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Early voting for the sole issue on the August eight special election ballot is underway and there's increasing trouble for low income Ohioans.

All this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

The first day of early voting was a big one for a statewide special election in August that wasn't even on the calendar until May.

Voters lined up at the Franklin County Board of Elections Early Voting Center in Columbus, unusual for a summertime vote.

The only question on the ballot is issue one, a constitutional amendment which would raise the voter approval threshold for future amendments from a simple majority to 60%.

It would also increase the required signatures from counties from 44 now to all 88 and would eliminate the ten day period in which citizens and groups can gather more signatures if they fall short of the valid number needed.

Both sides have been working to boost turnout among their supporters.

The pro issue one side.

In an event last weekend at the Ohio Republican Party's headquarters in Columbus and the anti issue one groups in several events last weekend.

At a press conference on Tuesday in the parking lot of the early voting center in Columbus, by the way, campaigns for any candidate or issue are allowed at those centers and at polling places.

But they have to be 100 feet away from the entrance and ten feet away from voters in line past that.

There's been a bit of a dispute over what forms people who want to vote from home can use to request their absentee ballots.

Political parties and issues groups have long mailed out absentee ballot applications to encourage early voting.

But the law that requires voters to show photo ID also has a change for absentee ballot applications, said Secretary of State Frank LaRose last weekend.

Anybody can give out a form.

Anybody can print out a form as long as it's the right one.

This is a change in the General Assembly made honestly when we were advocating for some important changes, in my opinion, like photo I.D., establishing days and hours and some of those other things.

This is something that I didn't ask for, but the legislature chose to include and again, the legislative branch on the executive branch will carry out what they write.

They put in there a provision that said you can only use this specific prescribed form from the secretary of state's office.

Laurel was cited as an example, a form from before the passage of the law that was printed in the Cleveland Jewish News last month.

He said about 30 application pins using that form came in and were rejected.

So we've instructed that Board of Elections to contact and personally contact each one of those voters so that they could fill out the correct four, mailed them the correct form, all that kind of thing.

And so that's just one of the changes that was in there.

It's got to be the prescribed form from the secretary of state's office.

But this week, the pro issue one group, Protect Our Constitution, sent out mailers also featuring an outdated form.

Lareau supports issue one along with most Republican officeholders.

On Tuesday evening, LaRose, his office, said in an email that previous absentee application forms would be accepted as long as they include valid ID as required in the new law, either a driver's license or state ID number.

The last four digits of a Social Security number or a copy of the voter's photo ID.

Voting rights groups, which are opposed to issue one, say they're pleased that older application forms will be accepted, but they have questions.

I think the people of Ohio deserve some clarity as to why those forms were rejected, why the pro issue one forms were accepted.

What was the difference or what was the cause for that discrepancy?

In order to eliminate any perception of, frankly, selective enforcement of Ohio's voting laws.

Ohioans turning in absentee ballots in person must return them to their County Board of Elections by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day, August 8th.

Mail in ballots must be postmarked by August 7th and arrive by August 12th.

The last day voters can cast ballots in person at their county's early voting center is August 6th, the weekend before the election.

August 5th through sixth is the only weekend of early in-person voting this election.

The new two year state budget includes a $100 million state tax credit for low income housing, income tax deductions for savings accounts for home ownership, and a tax credit to build more single family, affordable housing.

But the budget wasn't all good news for advocates for people experiencing homelessness and low income Ohioans struggling with housing costs.

And a report out this week says those numbers are growing.

Amy Riegel is the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

Today, a report came out from the Ohio Finance Agency, or OFA, and it is their annual needs assessment for housing in the state of Ohio.

And what it shows is that there are more individuals who are paying more than 50% of their income on household cost, and that's just rent and utilities, not counting all the other things that you have to spend money for in your home.

And so that number between renters, 700,000 are paying more than 50%.

And then if you add in homeowners, it's over a million individuals who are paying more than 50% of their income on rent.

So that number is one that is definitely not headed in the right direction.

The other point is that between the year 2020 and 2021, we lost 15,000 units of affordable housing.

And so when we think about the new tools that we'll talk about that came in with the budget, what that shows is even with those new tools, if we are losing 15,000 units a year, we're not even going to be able to keep up with what is being lost.

The report also says that rent is now higher in any year on record other than 2021, even when adjusted, even when adjusted for inflation.

Let's talk about the lack of units that are available for these folks.

I mean, the budget has a tax credit that is expected to produce around 4000 affordable rental units.

That's a little bit short, more than a little bit short.

Yes.

So that is the game that we're trying to play right now and trying to play catch up on.

So with those loss of units in the state of Ohio, we have a deficit of 270,000 units of affordable housing for just individuals who are extremely low income.

And so we need to build more housing, We need more units.

It's not just about how fast rent is rising is also about what is available when you go look online to find a place to live.

And the report also says 25% of renters are spending at least half their income on housing.

So you've got a huge number of people who are spending far more than the recommended amount that people should be putting toward housing.

But let's talk a little bit more about the budget.

There is this $100 million state tax credit program for low income housing.

What will that do?

And is that going to be enough?

It is an excellent step forward for the state of Ohio.

So the state of Ohio joining about one of 24 other states that have a state housing tax credit.

So it does move them in the right direction of tools in place to help build affordable housing.

The the proposal that was passed was for $100 million, which sounds like a lot of money.

And it is, but that will only create about 4000 units of housing.

And there was a proposal by the House for $500 million and that had some support and definitely was able to move forward in the House.

We're hoping that maybe this initial tax rate is just a baby step and we can continue to show how successful it can be and then build it as we go.

There are also income tax deductions in the budget for savings accounts for homeownership.

Does that help?

It does.

So housing is an ecosystem.

And if at any point one part of the ecosystem isn't functioning to its highest, then the whole system gets thrown off.

So part of what we're seeing in the rental market is that more people are entering because they can't move into homeownership.

So if we can create that pathway, smooth that pathway into homeownership for more individuals, that will definitely help the rental market.

Also, the budget does some things that you don't like, though it cuts 81% of the $16 million that goes to a program that provides housing assistance for pregnant women and families.

Aren't there other programs that help that specific population, those people?

Yes.

This funding, though, was specifically for a program called Healthy Beginnings At Home, was which is actually a research project.

So not only is it providing the assistance, but it's collecting a lot of data, doing high fidelity research around the impact on that rental assistance in improving birth outcomes.

And so it is a national model, first of its kind, to be doing this work.

And what it would do is to create a model for how we could blend and breed state and federal funding to better be able to address housing needs across the state, especially for pregnant women.

So reducing that means that the research gets pretty much stopped because we really need the whole funding to be able to move the research forward.

There was a last minute amendment that would have abolished the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, which is where this initial report we started talking about came from that was removed.

What would that have done if that had gone forward?

They would have consolidated work within housing to a new office, the Office of Housing Transformation.

And it would have reported under the Ohio Department of Development offer as we know it today, would have been abolished.

And so that would have taken many of the responsibilities of offer and put them under the direction of political elected officials across the state, including the Treasurer, the auditor, the governor, some to reporting to the Senate, President and the Speaker of the House.

There were a lot of different people involved and it was very last minute.

It was not something that it had public hearings or had had public input.

And so though there were threads of the idea that could have shown promise, this kind of quick dark of night way of getting it into the budget was not the best approach into addressing such a large consolidation of work, of impact and of possibility across the state.

Is the real solution to a lot of these problems outside the housing area in terms of trying to get more people into better paying jobs, getting them more training.

I mean, is that a part of this and what can be done about that if if it is so?

The work of Jobs, Ohio has been tremendous over the last few years.

And now what we see is that they have been able to create more jobs in Ohio than we currently have people to fill them.

And so as we think about Intel and Honda and Abbott all expanding their operations in the state of Ohio, what we know is we need housing in places where it doesn't exist today because those are oftentimes in more rul or suburban areas.

We need different types of housing and we're going to need more people to come to the state to fill those jobs.

And so we're now at that tipping point of there's going to be jobs that are being created.

But jobs have to have somewhere to sleep at night.

And we need to create those places today.

And what about the people who are here, though, that are not getting those jobs who are working in jobs and working lower income jobs?

Is there a solution here that involves helping those people get more money, essentially?

Yes, we do need to think about how we close this gap, because if you think about any of those jobs that are out there, the ten most common jobs in the state of Ohio do not pay enough for a person are eight of them do not pay enough for a person to afford a modest two bedroom apartment.

But if you looked at that list, there's not one of those jobs that you would say people shouldn't be filling.

And so we have to figure out a way for wages to catch up or for there to be some type of stop gap in between that helps people balance their wages and their costs so that they can live and thrive within our communities.

And the percentage of Ohioans in poverty rose for the first time in a decade, according to a report out this week.

The 30th annual State of Poverty Report says in 2021, 13.4% of Ohioans were in poverty, up from 12.7%.

And many low income Ohioans were affected when housing, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP benefits offered during the pandemic stopped.

The report was prepared for the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, which work with low income people to get them to self-sufficiency.

AC.

It's headed by Phil Cole, who has thoughts on what the definition of being in poverty really means.

You know, there are so many ways to look at poverty.

It's a federal definition, federal poverty guidelines, which are very, very flawed, that are the ones used by most people.

You know, we like to use the self-sufficiency standard, which is the income you need to get by without private or public help.

And then there are other there are supplemental systems, that kind of thing.

But but the the most important one that people use is federal poverty guidelines, which that says that sets the eligibility standard for most federal programs.

We just we just go with self-sufficiency standard because we just think that's the one that really tells you the truth.

Tell me a little bit more about that.

What does that actually mean?

And can you put some is there a dollar figure you can put on that?

Yes or no?

In Ohio, we have a self-sufficiency standard.

You can find it on our website at a wacky dot org.

But we we do it by seven different family sizes.

You.

Yeah.

And we do it based on cost of living for different for different things that are different necessities.

And we also do with tax rates and those kind of things for every county in Ohio.

So yeah, we could do it, we could do a number, but there are hundreds of them because we say this is what it is.

If you live in Cleveland, this is what it is.

If you live in Gloucester.

And there are different factors that come into play here, you look at costs for health care and food and that sort of thing.

Health care, food, housing.

What tax rate would you pay and do you get tax credits would count that back in as a plus.

You know, what's the cost of child care?

And the amazing thing is, no matter where you go in Ohio, if you have children, the highest cost that you will pay will be child care.

People don't understand that.

We try and tell people, especially young people, do you have to understand that children are great, but they cost you a lot of money.

You know, some safety net changes from the pandemic have ended, such as boosts in SNAP or food stamp benefits.

The suspension of work requirements for Medicaid is are those why the poverty level went up or have you not seen the effect of those changes?

We're just seeing the effects of those changes now.

And they are the things that scare me.

I talked a little bit earlier today about how we're having the Ohio University evaluate the program that we ran on rent assistance as to look at how our department administered it and how we ran it.

And they did.

We will have the findings out later this summer.

But that's what the preliminary findings are.

One thing that shocked me was that they did surveys of our customers and one of them was so scared of losing rent assistance because she has to recover from other other things caused by the pandemic that she said she would consider suicide over homelessness.

And we have to remember the very human factors that are to play the record that are affected by home, by COVID.

And this it scares me.

Well, we we tend to get caught up in these temporary programs that we had for COVID, and we see them as dollars and we say, okay, the president declared COVID to be over, so covid's over and everybody go back to normal.

Well, there is no normal anymore.

The normal of 2019 is not the normal of 2023, and many people have not been able to cover it, cover the cost or cover the losses they had from the loss of jobs.

And those kind of things.

You cite three areas of focus in this report.

I want to ask you about each and how they affect poverty.

Let's start with pandemic learning loss.

How does that affect people in poverty?

Well, first, the problem problem that we saw first was when the governor had to close the schools and he did.

It was the right thing to do.

And he worked as hard as he could to get them open as fast they could.

But all the time that they were closed, students were supposed to work remotely.

Of course, the problem was poor students and many students just in Appalachia, because the geography didn't have computers at home and they could not link to the Internet because because of the geography of Appalachia.

And also that same problem in.

Rural Ohio.

Other parts of rural Ohio, and then, of course, urban urban Ohio was very expensive by but so students were affected by the fact they didn't have computers.

In fact, they didn't have Internet.

They're supposed to work remotely, but they didn't have the tools.

So that was part of it.

Another part was schools provide free meals.

Those meals were gone.

If the schools are closed, they were doing some places.

We worked very closely with Children's Hunger Alliance to try and replace as many of those meals as possible.

But we didn't have the resources.

We could do all of what we did.

We did a lot.

So and there is a connection between poverty rates and schools.

I mean, there are schools that have are in wealthier neighborhoods tend to have better test scores and that sort of thing.

There's an economically disadvantaged thing about this.

Oh, yeah, we saw the test scores went down about 13% in urban, urban, high poverty urban areas and about 3% in the suburbs.

The suburbs tend to have people who are more highly educated and they tend to be wealthier.

So they have the computers, they have the broadband.

And it's a it's a real important item to them.

So one of the other areas of focus in this report was mental health.

How does that affect people in poverty, mental health?

You know, it's very difficult emotionally to be poor because you're fighting to get by.

You're always under stress.

And then when you lose your job because of COVID, that makes it a whole lot worse.

And if you if you need counseling, mental health counseling, a quarter of Ohio's counties don't have a mental health provider for that's certified registered, registered with the Medicaid.

And so it's hard.

And then when you have the Transportation Department talking about and if you are one of those rural counties that doesn't have a counselor for it, you've got to travel someplace else.

But if you have the transportation, money can't get there.

So these things just compound and they make matters a whole lot worse.

The stress got a lot worse for people in poverty and the help was farther away.

And on that note, transportation, that's another area of focus.

Why?

How does that affect people in poverty?

You know, they have to definitely get to the job.

We don't have good public transportation.

We talked about that earlier today.

We're the average state per capita, spends $60 a person of resources and it's like six zero per person.

Ohio spend six, basically nothing.

So there's not good public transportation, especially if you live in rural areas.

A large percentage of people in the state live in one county but work in another.

And if you don't have a car, you're in trouble.

Cars are expensive, car repairs are expensive.

If you're poor, it's harder to afford.

Those things Are people poor because of the choices that they make?

Because that's quite often what we hear is that if people make better choices, they would not be in poverty.

Sometimes that's true.

I would say it's more that society makes bad choices.

We're not funding the schools in the draft decision said we were not funding the Constitution was 30 years ago.

There was this in this budget.

They made some progress.

There's a real progress towards funding and probably will have an attorney generation mind.

Like I said, we haven't funded public public transportation to fund public transportation.

Those are society decisions.

You know, we need to encourage more people to get into mental health careers and then give them incentives to go into these areas where they're needed.

You know, we talk about we always want to get people into this in these jobs that are in high demand, mental health care in rural areas is in high demand.

Let's do something about that.

You mentioned that there is funding in this budget.

In fact, the budget went back to the House funding, which was half a billion dollars more than the Senate's funding for traditional K through 12 public schools.

Is there anything else in the budget that you really feel will help people in poverty?

Oh yeah.

There's the $793 million they put in for broadband.

That's going to be a big deal.

That's really going to help students, especially I wish they had more for public transportation, but I say that every year.

So, yeah.

When you start talking about the things that could be done to help people in poverty, you've said that there are societal choices that are being made that help keep people in poverty.

Are you fighting against an attitude that says people need to make better choices rather than we need to pay for this stuff?

Yes.

Yes, we are.

But I think it's not that hard to figure out.

If you look at the fact that we don't have public transportation, we don't have good mental health care, we don't have affordable housing, our health care is through the roof.

We spend I think we're fourth or sixth in Medicaid funding now.

We need we need to take a real looks at these issues.

You know, we need better public policy and poverty.

In your report, you describe it as not just it can be episodic, it can be occasional, it can be chronic, it can be even generational.

I mean, poverty has a lot of different definitions, so to speak.

Right?

Episodic poverty, what we're seeing a lot more of now, that's I mean, there's let me borrow your audience with a couple of definitions.

Chronic poverty is it you're in poverty for two years.

During 24 month period.

You're in poverty for 21, 24 month period.

We call it otherwise known as two years.

Episodic poverty is two months.

I like 20 for two consecutive months, a 24 month period.

We've seen a lot of episodic poverty because of COVID as people going in and out of poverty to get a job, you know, and they also they lose a benefit for something else or or they're able to pay their rent because of rent assistance.

The rent assistance disappears as it's very we have a very inconsistent system that causes episodic poverty.

Chronic poverty is a lot of times it's a generational stuff.

It's people who just can't get going.

And there's some debate about is that personal?

Is personal decisions or societal decisions?

I said some of both, but I tend to lean towards more towards society.

And if people are in episodic poverty more often, will they end up in chronic poverty?

Or can things turn around and they can end up out of poverty either?

We really hope that a turn around, that we hope that they come to community action and let us help them find out what the problem is and what do they really need.

You know, we don't want to just say, okay, we'll give you some you you should be go to the Department of Job, Family Services to get food stamps.

We need to say what's why are you here?

What is it?

Do you need child care?

If we help you get that?

Do you need a job?

We help you get training.

We have to find those answers.

Look for the real solutions for this episodic poverty.

The new state budget caps subsidized child care at 145% of the federal poverty level, which is about $35,000 a year for a family of three.

And a provision from the Senate budget was removed that would have required a photo on SNAP cards.

Supporters have long said it's a fraud fighting effort for food stamps, but advocates have said it would cost the state more to administer than it would save and would be a serious problem for families using those benefits.

And that's it for this week.

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 dot org and 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.