Editorial Roundup: Ohio

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from Ohio newspapers:

Why Akron media are focusing on housing issues

Akron Beacon Journal

Feb. 1

It’s a basic human need. A roof over your dry head with enough heat to stay warm through the long winter months.

Quality housing. It’s something many take for granted and others constantly seek. And it’s a significant problem in Akron, based on the comments from many of the 200 people who gathered at our “This is Akron” community forums last spring.

The forums brought together residents and journalists from the Akron Beacon Journal, The Devil Strip and WKSU, to discuss life in the city through conversations moderated by former Beacon Journal Managing Editor Doug Oplinger, who now leads Your Voice Ohio, a journalism collaborative.

The most prevalent issue we heard about was housing, with Oplinger recently writing that “journalists heard over and over that housing was at the core of a feeling of unease. Whether people were homeowners or renters, there was a sense that something monumental had happened in the city, affecting relationships and emotional security.”

That unease appears to be reflected in other ways. Just about every Beacon Journal story on housing topics generates strong readership, according to BeaconJournal.com analytics.

That includes a December article reporting Akron has the highest eviction rate in Ohio, which covered a third-party report released in the middle of a debate about Akron Municipal Court judges implementing new rules for eviction cases.

City leaders, by the way, agree Akron needs more and better housing to regrow its population. That’s evident in many ways, including the city’s 100% tax abatement on new and renovated residential properties. Mayor Dan Horrigan is expected to make housing a key part of his “Plan to Grow 2.0,” likely to be rolled out in his upcoming State of the City address.

All of these realities lead us to today’s first story in our yearlong “Home in Akron” reporting project.

As you may have seen already on our front page, Beacon Journal reporter Doug Livingston explores how illegal squatters can become legal tenants requiring an eviction hearing.

As we noted in a recent editorial, there are good landlords and bad tenants and vice versa. Imagine how would you feel if you found a squatter trying to sell your personal property while you wait weeks for an eviction hearing on someone with no lease?

You may also see or hear this story published by our Akron Media Collaborative partners in the coming days, including the aforementioned outlets and News Channel 5. We’re being assisted by Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

We’ve been meeting with our colleagues for months to discuss how to best tell Akron’s housing story across all mediums. It’s so important we’re working together to better serve our community.

That includes requesting tons of data that are being analyzed right now to develop more story ideas and priorities for reporting later this year.

We’ve already learned the number of rentals has grown significantly across the city in recent years, with about half of all homes being rentals today. We’ve also learned 42% of renters spend more than 35% of household income on rent, a ratio that’s troubling before considering Akron’s high sewer rates.

Our goal is to dig well beyond the numbers and tell real stories about how housing works and does not work for people across Akron. We also want to empower residents with information on how to protect themselves and improve their neighborhoods. Look for announcements of community meetings coming soon.

We’re not certain where our efforts will lead. But we are convinced improving Akron’s housing picture is critical to the city’s long-term healing and future health.

Online: https://bit.ly/2v2sMsU

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Investigative reports need your support

The Canton Repository

Feb. 2

Well over a year and a half ago, Canton Repository staff writers Tim Botos and Shane Hoover approached top editors at the newspaper and pitched a story idea.

For Botos, it would not be the first time on this particular topic. Far from it. For several years he had been suggesting a thorough examination of the case files of former Stark County Coroner “Gus” Shaheen. Based on some preliminary digging of his own, coupled with some whispers in the community and one high-profile mistake already documented, Botos believed Shaheen had made at least a handful of other extremely dubious rulings.

To do the story appropriately, and to ensure the reputation of the former coroner would be respected, would require months of tedious work. Before any story could be published, Botos, Hoover and their editors needed not only to be sure of their conclusions, but also their motivations and why it would be in the best interests of the paper - and the community - to reopen old wounds.

In short, they were asked: Would the journalistic payoff and the feelings likely to get hurt be worth the huge time investment?

We think we can show, the reporters replied, that at least one person might have gotten away with murder in Stark County. And that person might still be walking free today.

On Friday, the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office gave credence to the reporters’ hypotheses, stating some cases will be re-examined.

“Even though it might be pretty remote that anything could be done, I think we still need to do this for the victims’ families …,” county Prosecutor John Ferrero said in a news release. “If we can give them some answers, OK. If not, at least we tried.”

Representatives of the FBI, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Stark County Sheriff’s Office and the prosecutor’s office will make up the team reviewing the old cases in question.

Botos and Hoover examined an estimated 14,000 pages of documents from among the 8,600 rulings Shaheen made as coroner from 1962 to 1980. A forensic expert who assisted them in reviewing some of the cases ruled accidental deaths or deaths by suicide said physical evidence could point to a different conclusion: a homicide ruling.

A handful of those cases, plus some fresh tips called into the prosecutor’s office in recent weeks, will get the review team’s initial attention.

Fred Scott, chief of the Criminal Division in the prosecutor’s office, will direct the review team. It will determine if a suspect can be identified and whether further investigation is warranted and even possible. Any potential leads would be turned over to local law enforcement for consideration.

The decision by Ferrero’s office gives affirmation to the reporters’ work - its comprehensiveness and its accuracy.

It also affirms the need to support quality local journalism. Fewer and fewer newsrooms can afford to devote reporters to investigative projects lasting even a few weeks or months, let alone more than a full calendar year.

We are reminded of the fate that awaits communities, like nearby Youngstown, without their watchdog - the local press - to ask questions of governmental leaders, boards of education, political candidates, corporate executives and anyone else who might be tempted to abuse their power or who simply aren’t performing their jobs adequately.

Series like “The Madam Must Die” and “The Shaheen Files” cannot be published without the continued support of loyal subscribers and advertisers. We appreciate and thank ours for keeping us strong and able to shine light where there’s darkness.

As Ferrero put it: “If we can give them some answers, OK. If not, at least we tried.”

Online: https://bit.ly/2RXL8EN

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We could use more politicians like Todd Portune

Cincinnati Enquirer

Feb. 1

Todd Portune didn’t pay lip service to being a public servant; he lived for it, right up to his very last breath. Portune “passed with grace and peace” Saturday at his Green Township home after a battle with cancer. He was 61.

Portune had a distinguished career in local politics that spanned 25 years, making him one of the longest-serving Democrats in the Cincinnati region’s history. He was tough to beat at the ballot box, losing just once – his very first election in 1992 to incumbent Ohio Senate President Stanley Aronoff, whose name graces the theater downtown.

Within two months of that defeat, Portune joined Cincinnati City Council as the appointed replacement for David Mann, who was headed to Congress. He spent eight years on city council before being elected in 2000 to Hamilton County Commission, beating a long-time incumbent and becoming the first Democratic county commissioner in Hamilton County in 36 years.

Fighting for the people was always at the forefront of Portune’s agenda. He listened to his constituents and understood the struggles and economic hardship of every day people. Portune grew up on the West Side, the son of a University of Cincinnati professor and a stay-at-home mom. When Portune was 14, his dad died, creating financial turmoil for his family. His personal experience gave him perspective and a compassion for people that would be a signature of his political career.

Portune’s legislative accomplishments are too numerous to list them all, but he was instrumental in the development of The Banks on Cincinnati’s riverfront and pushed for a better regional transit system. He was a thorn in the Cincinnati Bengals’ side, constantly pushing back on and trying to renegotiate the terms of what some have called the worst stadium lease agreement in the history of professional sports.

While Portune was a fighter who stood for his convictions, he had a unique ability to separate the personal from the work. Former Republican county commissioner Tom Neyer Jr., who served with Portune during Portune’s first three years on the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners from 2001-2003, said he taught him that “an opponent is not an enemy.” Lawmakers in today’s acrimonious political environment could learn a lot from Portune about working across the aisle. It was this statesman-like approach that won Portune the respect even of those who disagreed with him politically.

Portune didn’t shy away from tough questions from the news media either. He was incredibly accessible. And even when he disagreed with a headline or the way a news story was framed, Portune never yelled at or belittled reporters or editors in his criticism.

But of all the words used to describe Portune, courageous and resilient might define him best. Portune endured a series of serious health challenges during his time in public office, starting in 1996 when doctors discovered tumors on his spine. Treatment for a blood clot in 2002 caused the spinal tumors to hemorrhage, paralyzing Portune from the chest down. He would eventually improve to where he could walk with the help of crutches, but never regained use of his left leg. He had the leg amputated in 2018 when a connective-tissue sarcoma was found.

Through all of his medical travails, Portune continued working for the people of Hamilton County, introducing motions from his hospital bed and phoning into meetings when he was physically unable to be there. If anyone had a reason to be angry and bitter about the cards that life had dealt them, it was Portune. Yet, he never complained. Instead, he always had a smile on his face, a joke or a kind word.

His indomitable spirit was both infectious and inspiring. Even upon the announcing of his retirement from public office due to his health, Portune declared, “While this chapter in my life is coming to an end, this is not the end of my contribution or service to this community. I plan on beating cancer.”

As it turned out, cancer was only the second opponent Portune could not defeat. But he leaves behind a legacy that politicians today can learn from and should strive toward – professionalism, integrity, courage, tenacity, adaptability and standing up for your convictions. We could sure use some more Todd Portunes on the local or national stage.

Online: https://bit.ly/2uehJgc

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Issues raised in referendum fight shouldn’t be forgotten

The Columbus Dispatch

Feb. 2

The effort to give Ohio voters a chance to weigh in on a $1 billion nuclear bailout is dead. The coalition of natural gas interests, green energy advocates and others opposed to House Bill 6 can’t match the spending of the nuclear-plant bailout recipients and others who support the law, so the court battle over a possible referendum is over.

But the questions raised by the fight shouldn’t fade away: Should the state’s process for approving a ballot-issue petition be allowed to cut into the 90 days the Ohio Constitution gives bringers of such issues to collect the required signatures? And do lawmakers need to do something to prevent campaigners on either side of such issues from using abusive, anti-democratic tactics?

These questions arose because of the extraordinarily fierce and nasty fight over the effort to subject HB 6 to a referendum.

The Dispatch opposed the bill, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in July, and supported the referendum effort because the bill not only delivers a giant, ratepayer-supported subsidy to FirstEnergy Solutions, the owner of Ohio’s two nuclear plants, but also guts the state’s already-meager program to boost development of alternative energy. It also props up two dirty coal plants, one of which isn’t even in Ohio.

Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, the coalition opposed to the bailout law, launched a campaign to put a referendum on the November ballot. That effort was opposed by Ohioans for Energy Security, a pro-bailout, dark-money group that ran outrageously false ads claiming the referendum effort was the work of Chinese energy interests that have “infiltrated our energy grid.”

The group also hired “blockers” to follow and interfere with people trying to gather signatures for the referendum – leading to at least one shoving match – and hired signature-gatherers away by paying them more to collect signatures on a sham petition designed to confuse.

Along with the ridiculous “Chinese menace” ads, another ad campaign by Ohioans for Energy Security directly undermined democracy, by casting petition-signature gatherers in a sinister light as strangers sent into “our neighborhoods.” Most offensively, they urged people to “report” circulators to a “hotline,” as if they were committing a crime.

More likely, the hotline helped the referendum track the circulators so they could dispatch blockers to get in their way.

Amid this unprecedentedly hostile atmosphere, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts’ time to gather signatures was cut short significantly because Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost ruled that the first proposed petition was not the “fair and truthful representation” that state law requires.

By the time the group submitted a revised petition and Yost approved it, 38 days of the statutory 90-day signature period had gone by.

When the group failed to make the deadline it sued, asking a federal judge to declare that its signature-gathering time was unfairly shortened and undermined by opponents’ tactics. U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus ruled that the case should go instead before the Ohio Supreme Court, to answer the state-law questions raised.

We cheered when the state’s high court agreed in December to take up the questions, because those issues should be resolved. But the anti-bailout group withdrew its federal-court challenge last week, declaring it didn’t have the money to continue the fight.

On Friday, the state Supreme Court dismissed its case as well.

If the issues that the HB 6 fight spawned are not to be resolved in the courts, the General Assembly should take a look at them. No one has accused Yost of foot-dragging for partisan reasons on the referendum petition, but the potential for any future attorney general clearly exists.

And unless some campaign guardrails go up, the resounding success of Ohioans for Energy Security’s nasty tactics is sure to breed more of the same in the future.

Online: https://bit.ly/2Oqsbbz

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