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.

Moore and 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 Another twist in the redistricting saga to try to keep the whole primary on May third, and as the primary comes closer to economic, experts say they have some questions they hope the candidates for governor will be asked and will answer all this week in the state of Ohio.

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

The May primary is a little over seven weeks away, but the Republican drawn maps for Ohio's 132 House and Senate districts and its 15 congressional districts are still being challenged in court.

And if they're tossed out again, that would mean those offices couldn't be on the May primary ballot.

But in the meantime, elections officials were supposed to mail ballots to overseas and military voters on March 18th.

The Republican dominated Legislature voted this week to move that deadline and shorten the window during which those voters have access to those ballots and delay the return date until 20 days after the May third primary.

Democrats oppose the move, and their refusal shut down an emergency clause to allow this to take effect immediately.

House Republicans then attach that extension to a different bill and also attached $200,000 for expediting those ballots.

And that appropriation means the bill goes into effect right away as soon as it's signed by Governor Mike DeWine.

This week marked the two year anniversary of the announcement of the first confirmed cases of COVID 19 in Ohio.

In the two weeks that followed, K through twelve schools were closed.

Public events with more than 100 people were banned.

Nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals were shut down to visitors, sports stopped bars and restaurants were closed and the polls were shuttered for the March primary as mail in voting was extended.

The first COVID death in Ohio was recorded on March 20th, 2020.

Since then, there have been 37,146 COVID deaths in Ohio as of Tuesday.

That's about the same as the population of Hilliard, or it's the total the populations of Medina and Coshocton.

It's also more than the capacity of progressive field or of Ohio State's value city arena and nationwide arena in Columbus put together.

But there's another hopeful sign we're moving from pandemic to endemic.

The state says it will start reporting COVID data weekly, not daily.

Deaths have been reported twice weekly since last March.

The major party candidates for U.S. Senate and governor will debate their opponents at Central State University in Wilberforce later this month.

Except for one, governor, Mike DeWine is the first candidate to decline an invitation to the Ohio Debate Commission's debates.

While Jim Renacci and Joe Blystone have accepted the debate on Tuesday, March 29th, Ryan Hood's campaign has not responded to the invitation.

The debates in the morning and evening of March 28th and 29th will be streamed live, and many radio and TV stations around the state will also carry them as they happen.

I'll be moderating the Republican U.S. Senate debate on Monday, March 28th, and all seven candidates are expected to participate.

Questions for the Republican and Democratic candidates for US Senate and governor can be submitted at the Ohio Debate Commission's website.

two economic experts from Ohio State University's John Glenn College of Public Affairs have a few questions for the candidates for governor, as they did in 2018.

Bill Scurry and Fran Stewart have written three reports on the state's economy over the last 60 plus years, and some issues they think are critical for the next governor to deal with .

Discourteous served as both a director of the Office of Budget and Management and a Democratic former governor, Richard Celeste, and was the budget expert for the Senate Democrats in the 1980s.

I asked him what's changed since the report he and Stewart put out four years ago.

Besides the pandemic?

Well, leading up to the pandemic.

So we got four more years of data.

The long term trends of Ohio's relative decline.

Ohio's economy has continued to grow, but not as rapidly as the state as a whole.

That long term trend continues, and in fact, we always enjoyed and I enjoyed getting reader comments from our paper.

And one of them was you should use something more than per capita income.

That's just one measure.

Why don't you adjust for lower housing costs and all that?

So we did.

We came up with three additional indicators.

And to make a long story short, they showed the same thing.

Ohio, relative to the national economy, continues to lag behind as it has for the last 50 years.

So that's one thread, but that is up to the pandemic.

And then that opens up a number of challenges for Ohio.

But also, we think some opportunities, some of which have already surfaced that Ohio could take advantage of and maybe break through that that long term decline.

When you talk about that decline person per capita income in Ohio coming out of the Great Recession before the pandemic grew 5% less than the nation as a whole.

And you say that that adds up, that's billions of dollars less that Ohioans have to spend on whatever they want.

And at one point you say it's $68 billion less than they can spend on themselves, their families, their communities.

All that.

Also, though, you mentioned the lower housing costs.

Ohio's housing costs again before the pandemic and before Intel and all these things.

27% below the national average.

But still, the state has fallen 6% below the country as a whole with adjusted per capita income.

And the thing that really blew my mind.

New job creation, Ohio has fallen 33% behind the nation as a whole.

These are big numbers.

They add up and it's amazing the state's doing as well as it is in some ways, but and part of it is related to population growth and you have a big population growth in the Southwest and some other areas that we can talk about later.

But it is frustrating as someone who was born and raised in Ohio.

You know, I'm just old enough to remember when Ohio was kind of the manufacturing king.

But just to see that continued relative decline is frustrating.

The manufacturing news, of course, that a lot of people are focused on is intel.

You had said that Ohio's decline could be traced to quote the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs primarily to automation, but also to foreign and domestic competition.

It would be easy to say that Intel has kind of solved a lot of Ohio's problems.

I mean, it's potentially a 100 billion dollar investment by a company that's producing a product that's not only critically needed now, but into the future.

It will lead to potentially 10,000 jobs, the intel jobs averaging $135,000 a year.

The state and intel also spending billions on infrastructure and developing training programs at colleges and universities.

But you write that Intel is not a silver bullet here.

Right?

I want to make clear Fred, and I think that that having intel come here has the potential to do a lot of good for Ohio.

The two caveats we raise is one announcing jobs and creating jobs are two different things.

We've had some very successful job and you know, Honda started out with something like 49 employees making motorcycles, and now it's nearly 15,000 jobs and an equal number in parts.

And so that's a tremendous success story.

But every investment is not guaranteed to be a Honda.

And we pointed out a couple of them the the the one that's most comparable, at least initially, is when Ohio got Honda.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania got very jealous and they wanted one.

So they made a deal with Volkswagen to build the Volkswagen Rabbit in new standard and that was supposed to create 20,000 jobs was the promise .

Well, the rabbit never took off the way the accord did, and they did hire 2000 people.

But ten years later, the rabbit was dead.

And those people were laid off, and that was a failure.

And then you had Wisconsin and Foxconn, which is another big promise that didn't come through.

And we were we made clear we don't think Intel is fact.

Foxconn had a reputation not following through on this deal.

But even in Ohio, more recently, you had the the bicycle people.

Peloton was a factory in northwest Ohio.

400 million dollar investment.

2000 jobs there demand change.

They changed the leadership and they backed out of that deal.

Now that's not guaranteed, or even maybe likely that that would happen on Intel.

But chips are a very competitive industry.

And someone else develops a new technique or something, or intel doesn't stay competitive.

That that could be a problem, but it could also be a big success.

Now here's the other interesting point of that.

Even if it is a big success and we all hope it will, and it will bring benefits to the state of Ohio, it by itself will probably not change that line as big as it is.

And they're talking about the initial investment, I think is $2 billion.

If I remember the state from the state, yes, there is a lot of investment incentives.

20 $20 billion from Intel, potentially $100 billion long.

Totally.

So let's start with the 20.

The state's gross domestic product is like 670 some billion.

So it's proportionately, although it's a big deal, it's proportionately small amount.

This is a big, complex economy, and the example friend I used in the report were two tremendously successful development projects this one.

But even before that, which initially was even a bigger deal than Intel was when General Motors took an empty field and Trumbull County and said, We're going to build one of the largest and most efficient auto assembly plants here.

Lordstown and people that have been people are younger than me.

Remember Lordstown as being kind of an indication of failure, although that factory and the workers there always produced.

But when, when, when it opened up, when Lordstown opened up the the promise was 4500 jobs to start and maybe 1000 it got ramped up and met that goal .

It blew past the 8000 goal at the peak in 1985 8085.

Yeah, about 20 years later, they had 10,500 people working there, plus various suppliers and so forth.

Then they started to fade out in the mid eighties, but that's when Honda picked up.

But the point we made is even with Lordstown and with Honda two of the most successful development.

Developments in the country, Ohio still continue to decline.

So what we hope is that Intel can be part of what's a renaissance, but it needs to come also from medium sized businesses, from businesses that are here, from small businesses that can become the big businesses of the future.

And so the state needs a whole portfolio.

And the example I like to use, it's like a sports team getting expensive free agent.

Sometimes that's enough to put you over the top.

But it's not enough if you don't have the rest of the team behind that person.

And that brings me to something you talked about in 2018 and also this time that Ohio needs to address the misalignment between employer skill demands and worker skill supply.

Ohio also faces the added challenge finding more workers when the working age population is not growing, a growing number of workers have dropped out of the workforce.

And you suggest that expanding legal immigration is a possibility here, but that could run up against a roadblock in a state that's pretty red.

So how do we solve this problem?

Well, we need to look at I mean, there are a number of things we can do, but if we don't grow our labor force, we aren't going to be able to compete and bring in the jobs we need.

So it's an advance.

If we do that better than anybody, it can be an advantage.

If we continue business as usual and other people get ahead of us, it's a disadvantage.

So one of Ohio and the whole Midwest faces this challenge is loss of population.

The population stays here tends to be older, not in prime working ages.

So expanding legal immigration is one, and I give Governor DeWine credit.

He spoke out when the Afghanistan crisis occurred about bringing Afghan refugees in the state, did bring Afghan refugees and now have Ukrainian crisis so that there are some opportunities and we've had them.

So that's one and the question, of course, being the legality of some of the issues.

And that's what I think a lot of legal examiners has been a bit of a problem because it can't get its arm around what's legal and what's not.

You've also got the issue of people that have committed felonies, felonies but are out of prison, and I'm not arguing all of them are suitable to bring back into the workforce, but certainly some are and people hopefully recovering from opioid addiction.

So these are people maybe in the past we could afford to dismiss, even though we shouldn't have.

Now there's an economic necessity that argues for it as well.

The other thing is, one of the things that Governor Kasich did, I thought was a really good thing was creating the governor's Office of Workforce Transformation to try and link up the gap between expectations and what what the schools and colleges were turning out.

And I think they made some progress, but there's still a lot of misinformation and friend.

I went nuts trying to sort out the statistics because you hear that well.

64% of new jobs will require a college degree.

Technically, that's true.

64% of the jobs that have not existed before will require a college degree or better to to do it.

But if you take all the jobs, including current jobs that open up and there are vacancies to fill.

It's more like 64% can be filled with a high school diploma or maybe a little more training, so.

And the difference is the number of vacant positions of all jobs compared to the number of new jobs, about four times as many.

So Ohio needs to deal with the issue of a lot of these jobs, aren't it means to produce the advanced degree people because they provide a lot of the impetus for the economy over and above their numbers.

But they can't afford to overlook people who just have a high school diploma or just need a little bit of more training.

And getting those two in sync is, I think, extremely important.

It's interesting you mentioned the opioid crisis, which a lot of people, I think have kind of forgotten about with everything that's been happening.

The Department of Health said in its latest annual report that in 220 19, there are more than 4000 people who died of opioid overdoses that year, so it's still an issue in Ohio.

But I want to ask you, I want to ask you about the disparity between the wealthiest counties and the poorest counties in Ohio.

You said the disparity is an average of 51%.

That's a big number, and it's unlikely to go away any time soon.

You write that even the pandemic may have made that disparity worse.

There's also this looming problem with cities, because with remote work, you could potentially end up with cities losing municipal income taxes.

So there are a lot of problems just in the geographic situations around Ohio.

Absolutely.

And there are a couple of opportunities that come out of that if we handle it correctly.

So let's take the work from home first.

one of the potentials is people on the coasts that live on both coasts are fed up with either hurricanes.

Fires or congestion could want to come here.

So attracting them is is a certain a possibility.

Although so far looks like most of the movement has been within the same county out there.

Now that could change, but it isn't a silver bullet by itself, but it's worth a try.

The other thing is.

Handling the tax issues for the remote workers, and I understand why if someone's living in one place and working in another, that maybe not all the tax revenue should go to where they're working part time.

But if you pull all that out very quickly, that undercuts your urban areas, which are the center of your job growth and attracting a lot of the highly technically skilled people.

And what I worry about is in the Legislature, there's kind of an anti urban bias among some members, and that could manifest itself in the way this thing is handled.

The leadership typically is not from urban areas.

I mean, the leadership is Republican.

They tend to be from smaller communities or from rural areas.

I, in the old days Watson was I used to come in, I think still to some degree come from suburbs sometimes.

And those suburbs often are part of a larger metropolitan area, but it's not.

There is a there, and there's always been a bit of tension between rural Ohio and urban Ohio that that's not new, but I think it seems more intense now.

one of the other opportunities this opens up and one of the things the Legislature and governor did in this last budget that I find really encouraging is I think they allocated half a billion dollars to cleaning up dirty industrial sites.

So those could be opportunities to bring in additional jobs and businesses.

So I think that's a that's a good thing.

And I'm trying remember we got off on the oh, the other thing was the what we call the forgotten Ohio.

And there's a lot of polarization going on today.

But the forgotten Ohio's are really two parts.

It's people with less than a college degree that live in distant rural areas who tend to be more white and tend to be more Republican.

But it's also people of color who live in urban areas who tend to be more from a minority and tend to be more democratic.

The challenge is you need to try to get a coalition to raise up both.

And there are a number of different things you can do.

We talked about one is improving internet access, high speed cable now in the rural areas.

It doesn't even go out there in the urban areas.

It's might be out there, but it's not affordable.

So there's a lot being done that that I think has some potential.

The other thing is we talk about a program some other states have done where they insure every young child that's born in that state or a certain subset, a small savings account to start early to pay for their education.

And the argument is, and I think this merits some additional research, but the argument is even a relatively small amount of money makes a difference for a poor family, particularly in aspirations.

So that might be another thing that Ohio looks at.

That's something that's been opened up by the pandemic.

And the interesting thing is, the state right now is in good state shape financially.

I'm sure you will get the pressure for tax cuts versus spending increases, and that debate should occur.

But if it's all tax cuts and we don't invest in some of the things that deal with these problems, we going to be able to take advantage of some of these openings we have as a result of the pandemic shaking everything up.

And we've talked about a brain drain in Ohio for decades now, and certainly some people might be turned off attempted to leave Ohio because or not even come here at all because of laws on limiting abortion targeting LGBTQ people.

Bans on so-called critical race theory also potential bans on mandatory vaccines, even those offered to children.

I'm just wondering if you think that Ohio's political environment and the ideology of some people who are policy makers could threaten Ohio's development and threaten the improvement in that workforce and all the things that you're talking about here?

Well, potentially it's a it's a tough call, though, because some of the craziest stuff is coming out of Florida and Texas, which make Ohio look moderate to some degree.

States are doing well economically.

To me, the interesting challenge out of Intel is that's a corporations coming out of California, which is a very different culture.

But they elected to come here knowing what the state's like in the interest.

The interesting thing will be how much is intel adapt to the political culture of Ohio?

How much does Ohio have to adapt to the political culture of intel because they're going to feel differently about some issues, I suspect, than some factions of the Legislature ?

Do other states, though, have the same problems that we have?

I mean, certainly you could look at some of the categories you talk about changing workplaces, worker shortages, supply chain bottlenecks.

People have been forgotten.

And the whole issue of the disparity here, I mean, other states are wrestling with the same issues that Ohio is.

Ohio is not unique in this.

Yeah, absolutely.

As you go through our our report, we do a lot of comparison with neighboring states and all of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia suffered.

The same in Pennsylvania is also a neighboring state that seems to be doing better, but Pennsylvania is really two states.

There's the coastal half and then there's the internal half of the internal half is more like Ohio, and some of those states are doing things we're not doing.

Some are doing the same things we're trying to do.

There was a fascinating article that some somebody from Ball State wrote who is the head of their business and economic thing about why Indiana lost intel.

And he argued that it wasn't tax differences that Indiana could probably beat Ohio in whatever tax incentives they wanted.

But what Ohio offered for Intel was a much stronger system of K through twelve and higher education than Indiana did because the Indiana Legislature is even more parsimonious than the Ohio Legislature.

In fact, if you look at what Ohio spends on K through twelve, at least it's near the national average.

It may not be distributed properly, and there are all kinds of other issues, but at least we're competitive there.

We have tended to lag behind the rest of the country in the investment in higher ED, but we seem to be making some progress in getting our workforce more educated.

So there are all kinds of interesting dynamics back and forth.

But I would argue our primary competition is not our neighboring states.

They say, face the same problems we do.

What we need to figure out, especially with our population declining and us losing congressional seats, is how to maintain our clout in Congress so we don't get screwed over.

And those neighboring states are important, particularly when it comes to protecting fresh water, which Arizona and those other places don't have.

And my greatest fear and we write about it in the book is all of a sudden Congress comes up with some great water diversion scheme at our expense.

Yeah.

And it's interesting when you look at the congressional delegation in the fifties and sixties with 23 members of Congress, we have now 15.

You write four questions for Ohio's next governor here, and you write that it's reasonable to ask the candidates for governor where they stand on the new school funding formula.

Also, where and how to use the Rainy Day Fund on the remaining controversies over House Bill six and the corruption scandal there on energy in general.

It seems likely, though, that a lot of the questions in the primary and in the general election that will be brought up are going to be about grievances over lockdown policies, candidates records on abortion and guns.

What was known about the corruption scandal involving House Bill six and when record gas prices?

These are not issues that you're talking about here.

Do you think that we're we're all missing the boat?

Yeah, and it's tough.

And I've worked for statewide campaigns and you worked for former governor Dick Celeste.

Dumbfounded.

Can't always control what people were want.

What our hope in this report isn't going to be read by every Ohio and we understand that, but we hope it'll go to news people and people that are moderators for the debate and that at least some of the discussion in the debate will involve these issues as well.

I mean, abortion and guns are important to a lot of people, and the issues are important what the state does.

So we're not arguing to totally exclude that.

But there needs to be a balanced discussion because the next governor will be the one that has a lot to influence.

He or she can't determine it, but influence how the Intel deal turns out.

So Intel's been recruited here.

But the real tough decisions are going to come in the next couple of years as they they start to gear up and how you meet to make sure they meet the commitments to the state, and we meet our commitments to them in terms of workforce and everything else and how that all plays out and the impact of that on this part of central Ohio.

So the governor, the governor can't control everything, but the governor can influence a lot.

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 dot org, and you can also follow us on the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio, where there are other parts on the matter to talk.

Thank you, God.

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.

Moore and 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.