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The 2022 election takes shape as candidates file for statewide offices.

Medical professionals have struggled with COVID since the start, including MTC and more details about the Intel project and one of the leading negotiators for the state.

All this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler.

This week brought a parade of candidates through the Secretary of State's Office to file their paperwork by the deadline on Wednesday.

Among those who showed up in person or justice Jennifer Brunner, an appeals judges Terri Jamieson and Marilyn Zayas, all Democrats running for the Ohio Supreme Court and incumbent Republican justices Pat Fisher, Sharon Kennedy and Pat DeWine.

Also, Republican Auditor Keith favor US Senate Democratic candidates Tim Ryan and Morgan Harper, and Republicans Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno, who dropped out of the race the next day and said he back whoever former President Trump endorses.

Democratic candidates for Governor John Cranley and Nan Whaley showed up.

The only Republican gubernatorial candidate who filed in person was Joe Blystone, and far right conservative former state representatives Ron Hood and Candice Keller have joined that race.

Hood, Jim Renacci and Blystone have all spread.

COVID and vaccine disinformation are opposed to incumbent Governor Mike DeWine's COVID policies and are openly supportive of former President Trump so they could end up splitting the anti DeWine votes in the May gubernatorial primary.

Still, no decision from the Ohio Supreme Court on newly drawn State House and Senate maps candidates who are expected to file for the district they want to run in.

But a law signed last Friday gives them some flexibility when or if the maps change.

COVID hospitalizations in Ohio keep falling this week, going under 4000.

The lowest number since early December, but reported death totals are still high.

In the last six months, over 13,000 people in Ohio have reported to have died of COVID, including more than 4000 just this year.

Doctors and nurses are not the only medical professionals who have felt the stress of COVID.

Emergency medical technicians or EMTs are suffering with it, too.

Staffing shortages at Ohio's ground and air ambulance companies are causing those who are left to make difficult choices.

Statehouse correspondent Joe Ingles talked to a privately run patient transportation service about that.

But.

Like other health professionals, EMT have been struggling with long hours and an increase in patients to transport because of COVID.

And of course, being exposed to the virus from the very beginning.

But while hospitals have raised pay to attract and keep staff and have hired expensive traveling medical professionals, private ambulance companies haven't been able to do that because their rates are set by government and private contracts.

Ken Truax works at Superior Ambulance, a private company that does patient transport in five states, including Ohio.

It's tough.

It's tough to deal with, so we do our best to, you know, to thank them and show appreciation.

But.

They're there in the building for 20 minutes in the morning, and they're not running calls the entire shift because there's not enough people they get, they're dealing with stressed out nurses and doctors because they're having the same problem.

And that's just not easy, it's not that's not something that you want to do day in and day out, so you go to Best Buy and get a job that pays equal.

You go to McDonald's, we go to Thorntons.

I mean, these are places that are equal to or higher than an EMT is making starting out close to what paramedics are making.

And then the hospitals now in doctor's offices are getting you finding new ways to compete with us and then we'll hire paramedics.

And EMT is to do the jobs that nurses and nurse assistants have done.

So they go there, it's no a safe office space.

They're not worry about the road or cold conditions or snow.

And life is a little smoother for them.

Keeping the system running smoothly is Raymond Jenkins job, and he says it's hard to do that.

So we've definitely seen an increase in COVID related patients just because of the isolation precautions that come with it if they're going home and a family member can't get them.

That now falls on our laps.

So those runs have gone up.

We're also seeing our workload from a traditional sense.

You know, the the injuries, the infections, the things like that that have always been around.

So it's just an increase.

We're seeing more and more runs every day.

The runs are taking longer because there is a Dickon aspect.

As far as my job goes, that kind of affects my planning because I kind of plan where the trucks go and when they're going to be there and what time and priorities.

So it's just it's created an increased workload on kind of everybody.

Hospitals and nursing homes are struggling to handle the huge influx of patients.

Sometimes hospitals go on what's known as emergency bypass, notifying EMT that they can't take anymore.

So when we're transporting a patient that's a critical patient to a facility that we expect is only five minutes away, seven minutes away, and they're on bypass and we immediately have to divert and they won't accept that patient and we have to go to another hospital system that's farther away.

Possibly it might not have the needs that actually go to that patient.

But we have to get that critical patient to the closest facility.

Most ERS can handle just about everything, but they have that.

Then that patient will have to be transferred again to the appropriate neurological care or cardiac care at that point, wherever in the system that they need to go.

And it just delays that patient care and requires another transfer and it just backlogs everything.

Superiores Medical Director Dr. Ryan Councilor says it's important to get patients transferred out when they no longer need medical care.

But he says that's difficult sometimes.

So nursing home accepts the patient, you then have to call the ambulance required to get the patient out of that bed and into the nursing home.

If there's a shortage of the private ambulance system, that patient doesn't move.

And if that patient doesn't move from a hospital bed, no one else can take that hospital bed.

And every morning there is a weight of patients, whether it's surgical patients that after surgery are going to be admitted for post-surgical care, whether that's new ED patients that are being admitted or patients being admitted directly from primary care offices that go to hospital beds, all those patients are waiting for their resource and their resources a medical bed.

And that resource depends on an EMT to get that patient out of that bed to home, a nursing home or wherever they need to go.

So every hour that you lose, you're losing a patient, a chance to move other patients.

So it really slows down the whole system.

And throughout the pandemic, the usual calls still come in, such as for heart attacks, car crashes and drug overdoses.

Unlike hospital and Public Safety Forces, private ambulance companies didn't get CARES Act funding, and they did not receive pandemic assistance.

The problem is exacerbated because Ohio's Medicaid reimbursement rates are low and the bottom 15% of the nation's rates.

Joe Ingles Statehouse News Bureau, the 20 billion dollar intel project headed for Lincoln County, is firing up some people in Ohio, but there are still lots of questions about it, specifically the state's investment in it.

Ohio will spend nearly $2 billion to bring intel here, including $600 million in cash grants, $691 million for infrastructure like roads, water and sewer, and $650 million in a job creation tax credit.

The state's nonprofit job development company, Jobs Ohio, plans to give Intel $150 million in cash grants, but won't give more details until final agreements are executed.

Lieutenant Governor John Houston was the point person for the state on the Intel deal.

I asked him about that project and all the implications of it, starting with what it means for Ohio without all the hype.

I believe it's an opportunity to build a whole new industry sector for Ohio that will have a ripple effect that will benefit everybody in every county in the state.

Intel Look, we have to reassure the global supply chain of semiconductors.

These are semiconductors are in everything we use, the lights we have here, the electric grid, our phones, everything we need, semiconductors, our cars.

And right now, America doesn't make enough of them to supply our national defense interests and our economic interests, and we need to make semiconductors in America.

And if the chips act passes at the federal level, I think you will see this intel facility grow to be and not exaggerating the largest, most advanced semiconductor production.

Facility on the planet.

Not my words.

The CEO of Intel.

That's what they want to do with this.

And if that happens, you're going to see Ohio become a magnet for everybody in that industry.

The brightest minds in the world will want to be at the top facility.

You will see jobs from construction jobs to tech.

Jobs can grow and blossom.

The supply chain will follow it to Ohio.

There won't be enough opportunity in central Ohio and in terms of locations and workforce, so they'll have to locate in outlying areas across the state and businesses that are already here.

140 of them will do business or are already in contract relationships with Intel, and they will see more and more come their way.

I was just going to ask you, there are people in Cleveland and Cincinnati saying, Hey, central Ohio already has a good economy.

Why?

Why bring it here?

Why not bring it to a part of the state like southeast Ohio, Cincinnati, Cleveland that really could use a little bit of a boost, right?

A great question.

And there's an easy answer, because that's what Intel picked.

We we offered three jobs Ohio.

Every region in the state, from Ready Cincinnati to Team Neo and Northeast Ohio, the opportunity to put sites together to accommodate the Intel request.

Central Ohio was the only part of the state who could assemble all that acreage near a workforce near highway transportation.

They were the only one that could do it.

We were.

That was the only site in Ohio that qualified for what Intel was, was searching for.

And so that's why that site was ultimately chosen by Intel.

It's very complicated that they you couldn't be near a railroad track.

You couldn't be near a highway because they can't have any vibration in these facilities because they're they're building chips that are they're going to put transistors 1000 wide on something the width of your hair.

This is the kind of preciseness that's involved.

And so the specifications are very critical.

There already seems to have been an impact on colleges and universities.

They'll be key in training the workforce because this is a high tech workforce.

I believe you said the average salary is going to be about $135,000 a year.

That's exactly right.

They were very interested in whether or not we had the engineering school capacity, the community college capacity, the the career center capacity at the high school level to provide the specialized talent that they need.

And we do and we have a we have a great network of colleges and universities.

But I also believe that this will be a magnet for people to move here from out of state as well who have those skills.

I want to add this to not all economic development projects are the same.

This is not a cryptocurrency company.

This is not a social media company.

This this is not an app where you could do these jobs from anywhere in the world when you're making semiconductors.

You have to secure the $20 billion per fab or two fab unit that they're building.

That's that invested here.

The people have to physically be here.

So these are jobs that will be in Ohio, not a company that locates here that will employ thousands of people anywhere.

It's thousands of people employed here.

Let me talk about some of the concerns that some people have raised about this project, and some people are going to need some convincing, some on some of these things.

For instance, there are questions about what this will do the housing market in central Ohio right now.

There has already been some big money land transactions in the Lincoln County area where this is going to be built.

Realtor.com says Columbus is already like the fifth hottest market in the country.

The average the typical home value in New Albany is $516,000.

Those are scary statistics to people who want to buy a home, but say it's already out of reach for them now and potentially could get worse.

Well, this is going to create an opportunity throughout central Ohio, not just to New Albany.

We have a great highway system and people are going to be able to get there from lots of different places.

Look, I know Ohio has an experienced robust growth in a long time.

So this is something that we'll have to get used to that that we actually have more jobs and a growing economy that looks like a lot of other places that we've envied for the first, oh, so many years and to think that that's coming to Ohio.

Yeah, for some people, I know that that is a little bit of a shock, but it's better than the alternative because I lived in a place like that.

I lived in a place where my dad lost his factory job along with my aunts and uncles.

In a town where you lose jobs, you lose employers, you have the opposite problem.

You can't sell your house.

Nobody wants to buy it.

There's no place to go to work.

And so from an economic development point of view, you've got to keep growing to where the future is.

Understand, I use this example.

We're pouring a lot of water in the top of the bucket, meaning we got a lot of jobs coming to Ohio from a lot of other places, not just Intel.

We've had 30 companies move operations from the coasts to Ohio over the last two years.

So we're growing that sector of the economy, the tech sector, the high tech manufacturing sector.

But.

We're going to be leaking out of the bottom two every time a car with a battery pack in a motor is bill.

That's one less engine and transmission that we build.

We build those things in Ohio.

So they're going to be some industries due to technology that are going to be exiting the state ever so slowly.

And that's why you got to build the next thing you've got.

You've got to be, as Wayne Gretzky said, where the puck is going, not where it is because you've got to think ahead and this is about the future of Ohio's economy.

Semiconductors, for as long as semiconductors are going to be needed, which is for our foreseeable future and everything we do, this is going to be the Premiere facility on the planet to do it.

And that's the future of Ohio.

It's built around these kinds of great investments.

Something that is this large, as you're saying, is going to have an economic and environmental impact, of course.

A study from Stanford said a typical computer chip manufacturing plant will use 20 million gallons of water, which ultimately must be disposed of his waste.

Chips makers also use large amounts of energy, sometimes toxic chemicals, all of which harm the environment.

So was this a concern during the talks and how do you mitigate some of this stuff?

Well, Intel is one of the most environmentally responsible companies in the world.

That's why we're building the water recycling plant.

When we talk about some of the incentives the state put in, it's to build infrastructure that will remain here so that we can recycle that water so that the place is environmentally friendly.

They they have goals as a company to be 100% on renewable energy, I believe by the end, by 2030, and they're going to.

Their goal is also to be 95% waste free in terms of their their footprint on on products that they use.

So this is a very responsible company who has been a good neighbor in places that are Oregon, Arizona, other places like that where they have operations in the country that have been very responsible.

And it was part of the conversation.

They gave us those reassurances.

But the reputation of the company itself is important.

This is an American company.

A lot of times when we've had these big opportunities in the past, they've been companies that weren't American companies.

This is a responsible company that will we will be proud to have been here in Ohio.

Intel says as you just mentioned, the factory will be entirely carbon neutral by 2030.

The state only gets about 3% of its electricity from renewable resources right now, like wind and solar.

Most of the energy the electrical energy in the state comes from coal and natural gas.

So how do how does Intel get there to that carbon neutral point when the state is so balanced in the way you, you buy credits there?

We can't.

This is why we've been in favor of of an all of the above strategy because you can't produce enough solar and wind necessarily in Ohio right now and you won't be able to and in the near future.

But what companies are doing, like Intel, is they're buying this on the market.

I mean, look, when an electron enters the the the electric grid, you don't know whether it came from a windmill or a coal fired power plant.

You have to, but you know what's going on and then what's going on?

The grid and Intel will purchase the credits for renewable energy, often as they purchase their energy.

They have worked on this with companies like AEP.

This is this was an important part of that early conversation to make sure they could do that and they'll be able to do so.

Any chance that this could revive the debate in the Legislature about renewable energy and requirements on electric utilities to have a certain percentage of their power come from renewable sources?

Look, the market, the market is going to drive that as companies like Intel are demanding create a demand, then somebody will go out and build the supply.

That's how markets work.

And right now, there aren't enough companies in Ohio who are saying, I want to have complete renewable energy in my portfolio.

As Intel says it does, then you'll see people go out and build that capacity.

So a mandate or a standard wouldn't be necessary.

A mandate is a is a good thing to start an industry, but it's not.

But ultimately, you have to have people that want to buy that power, that want to pay the premium that cost that it takes to get that power.

And if Intel wants to do that, then I imagine that there are going to be people who are going to be building these facilities for them to to draw their power from the state is invested more than $1,000,000,000 in the project.

You've said for every six months the state invested, intel invested.

Is that a is that going to pay off, though over time in terms of if this is a 20 billion dollar facility and stays that way?

That seems like a big investment for the state.

Yeah, we'll get $2.8 billion in growth in our GDP every year, just from phase one of this.

So it's going to pay back in a very, very short period of time in terms, of course, because you have 3000 direct jobs that pay 135.

Thousand dollars a year, plus 7000 construction jobs, plus 10,000 downstream jobs.

And every time they build out a new phase that will replicate itself, it will be the same thing in phase two.

Same thing in phase three, same thing in phase four.

Over time, it will add so much growth to our GDP in the state that it will pay back I multiple on multiple occasions it will pay back.

I will add that the jobs that they have, though, are two and a half times the median income of a family of four.

This is going to lift the standard of living for everyone across the state of Ohio.

So this isn't necessarily I know there's worry that this is this money, this billion dollars that has been going, it's going to go to Intel is being taken away from some other part of the budget.

No, but but understand the the money is being is going to build things here.

So the $1.2 billion, it's going to build roads, OK, it's going to build a water treatment facility to address the the environmental questions you asked earlier in the conversation.

It's going to build this fabric.

It's going to help partially with the construction.

These fabrication facilities, meaning you can't leave, these things are going to be here and they're going to continue to return on that investment for longer than our lifetime.

Probably, Karen.

So this is this is going to be a huge return on investment.

I've been working off and on an economic development my whole life.

These opportunities never come our way.

I've never been part of even having a chance at a facility like this.

And the fact that we not only had a chance but we won is just an amazing, amazing thing for Ohio in looking at some of the articles that were written in other states about states that didn't win.

one article that I read was from Oregon saying Ohio won because you worked harder for it.

You wanted it more, I guess.

Is it?

Is this?

Is there anything that Intel wanted that the state refused to fulfill any of the many things?

And that was really how we built trust with them.

We told them what we could do and we told them what we could not do.

And in many cases, we did say no to them and things that they had asked for.

But we.

But when the answer was, maybe it was maybe and we we worked through it.

They had some big requests.

You could we handle their water demands would be we'd be willing to invest in water recycling.

And the answer to that was yes.

And so it was things like that, but we built a trust with them.

Honestly, I mean, I think in a lot of other states, they put it just didn't go as well in the conversation as it did with Ohio.

I promised them the governor did, too.

We're a no drama state.

People in Ohio just want good jobs.

They want to work hard, they want to take care of their families and and they want some economic security.

And we like to make things.

We like to build things.

We have a rich history of doing that and the idea that we will build probably the most important thing for the future of our economy right here in Ohio and that we will lead the globe in doing so.

We knew how important that was and we were going to do everything we could to win within reason.

Now this isn't drama, but maybe it was a little bit dramatic in that you and Governor Mike DeWine filed a blockbuster campaign report yesterday.

Campaign finance report showing more than $9 million in the bank, the largest amount ever for a governor, an incumbent governor seeking reelection at this point in the campaign.

There are still some people in the Republican Party who dispute the state's COVID response.

You also have some Democrats who say the governor didn't go far enough.

The two Republicans running against the governor say that he went too far.

Does this opportunity with intel give you a chance to change the conversation from what government did and was doing in the COVID situation and into what government can do later?

Well, we always said during this that we were trying to balance the lives and livelihoods conversation respecting, particularly until we got a vaccine, that health threats but then never taken our eye off the economy.

What what you now know is that starting in March of last year, when everybody was talking about the vaccine, we were working on Intel.

We were working on trying to drive a great economic outcome.

We have we have record or we have retracted 30 companies from the coast to come to Ohio because we showed them how reasonable people do things, how to continue to focus on on the economy and also come up with a rational response to a pandemic.

And that was very, very valuable in a lot of the conversations we had.

I think people view Ohio as a pretty thoughtful Midwestern state that that they want to locate their businesses in that they want to grow in.

And I think that the Intel project shows everybody we never took our eye off the ball.

On what was most important for Ohio, and that's the economy and jobs, and that's exactly what we did.

I got to ask, are you going to be seeking the endorsement from former President Trump?

I visited with the president a few weeks ago.

We had a great conversation.

I explained to him that we were going to be successful and he was very encouraging.

But we didn't ask for anybody's endorsement outside of the state of Ohio.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our web site at state news talk and you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

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

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Med Mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP , now with eight locations across the country.

Porter Wright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OHEA.org.