully afford in Ohio is a lot less because we all moved up.

I, I lived in three houses.

I don't know how many you've lived in, and they're all more expensive every time.

So and every time somebody else, bought my old house that, was more affordable than what I was buying.

So it the move up market does help.

So I think there's things we can do to help all of the above, but our focus at the chamber is around workforce housing and trying to make it more affordable.

The chamber has cited a recent economic study showing the direct financial impact to Ohio of insufficient child care.

Coverage was found to be almost $5.5 billion annually, including 1.5 billion in missed annual tax revenue and almost $4 billion in child care related employee turnover and absenteeism.

Those are the costs to employers.

There was a survey last year that was released from Groundwork Ohio, the early childhood, advocacy group that not half of working parents have had to cut back their work hours to care for their kids.

61% of mothers said they'd like to work full time.

What's the yes.

What's the role for government in fixing this?

And is Ohio doing that?

Well, we think there's a role for everybody in it.

There are programs that the chamber has urged folks to look at, like try, share where the employee, the family participates in paying for part of the childcare, the employer, our members pay for part of the childcare because they get people to work that couldn't afford work to work without.

Childcare and workforce is still one of the top issues I hear from my members.

And the third partner is government, creating some type of subsidy for sort of, you know, working folks, not poverty based assistance, but for people that are policemen, teachers, factory workers in that sort of middle income level, government can help a little.

The employer helps a little and the employee helps a little.

It helps, you know, make health care more affordable.

I'm sorry, make childcare more affordable where families can afford it.

We've all been in this situation where one of the spouses, you know, is making, let's say, $50,000 a year.

And if you have two kids, childcare costs 40.

So, you know, you're really working for ten grand at that point.

And in some cases, if you have three kids, all of a sudden you're paying to work.

Childcare is not inexpensive.

And we've seen this turnover in the childcare staffing because they don't pay very much and there are issues there, but the economic impact is on not enough people in the workforce.

That's the biggest impact which impacts our members, the 350,000 employers across Ohio.

And it impacts, families, obviously, because they have less income and then it impacts the state because of less tax revenue.

So it, childcare and the fact that there's not accessible, available, affordable childcare for people that might work in rural areas or work on second shift or even work on first shift in a in a suburban or metropolitan area, there's still shortages of childcare or waiting lists and things like that.

So we've got to continue to look at innovative policies.

And we're not trying to say there's only one approach.

There are lots of things we've seen from a bunch of other states and locations about how to deal with it.

But we think everybody has and should have some skin in the game.

Our employer members are willing to help, you know, pay for childcare.

Many of our bigger members have on site childcare at their business locations.

It's really small business that struggles the most with this.

And even the small business members I talked to tell me they're willing to try to help pay, something for their child care for their employees.

They just don't want it mandated by the state.

They want it to be their option, which I think is the right way to encourage it as opposed to force it.

What does the chamber want to see you when it comes to property tax reform?

Considering that the property tax burden on businesses has gone from about 54% in 1975 to 32.5% in 2023, it's gone the other way for homeowners.

Yeah, they were paying 46% of the tax burden in 1975.

Now 67.5%, yeah.

Do your goals for property taxes align with the goals for individuals and homeowners who I think they do.

You know, our focus is on unloaded property tax increases, based on appraisals, inside millage, inside millage.

We think there's some things we can do there.

And so we want to work with the communities, the county commissioners and the county auditors and the school boards and the superintendents as well as property owner groups to figure out is there a middle ground, because the big threat for everybody is this, you know, proposal that would eliminate property tax.

And while it sounds like a good idea on its face, it probably means new taxes for everyone.

And how they're distributed would be decided by the legislature.

Probably, but it would create an education funding crisis.

It would create a local government funding crisis, and then state government would come in and try to solve that crisis.

They'd have a lot of power in who pays what taxes, but it probably means more taxes for everybody and making Ohio less competitive.

So, in fact, the chamber has been one of the leaders of property tax reform over the last year.

We were one of the major the, the, Realtors and the chamber were the two biggest members of the Taxpayer Protection Coalition that fought for taxpayer, protections and reductions in real property taxes that have been now passed into law in the last year.

Most of those went not to businesses, but to individuals.

So, that that's something that we fought for because we thought it was really important to fix some of the problems in our real estate tax system where, you know, every three years we have a new appraisal and we're some homeowners.

We're seeing a doubling of their property taxes in three years.

That's a giant shock to somebody, whether they're on a fixed income or not.

It's a giant shock and a giant problem.

Governor Mike DeWine and others have talked about the possibility that the sales tax could go to 20%, and that obviously would affect, is the chamber opposing the idea of abolishing property taxes?

We are watching it at this point.

I we certainly are not supporting it because we think it would would cause a giant, problem.

And I think it would create a crisis.

And we're not, you know, opposing it yet either, but we are watching it today.

It looks like signature gathering today.

It looks like the signatures are not going to be enough, but, you know, they are one $2 million contribution away from being able to get the signatures because, you know, they've gathered about 60% or 70% of what they need, I'm told, and it costs about $11 million to get on the ballot.

So if somebody were to drop a big check, they might get on the ballot.

So this there is, a real potential that this happens when it's more real.

The chamber will probably take a position on it.

And my guess is we will be very skeptical of the proposal because it will create a crisis.

Let's talk a little bit about data centers here.

Chamber released a report in October that said data centers created 95,000 jobs across various industries and contributed nearly $12 billion to the state's GDP.

And, there was a House committee that was looking at a bill that would create a study commission on data centers, and the chamber is supportive of the idea in general.

However you've got some communities that are putting moratoriums in.

You've got some people who are raising concerns about the health and environmental impact on data centers.

Are you concerned that public sentiment is starting to turn against data centers because of all that and energy costs and things like that?

So I recently looked at a poll on data centers.

About 30% of Ohioans are, absolutely against data centers, but 50% don't really know.

And about 10 to 15% are heavily in favor of data center.

So the sentiment is mostly undecided.

A lot of people need more information.

That's why we did our original study on data centers and what the economic impact of data centers are.

Now we're doing a study on electric generation and transmission and how we can solve those needs.

We start with the idea that anybody who builds something should build, you know, all the infrastructure for what they need, including the power generation.

So if you're building, hyperscale, data center that needs a ton of power, you might want to build your own power with it, which is now authorized under Senate Bill 15.

So they can do that.

And and most of them are talking about doing that now.

So we do think that that's important.

We're also looking at water quality issues because people have talked about that.

And, there was a study out of Oregon on that that, you know, we want to take a serious look at.

But I think, you know, I can tell you, the hyperscalers that we deal with Amazon met, Microsoft, AWS, all want to do the right things.

And they're listening to communities and trying to deal with the issues that have come up.

They're now bringing their own power.

Every modern data centers are air cooled, not water cooled.

Most of them that use generators are now using the EPA level number for generators that look out for air quality.

So, I do believe that they are trying to do the right thing.

We're getting ready to do another, impact study on how we can leverage data centers to grow the future economy, because if they're processing data and sending it somewhere else, it has a value of about here.

But if they're processing data and we're using it to build the future economy, the value is up here.

And we know that there's some missing pieces in Ohio.

And I don't want to give away what the key missing pieces are.

But we have identified one.

We're working with jobs Ohio and others to get that.

Intermediated.

So that the data will actually be utilized here in Ohio to create the future economy and future jobs.

We think that's a giant deal.

Are you talking about an actual building or facility, or is this more of a policy?

It's a connection, if you will.

It it's, it's something that we need if the data is going to stay here.

And I believe you were referring to Senate Bill 15, House Bill, I said, yeah, I just you had wanted the tax break for data centers.

That remains because governor Mike DeWine vetoed a provision the state lawmakers that would have eliminated it.

But both we asked him to veto that.

And we think that was the right answer, because, the data centers that come here bring a lot of economic impact in the construction jobs they bring.

The other thing about a data center that people don't really realize, they think about, you build a facility and it's there forever, and you don't really reinvest in it.

Data centers are more like oil refineries, and they're reinvesting all the time inside and outside.

So the construction jobs that would be temporary on a warehouse are much more permanent and ongoing at a data center, because they're going to do new construction and new changes every couple of years.

So the a lot of those jobs are less temporary than most studies look at.

And our study looked at that.

But both Speaker Matt Hoffman and setup president Rob McAuliffe said a veto override is likely.

So they're not buying it, apparently.

Well, we'll see if see what happens and we'll be there lobbying on that because we think the governor did the right thing.

I want to ask you about energy usage by those data centers.

A lot of people are looking at their electric bills and blaming data centers for the rise in those costs.

And I mean, I know you said that some of these places are building their own power sources, but people are looking at that.

They weren't be clear.

They weren't allowed to build their own power sources until late last year.

So, you know, the the, law that allowed that went into effect in 2025.

So, and it takes 2 or 3 years to build, an electric generation plant.

But it's important to note that the energy that we are all using, part of it is powered by data centers, because we're all we're all playing with our phones and doing ChatGPT, and we're using our G.P.S.. That means we are the reason data centers exist and grow and need to be there.

But then even outside of data centers, electric demand is on the increase because of electrification of vehicles, electrification of equipment, new gadgets and electronics in our homes and offices.

So electric demand is actually on the increase even with just without data centers.

I want to ask you about, the possibility of an AI bubble with Ohio so heavily invested in data centers, is there a real concern that if that bubble pops, that Ohio will really suffer?

You know, you always have to pay attention to, a bubble and, you know, look at the tech bubble in 2000, and look about how it popped in for 5 or 10 years, there was less impact and less stock value and all that.

But if you look at the last 50 years, you know, tech stocks have been the best investment tech.

Innovations have had real ongoing job increases, higher salaries and wages.

So even if there is a bubble and there could be a bubble, what happens after the bubble will probably be continued growth at a higher rate than average.

You know, the average economy grows at say, 2% a year, 1% a year, and tech grows at 10% a year.

So even if a bubble happens, it may happen.

And we start a little lower.

You'll have a much faster increase from wherever that bottom is.

So, you know, a bubble could absolutely happen.

And, we need to think about that.

No, about that.

But I don't think that's a reason not to claim or want tech in our economy.

And when you look at Ohio's economy, one of the things we put out is the, competitiveness handbook, which looks at 54 different charts.

We actually even though we have a lot of data centers, we do not have a lot of tech in our economy as a percentage of our economy.

Technology is in the bottom half.

In fact, I think we're like 30th.

So there's more we can and need to do, to diversify our economy.

And that includes tech.

But it also includes, you know, pharmaceuticals.

We've seen a big influx of pharmaceutical jobs and includes defense.

We've seen some big announcements with Anduril and others.

So there's more we need to do to diversify Ohio's economy.

That's one of the things we don't do as well as some other states.

And that is 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.

Stay in the know by registering for Ohio State House alerts through this QR code, or by texting state news to this number.

You can also hear more from us on our podcast.

The Ohio State House scoop every Monday morning.

And please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, right, Morse and Arthur LLP.

Puerto Rico is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Puerto right.com.

Puerto right inspired every day.

And from 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 O-H e.org.