Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutuel, 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 Ohio's redistricting saga continues even as preparations are being made for the August 2nd primary for legislative races with inflation and other factors causing high rent, gas and food prices.

Ohio's food banks report a lot of low income Ohioans are struggling to get enough to eat.

And scientists at Ohio State University say they can tell your political preferences just by looking at a scan of your brain.

All of this and more this week on the state of Ohio.

And welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Joe Ingles sitting in for Karen Kasler.

Who's on vacation this week.

A coalition of groups that represent Ohio workers and low income residents has kicked off a campaign to promote a progressive agenda in the Buckeye State.

All in four, Ohio pulls together groups like Policy Matters Ohio that will focus on getting a fairer tax code.

Keesha Barrett Fahey says since 2005 lawmakers have given the wealthiest Ohioans a big tax break since 2005 corporate backed politicians have embraced tax policies that have given the richest 1% of Ohio households with average annual incomes about $1.5 million a year.

An average annual tax cut of nearly $51,000 enough to buy a new luxury car every single year while all those tax cuts drain about $8 billion from our communities per year.

Resources that could help working families afford childcare improve health outcomes for new moms or for babies.

Educate our kids.

Sheri Abramsky, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, says lawmakers need to start listening to teachers We need the legislature to stop feeding the culture wars and trust educational professionals to do the jobs for which they have been trained.

And Pastor Derek Holmes of the Circleville Second Baptist Church says the group will take its message to voters.

In the midst of all of this injustice, in the midst of all of this, on righteousness, in the midst of all of this corruption.

We do not have to settle for it.

Right.

The power is always with the people The coalition intends to hold voter registration efforts throughout Ohio to engage more people to be part of the political process.

Former Ohio Senate President Larry Abbott's portrait was unveiled this week at the State House.

The artist who painted the portrait, Paul Wise, might be better known for the work he did on another piece.

I used to be a professional piano player, and just by sheer association with a piano company in New York, Steinway and Sons, I was able to meet Billy Joel and paint his portrait on commission that now hangs in the Steinway Sons collection in New York City.

Abbott's portrait which is funded by private donations, will hang in the hallway with those of other former Senate leaders.

His portrait includes the gavel that he opened the session with when he took over in 2017 and ended in 2020 just before the height of the pandemic.

But above says he actually had many gavels during his time as Senate president.

I actually had a few hundred smaller ones made up that we use for individual bills.

But I but I began and finished every session with the same one that I started my term with.

They were all made out of wood from Ohio, all made in Homes County in the 22nd district.

A retired Cleveland electrician Ann was sworn in to take over the Senate seat vacated by Sandra Williams.

Williams was Term-limited and would have to leave her post in seven months.

But resigned last week to take a job in the private sector.

Dale Martin's tenure in this seat will end with this General Assembly because the new legislative redistricting maps reconstituted the district.

Last week, the Ohio House passed a resolution calling on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom to add Canada to a religious freedom watch list.

Majority Republicans who supported the measure said it's an action that needed to be taken because of the way Canada handled COVID lockdowns of churches and actions it took against religious leaders during the pandemic.

But on the same day the Ohio Senate passed a bill that critics say would steer a sweetheart monopoly deal to a Canadian business.

The Ohio lottery retailers Association said the bill would hurt the bars, convenience stores and other brick and mortar businesses that have been selling lottery tickets for four decades.

The association plans to fight that bill as it heads to the House.

Local boards of elections are preparing to run a second primary election in August for state legislative races to determine Republican and Democratic nominees for the Ohio House and Senate.

The unusual event of a second primary, which will cost the state an additional $20 million, is the result of a months long battle over new state legislative district lines.

State House correspondent Andy Chow takes us through the Ohio redistricting saga and where it stands right now.

Ohio voters approved an overhaul to the state's redistricting process in 2015.

Six years later, the state put that reform process in motion for the first time.

As the Ohio Redistricting Commission convened, five Republicans and two Democrats took the oath of office and began drafting new state legislative district maps.

Drawing the lines for 99 House and 33 Senate districts.

Democratic Senator Vernon Sykes spoke on this program with Karen Kasler.

Back when the redistricting commission started on his hopes that the new process would prevent gerrymandering.

How confident are you that the maps that will be produced will not be gerrymandered and that Republicans will negotiate in good faith and that Democrats, when, if they're in charge, will negotiate in good faith as these two Constitution amendments said they would?

I am confident that there will be less opportunity for gerrymandering.

The districts will be fair and how much fair is going to be depended upon in the negotiations that we have between the parties.

But definitely, absolutely, there will not be able to gerrymander as much as they have in the past.

After weeks of public hearings, the commission, with only Republican support, passed its first set of House and Senate district maps.

The maps, based on margins of Republican and Democratic voters in each district, maintained a likely Republican supermajority in both chambers.

Three groups filed objections to those maps in the Ohio Supreme Court.

Voting rights groups, community organizations, and a national Democratic group.

All argued that the maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor the Republican Party and violated the new reforms.

After several months of deliberation, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in January that the maps were unconstitutional.

That sparked what became a round of redistricting table tennis with the commission and the Supreme Court volleying between adopting new maps and striking those maps down for a total of five times.

That included a map adopted by the Commission on February 24th.

Now referred to as MAP three, the map reflected the proportionality of Ohio's voters, splitting about 54% Republican and 46% Democratic.

But a third of the Democratic districts were toss up districts, which still gives the Republicans a good opportunity for a supermajority.

Republican Senate President Matt Huffman said during the commission meeting that they needed to act quickly and get a map approved in time for the May 3rd primary.

All of the other options are bad to primaries.

Bad idea because I happen to suggest to people let me know pushing back the primary people are not in favor of that also.

So I don't know.

You know, I think at this point a while ago, days matter.

At this point, ours matter.

But because of the stalemate between the redistricting commission and the Ohio Supreme Court, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose had to remove state legislative races from the May 3rd primary ballot.

The boards of elections can't conduct two elections at the same time.

The voting machines are programed for one specific election.

All of the mechanisms of running that election are built on, you know, sort of the 90 days leading up to the election, running the election certification.

And so what the boards of elections would have to do is complete one election before they begin the next one.

If the decision was made to have that bifurcated primary, then the boards of elections would have to go all the way through final certification, which is about three weeks after the election.

They'd have to go through post-election auditing, which is about four or five weeks after the election, and then they could begin the process of conducting a new election.

You can't sort of run the two simultaneously.

As the saga dragged on with the redistricting commission consistently failing to adopt constitutional maps, a group of Republicans filed a case in federal court.

They argued that state leaders were at an impasse and the federal court needed to step in.

A panel of federal judges eventually agreed two to one with that argument and one state leaders failed to meet a May 28 deadline to pass constitutional maps.

The federal court implemented the unconstitutional map three so that will be the set of maps used for the 2022 primary in August and general election in November.

It creates 54 Republican and 45 Democratic House seats, along with eight Republican and 13 Democratic Senate seats.

16 of those Democratic House seats and six of those Democratic Senate seats are toss up districts.

Katherine Tercer with the good government group Common Cause says this is not what advocates envisioned when they voted for the constitutional reforms to prevent gerrymandering.

And 2015 I think about like election night when I thought hey we have possibly improved the quality of representational democracy for decades and then to go through and find that it is not enough to put good rules in the Ohio Constitution.

It's not enough just to have good transparency and a focus on making sure that the maps are not gerrymandered and having a metric there's a metric that they can use.

Sometimes it's called representational fairness.

Sometimes folks call it proportionality, that there can literally be a metric in the Ohio Constitution and that elected officials including constitutional officers like the governor, can just simply avoid.

It is heartbreaking.

Elections officials are getting ready for the August 2nd primary.

Meanwhile, several lawsuits over the district maps and the subsequent fallout issues such as candidacy, filing rules, are still being deliberated in court.

Andy Chao, Statehouse News Bureau.

Gas prices in Ohio are up this week.

More than $5 a gallon in many parts of the state.

Add to that inflation and supply chain shortages and many Ohioans are feeling the pain.

But perhaps none more than low income Ohioans.

Lisa Handler Fugate with the Ohio Association of Food Banks says many cannot afford to put food on their tables.

The folks who are turning to their local food bank, food pantry or soup kitchen have no money left in their budget at which to meet their basic needs, as you just described.

Everything costs more.

That same market basket of food that they were purchasing for their family a month or two months ago has gone up exponentially.

And in some cases, we've seen a doubling, certainly in certain commodities.

Meat costs are just sky high.

We're starting to see shortages again.

Their childcare costs have gone up and every just seems like with every passing day.

We're seeing higher prices for gasoline so they're limited incomes, especially from from their jobs just aren't stretching any further.

So they've already started to make cutbacks.

And unfortunately, the rent always eats first.

So what's happening is they're being forced to turn to a local food provider and for families with kids, quite frankly, you know, these kids have been relying on school lunch and breakfast programs and now they're home for the summer months, putting additional pressure on that family budget to to purchase more food.

The other issue that we're seeing as well is families with kids in the food lines, in increased numbers.

We're seeing more senior citizens than we've ever seen.

As I said, they're the canaries in the coal mine.

They're living on very low fixed incomes, generally derived by so security persons with disabilities, the same situation.

And again, their limited budgets just aren't able to stretch far enough to meet their basic needs.

So they're turning to us more frequently for more food at a time when we don't have it.

How does this compare with the pandemic when there was a lot of aid available for low income families for food?

Food banks were getting aid from the federal government back then.

How does it compare now?

We're not.

I mean, in fact, that, you know, the American recovery and Rescue Act plan that that President Biden signed some 15 months ago provided support to the state.

In fact, Ohio received over $5.3 billion for the explicit purpose to help recover, repay, restore and rebuild from the coronavirus, meaning that individuals that were most affected, communities that were most affected by the coronavirus, these dollars were to be used.

And while we have been the recipients of other funding, we have not received any of the ARPA dollars or the American Rescue and Recovery Act funds, despite a request of $50 million to help us immediately begin to replenish the food stores and the food inventories that we desperately need.

We're paying more for the same amount of food that we were purchasing last year because of food costs being up.

In fact, on average we spent about $0.42 a pound for the food that we acquired, and now it's over a dollar for a pound.

So we the modest, humble request for 50 million was not met And instead the State has chosen to use these recovery funds on a myriad of things, from state parks to trails to an animal disease facility, to other things that quite frankly aren't getting to the people in need.

The Ohioans that are really suffering as a result of the inflation.

And as they attempt to recover.

So we are continuing to work urging the administration to consider this request.

We need to replenish our food banks and ensure that when hungry Ohioans turn at their darkest hour of need to a local food bank, food pantry or soup kitchen, there's going to be food on the shelves.

Do you want to share?

I was at the Mid-Ohio Food Bank yesterday.

It is our largest food bank located in Franklin County, but serving Franklin in the 19 contiguous counties there at a 25% capacity.

I have never seen the inventory so low in the food bank or in Cleveland last week a similar situation.

Again the donations that we have traditionally relied on from food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, it's not there because of the supply chain issues and increased demand And the other issues that we're dealing with are just massive cancelations of commodities that we have depended on and were anticipating receiving from the United States Department of Agriculture.

And those are center of the plate items.

In fact, in the past five months, USDA has canceled over 250 semi tractor trailer loads of food that we had scheduled to come in.

So we are lightening the bag.

In fact, we are providing for fewer meals than we were prior to the pandemic.

And the need continues to increase literally week over week.

And now that we are going into the summer months.

Yes, I was going to ask you about this summer months.

Traditionally in the summer you've got kids out of school, so they're not eating at school anymore.

And families turn to food banks and summer feeding programs.

How does that how does that work into all of this?

Well, I know that the Department of Education and is doing everything that they can right now to get the applications for summer food service program sponsors reviewed.

They did provide a list.

It looks like we're going to have 297 sponsors this year, which is good because the sponsors are dealing with the same thing that we're dealing with are higher food and supply cost, higher labor cost about 1900 sites.

But unfortunately we currently have 33 counties in the state that do not yet have a summer food service program site.

So children that we're again relying on those critical school breakfasts in school lunch programs won't have a summer food service program site to go to for a replacement lunch.

So that means that we will be redoubling our efforts in those communities trying to do more mobile markets.

But again, we are urging Governor DeWine to do whatever he can now to release a portion of the ARPA funds.

The state has the state has the resources.

We have over 1.9 billion of unobligated federal fiscal relief dollars.

We have billions of dollars now and the rainy day fund.

There's hundreds of millions of dollars available.

And Tanev Ohioans are hurting.

They are hungry.

We need assistance and we need assistance now to make sure that we've got food on the shelves at our food pantries, in our food banks.

When families turn to us in their darkest hour.

Researchers at Ohio State University say they can tell a lot about a person's political ideology by looking at how they perform some simple task and get this brain scans.

The findings are from the work of OSU doctoral candidate Solomon Yang.

Our team initially interested in whether we can predict the political ideology purely based on the brain scan So our findings shows that.

So after we scan the brain using X MRI machine, which actually neurosci entities can measure the brain activity using the machine.

So we find out that 80% of the accuracy they we can predict to some of this ideology is purely based on their brain scan.

So this is a really good breakthrough because no new literature so far actually predict someone's political ideology purely based on the biological marks.

But our research can contribute some kind of scientific advancement because political orientation which can be considered quite subjective, even though subjective measure can be also predicted by the brain activation and brain scan.

So what kind of things are you looking for in the brain scan?

I know there was a mention of empathy.

You could tell from looking at a brain scan that may amount of empathy.

Tell me about that.

So, yeah, so actually to explain that part, I first would explain more about the fMRI itself.

So after MRI stands for the functional magnetic resonance imaging.

So it literally captured the brain activity while you just at rest, rest or you just see some pictures or you just think about some calculation or something like that.

So empathy task literally just make participants see some of the photos like such as like photos of the female angry or crying and then just captured brain activity while the participants are seeing those photos, emotional photos.

So what we can get from those emotional task or the empathy task is like we can measure like how different parts of the brain are activated while they are looking for those emotions I mean, the photos that arouses some emotion, a certain types of emotion.

And based on that, our brain activity, we try to see whether there's any distinctive patterns between the liberals and conservative.

And based on the patterns we can predict some of this political orientation, whether someone is conservative or liberal.

So what kind of characteristics show up for a liberal versus a conservative?

So you mean the brain in the brain, in the brain things.

Do you look at that that show up that tells you, hey, this person is a conservative?

So so brain is actually really complex work organ.

It actually consist of like like tens of millions, billions of the neurons and the cells so to actually measure the brain activity, we first actually break those brain into separate component.

And then using that component, we just to see how those components are connected to each other.

So literally, we see the brain connectivity, for example, the conservative people just to see some of more connectivity within the amygdala area, which actually control someone's detection of the risk if someone does are more sensitive to the like exposure of being risk.

And then the amygdala actually activated more and it is known that like conservative people are more sensitive to detecting dose of risk and amygdala part to actually capture those are like people's tendency to capture reduce risk of being risk.

So so the pattern so we can see I'm sorry, what was your initial question?

So that the risk is one thing that shows you whether there are conservative.

What are some of the other telltale signs?

Beyond risk.

So beyond risk, for example, there's a task named rewards task.

So reword task literally let participant just do so.

I mean, push the button based on some signal.

So if they correctly just push the button they win the money.

And if they fail to just push the button in a right way, then they lose the money.

So it contains some calculation.

So brain, I mean, fMRI machine literally kept her toes like of like how brain calculate some some of the money thing and those a signal can be captured using the MRI machine.

And then we can also tell whether someone is liberal or conservative based on how they use the brain when they just think about whether they lose or win the money.

Well, that's it for us this week for my colleagues at the State House News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News dot org and follow us on 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 mutuel, 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 Right is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at Puerto Rite 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