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  • State Attorneys Defend Ohio’s Plan to Fund Browns Stadium, Urge Court to Dismiss Challenge

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    HHS Architects

    A rendering of the Brook Park dome and Haslam-operated entertainment village

    Attorneys representing several Ohio officials including Republican state Treasurer Robert Sprague want a judge to dismiss the class action lawsuit challenging the use of unclaimed funds to pay for a new Cleveland Browns stadium.

    In a pair of filings, they reject the lawsuit as a “misguided challenge” and the plaintiffs’ objections as “conspiratorial ramblings.”

    Far from coming up with some novel workaround to take ordinary Ohioans’ money, “the law is both mundane and entirely within the state’s prerogative,” the state’s attorneys argue. “The state’s right to manage, dispose of, and take title to abandoned property has been established for hundreds of years.”

    If the plaintiffs are so worried about the state taking their property, one filing repeatedly asks, why don’t they just claim it?

    The state’s lawyers have filed a motion to break up the class of plaintiffs and another to dismiss the case outright.

    Background

    The case centers on the most recent state budget. The Cleveland Browns were seeking $600 million in state dollars to help to pay for a new $2.5 billion stadium in Brook Park. Republican lawmakers came up with a clever plan to pay for it without raising taxes.

    They could just take the money from ordinary Ohioans.

    The state manages a pool of nearly $5 billion in unclaimed funds. That money is made up of forgotten assets — things like old bank accounts, security deposits or insurance policies. It’s a big chunk of what state Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, has called “lazy money.” It’s just sitting in an account generating interest, but little else. He argued, why not put some of it to use?

    The Ohio Senate’s budget plan moves money that has gone unclaimed for more than 10 years to a new cultural and sports facilities fund. Rightful owners would have 10 more years to come forward, but after that, they’d lose any claim over their money. The Ohio House didn’t object, and when the budget landed on Gov. DeWine’s desk, he didn’t either.

    Two attorneys and former Democratic lawmakers, Jeff Crossman and Marc Dann, filed a class action lawsuit claiming the state’s plan amounts to stealing. Looking to eminent domain law, they said the state has to jump through several hoops before taking possession of a citizen’s property, but Ohio officials had done none of that.

    In the most recent filings, attorneys representing Ohio’s treasurer, the Department of Commerce director, the Division of Unclaimed Funds superintendent, and the executive director of the state facilities construction commission, pushed back.

    “The complaint is nothing more than an expression of plaintiffs’ belief that the law makes for bad public policy,” the state’s attorneys said. “Plaintiffs, however, are not entitled to use this lawsuit to substitute their judgment for that of the state’s duly elected representatives.”

    Standing & class status

    To bring a lawsuit, a plaintiff needs to demonstrate ‘standing’ — that they’ve been harmed, the defendant caused that harm and the court could fix it. In its filings, the state poked holes in class action’s claims of standing. With a website available for people to reclaim property, what harm has occurred? Anyone who believes the state of Ohio has custody of their property can file a claim, right now, to get their property back.

    “Plaintiffs here simply ignored (and continue to ignore) the available administrative procedure entirely,” the state’s attorneys write. “By deciding not to file claims under that process, they plan to cause their own injury and lack standing to claim that defendants are at fault.”

    What’s more, they questioned whether any injury exists at all, much less the “actual, imminent and concrete injury” plaintiffs need to demonstrate standing. Although state lawmakers set a deadline for claims, that cutoff isn’t until 2036.

    “Thus, no matter what, plaintiffs have had, and will have, more than ten years until they could theoretically experience a loss of their property,” the state contends. “That is hardly ‘imminent.’”

    The state’s lawyers argue the case is “far too speculative, remote, and abstract” to meet the requirements. Because no property becomes truly unrecoverable until 2036, no actual harm occurs until then either. By extension, the case won’t be “ripe” until then for court review. Because the plaintiffs haven’t taken advantage of the readily available administrative process for reclaiming their property, it’s not necessary for the court to intervene.

    In a separate filing, the state’s legal team argued there’s little that binds the supposed class together. People with property in Ohio’s unclaimed funds trust might prompt similar questions, but the state’s attorneys contend the point of a class action is to deliver a singular answer for the entire group.

    The state’s attorneys explain the federal government preempts disputes over money from FDIC-protected accounts. And because the state will only take over funds that have been in the trust for ten or more years, not every claimant would fit in the class.

    “Given the vast differences within the proposed class,” they insist, “these questions will require individualized answers, which will depend on multiple factors that would require a claimant-by-claimant analysis.”

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • How People Fall for Bitcoin Scams

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    Sam shows a portion of his text with the scammer who bilked him out of more than $500,000

    Maybe it was out of boredom, maybe a little bit of hubris and self-gain, or maybe an honest belief that he could score millions of dollars by the end of the week. Whatever the reasoning, Sam pulled the trigger and sent the alluring Asian woman in Los Angeles $3,000 one Monday afternoon last July from the swivel chair in his home office in Solon.

    But this wasn’t just any woman on the internet. This was Kristina Tian from Mucker Capital, one of the top venture capital firms in California. Her LinkedIn profile showed she a had finance degree from Stanford and another one from NYU. Everything seemed to check out, with what little checking Sam did. So, when Kristina reached out to the 53-year-old consultant about investing, he listened.

    “I work in finance, and have been for a long time,” Kristina explained to Sam on WhatsApp after initially reaching out on LinkedIn. “I have all these excellent products. We multiply money. We do well doing it. We give good returns to people.”
    Good returns, Sam thought.

    It’s not like he needed them. Since moving to the U.S. in the late nineties, Sam assembled a nice suburban life in Northeast Ohio. He married. He finished his doctorate. He raised his family. He made upper middle class money.

    And he invested. He had his reliable sources—an E-Trade account, a Roth IRA, a wallet of crypto coins. Three-thousand dollars wasn’t a big deal to toss into the bucket, even if tied to some random finance director off LinkedIn.

    “What kind of returns?” Sam said.

    “Good ones. I have been doing this successfully for some time,” Kristina wrote. “I would like to give you a try.”

    What do I have to lose, Sam thought.

    As instructed, he opened up Coinbase, an app used to buy and manage a variety of cryptocurrencies, and clicked the link Kristina had sent. The portal, “Dexproaeg,” was foreign to him. But there were myriad coins on the market, and anyone could digitally mint the next shining sleeper—Andrew Tate, Iggy Azalea, Donald Trump, the Hawk Tuah Girl. He bought $3,000.

    Thirty seconds later, the app surprised Sam. The number clocked up to $8,000.
    Wow, this is very good, Sam thought. He looked out at his yard, then back to his phone. His hands shook as he transferred the money to his Chase account. He had stumbled on the world’s greatest secret. How didn’t I know this before?

    WhatsApp dinged.

    “Oh by the way,” Kristina said, “what kind of car do you drive?”

    Sam didn’t really want to say. Nissan. Who cared? It was just a car.

    A photo appeared. It was a Bugatti Chiron, a two-door hypercar that retails well over $3 million. It was right there, sitting in Kristina’s garage in Los Angeles. And then, the yacht. The $5 million yacht Kristina was pondering selling after summer ended. Was it real? Kristina’s area code was Los Angeles County—310. She’d sent her location at Sam’s request: the Malibu Country Mart mall off Highway 1. (Where they would meet in-person one day, Kristina said.) But I don’t even boat, Sam thought.

    He opened up his Chase account and sent $100,000. He ignored the questionnaire that popped up: “Where are you sending this money?”, “Did anyone tell you to wire this money?”, “Did you meet someone online?”

    $185,000, the app read. I can’t believe it.

    “Can you talk?” Kristina wrote.

    She was calling! Sam was going to talk to Kristina. Should he? What would his wife think? It was just platonic; this was a business relationship. He opened the call. There she was on video, with her parted black hair, red lipstick and eyebrows like half moons.

    “Hi,” Sam said.

    “Hey, how are you doing?,” Kristina said in a dense Chinese accent, sitting in a plush, white chair in front of a wall of fashion books. “We need to hedge against the risk. Do you know what that means?”

    “Yes, I know what that means.”

    “We’re doing good,” she said. She sent Sam a screenshot of her app, showing returns totaling $300,000. “You know, we could make a few million per month, provided we have enough capital in the account. You could, if you wanted to, buy a $12 million house in LA. We could make at least $3 million per month—we just need to invest for four, five months.”

    Sam laughed. “I’m not in a rush to get a $12 million house,” Sam told her. He wasn’t. Maybe secure his kids’ future. Maybe double his current net worth. Beef up his retirement.

    “I just got back from Hawaii. Do you like Hawaii?” Kristina said. “You could make similar trips. You could do anything you’re unable to do in your life.”

    “Oh okay,” Sam said.

    Sam went to bed four nights in a row mulling over Kristina. It felt like a tryst. No one knew. Not his wife, his daughters, his best friend. Nevertheless, Sam threw over $500,000 into Kristina’s crypto account by the end of that week at the end of July.

    That Thursday, Sam woke up in the middle of the night. There was a ding on his phone. He rolled over and saw he’d received an email. It wasn’t from Kristina. Which relieved Sam: she had been texting and calling ad nauseam, urging him to throw yet another $100,000 into the account.

    It was an email from an FBI agent in Des Moines, Iowa.

    “Dear Sam,” it read. “Based on your recent transactions, we have identified you as a potential victim to a cryptocurrency scam, one that will make you deposit money…” He shut his phone immediately.

    The next day, Sam opened up WhatsApp. A reverse image search confirmed that “Kristina Tian”—her LinkedIn profile name—was actually a picture of Chinese influencer Eliana Jing. There was no Kristina Tian.

    “Master manipulator,” Sam wrote.

    “I feel for you,” Kristina wrote a day later. “You’re a good pig, just not fat enough. But thank you for giving me half of your savings.”

    “Wrong,” Sam said. “You were not close enough.”

    “Lol, I enjoyed it. And thank you for the money so I can find more.” She sent a crazy eyes emoji. “Glad to use your life savings.”

    ***

    Fattening up a pig, as many farmers know, boils down to two main principles. One, keeping that pig on a consistent stream of hearty foods, of soybeans or barley, maybe vegetable oils or tallow. And second, minimizing stress: keep access to feed easy, space luscious and outside animals away.

    This, to keep the metaphor going, is what cryptocurrency scammers have gotten really, really good at doing: casting a dragnet across the world—from the homes of the United Kingdom to Tempe, Arizona—and locating pigs worth fattening up over time, over months or even years. And then, only when they’ve reached the apex of their plumpness, bring those pigs to slaughter.

    In the world of internet crimes, this is known as pig butchering, and it is by far the biggest and most worrisome digital crime for authorities in the past decade. Bitcoin’s explosion on the Stock Exchange, dovetailed with years of pandemic boredom, smartphone ubiquity and ease of access to a trove of apps—Crypto.com, Binance, Coinbase—have helped facilitate the most popular and devastating financial crime today with global reach. And its victim count and perpetrator base, from Southeast Asia to Central Ohio, only continues to grow.

    The sheer amount of money sent, and lost, in online scams is pretty staggering, according to a 2024 report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complain Center. Money lost around the globe, whether it be from shady toll scams or from fake lovers, has quadrupled in the past five years, from $4 billion reported lost in 2020 to almost $17 billion last year. And crypto tops every single category, from number of complaints to amount of money lost. (It’s the number one leading digital crime reported in Ohio.) And the complaints just keep on coming. In 2020, crypto-related grifts tallied in the four figures; last year, there were 150,000.

    And that’s not even the toughest fact. In your typical wire fraud case, there’s about an 80 percent chance you’ll get your money back if you report it to the Feds within three days. In interviews with three investment scam experts, all told me that the chances of getting your money back after it’s entered the blockchain is less than 10 percent.

    “‘Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you.’ That’s usually how I start most of these conversations,” Steven Stransky, a cybersecurity expert at the Thompson Hine law firm, told me. Stransky, who helps the scammed—which include everyone from retired Clevelanders to investment arms of corporations—enter the sluggish legal process of getting money back, said the odds of returning a faux crypto investment is a lot thinner. “I would say that I’ve seen less than one percent of my clients be able to recover lost finances.”

    “My experience,” he added, “is that it’s almost never recoverable.”

    Therein lies the goal of the Midwestern Cryptocurrency Task Force: to fight against that almost never. Here, in a second-story room in the Cleveland FBI office off Lakeside Avenue, is the hardest-working group of agents between New York and Chicago in the world of crypto crimes.

    click to enlarge Agent Milan Kosanovich at his office - Mark Oprea

    Mark Oprea

    Agent Milan Kosanovich at his office

    Started by Special Agent Milan Kosanovich in 2018 to combat the astonishing influx of reports to the IC3, the MCTF comprises about a dozen financial crime experts across Northern Ohio and acts as an investigative link between two of the FBI’s largest crypto-tailored operations in its history—Operation Level Up and Operation Golden Sweep, the latter Kosanovich kicked off in 2023. The goal: perfect the job of tracing digital breadcrumbs along the blockchain, the global ledger of coin trading, from the scam center in China or Myanmar to, say, Sam in Solon’s wallet. And try and get the money back.

    “The problem is this: everything in the blockchain— Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON—once you send it, you can’t undo it,” Kosanovich told me. “It’s gone. Type in the wrong address? It’s gone. You can’t call Mr. Bitcoin or Mrs. Bitcoin, and say, ‘Hey, can you undo that transaction?’”

    About a year after he first made contact with Sam, Kosanovich invited me to watch him work, in the command center of the MCTF, in July. He keeps cleanly-cut, salt-and-pepper hair, and wears a flag pin on the chest of a black-and-white suit straight out of Men in Black. A former hostage negotiator, Kosanovich has lectured on finance crimes in 11 countries, is a member of the FBI’s Cyber Criminal Squad and was once a supervisor for the bureau’s Economic Crimes Unit in Washington, D.C. He keeps a glass-is-half-full demeanor in, it seems, every realm of his life. “I’m of the opinion that anything’s better than nothing.”

    At a desk holding a wall of computer monitors, Kosanovich brought up a simulation of a typical exchange on the blockchain. In a diagram that resembled a series of jellyfish tied together, sixty-year-old “Jonathan” from Utah sent money to a wallet with a specific code. The transfer’s public, so Kosanovich traces the transaction as far through the blockchain as he can go. This is essentially a game of hot potato. If, say, the transfer’s been identified trickling to and from a series of wallets on Kraken or Tether, then Kosanovich records that information from the ledger to build a case.

    But trying to find the money is like trying to nab a package without knowing what the delivery truck looks like. And scammers know this. Money deposited in their wallets is almost immediately lifted, usually in just an hour, to another wallet. And then another. Then, finally, with the help of hired mules, into a bank account tied to the operators themselves. Which is the gold of Golden Sweep: pinpointing exactly where money has been and will soon go. And do that in minutes.

    “I spend a lot of time going to other people’s desks. ‘Have you seen this before? Have you seen that?’” Kosanovich told me. He traced his cursor through the hoops and lines of the blockchain diagram. It stopped at the final wallet address, a lengthy line of characters, one still in the pocket of the crypto service, Tether. Kosanovich was so attuned to what he was doing that he barely flinched at the shouts from the hostage negotiation training going on next door.

    Kosanovich stood up and pointed to the wallet. “If it gets here? We can freeze that money,” he said. “And if we can’t? It’s gone. That is the dance and the challenge of this work.”

    ***

    Her name, the presentation file said, is Jessica. She’s 33 years old, five-and-a-half feet tall, weighs just over 110 pounds. She’s a Leo—“a spirited fire sign”—and was the child of a binational marriage, an American father and Belarusian mother. She’s “pleasing,” “attractive” and “elegant.”

    Jessica is also a go-getting entrepreneur, a college graduate aspiring to resurrect her dream of opening a clothing studio. But three years in she has hit a roadblock. She wants to “scale up” her business with top-shelf designs, and doing so requires a heap of money she doesn’t have access to by normal means. “Faced with this problem,” Jessica said, “I’m stuck with funding.” Jessica, as would have it, is direly looking to invest in some cryptocurrency.

    But Jessica, you must know, is not real. She is a character created by supervisors at a massive scam compound called KK Park, an enclosed village with offices and hotels on the border of Myanmar and western Thailand. There, hundreds of trafficked workers—mostly bilingual Chinese jobseekers tricked by bait-and-switch ads—are forced to message hundreds, if not thousands, of people a day. If they don’t, they’re laid in between rows of computers and punched or smacked with metal pipes; others are tied in crucifixion poses or electrocuted. But they are all, involuntarily and opportunistically, Jessica.

    Against the backdrop of Myanmar’s civil war, which has been pummeling the country’s economy since May 2021, a wave of rebel groups has since then capitalized on the country’s areas with lax or unenforced laws. And in the past four years, Southeast Asia has exploded with compounds like KK Park: one 2023 report from the UN counted 17 of them, from the northern tip of Myanmar to the southern border of Cambodia. That’s over 220,000 scammers, the report found, that operate in the hierarchical fashion of, say, a midsized tech company. Well, with a culture closer to a prison. “You have everything you need,” one expert put it. “Because once you enter, you can’t leave.”

    It was highly likely—Kosanovich suggested 99 percent likely—that Kristina Tian, the supposed investor that grifted Sam in Solon, was a character created by one of these compounds. A reality hard to swallow for people like Sam and the FBI. The vast majority of those on the other end of those strange texts (“Hey how are you?”, “When are we meeting for dinner tonight?”), LinkedIn DMs, or shady Tinder profiles are trafficked victims of scams themselves.

    Which begs the question: How does a government agency 8,500 miles away from Mae Sot, Thailand, catch and prosecute people who have scammed hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans out of billions of dollars?

    “The ultimate goal is not the person on the phone; it’s the person directing the person on the phone,” Kosanovich told me. “They’re the one orchestrating all of this. That’s why we want to give people their money back: we don’t want those funds to go to the back end.”

    A lot of the work on the ground lies in links between anti-scam organizations and Southeast Asian militaries. In February, China, Myanmar and Thailand backed rescue raids of scam compounds, including KK Park. Over 7,000 trafficked victims were rescued and set up for repatriation come March. Electricity was shut off to others. “But that has not stopped anything,” one worker for the International Justice Mission said. “Not even for one day.”

    While reporting this story, in the beginning of July, I, like countless others, got yet another scam text. It’s from Joanna. A Joanna from LinkedIn’s HR team who wants to know if I’m up for a new job. I say yes and soon I’m talking to Mireille on WhatsApp. She wants a screenshot of the text from Joanna. I say no. I say, “This just seems weird to me. Can’t we just talk about the job?”

    “Due to limited availability,” Mireille writes, “we need to see the text message in order to receive the training.”

    “I’m so confused!” I write. “Is this a real job or not?”

    “I need to see the time of the text message,” she said. “Of course it’s true.” Joanna is the recruiter, she said, and she is a “staff member for this company.”

    At that, my attempt to be annoying simmers into a cold guilt: What if my tomfoolery leads to this person, this Mireille, into a day’s worth of flogging?

    I open up Google Translate, then send the following in Chinese, for which I never get a reply: “Where are you?” I text. “Are you okay?”

    ***

    At the end of last year, a few months after the FBI reached out to him, Sam found out that he was one of the luckiest of victims. Recent operations helped freeze and seize $8.2 million from Tether, including $1.1 million tied to four local victims, Sam and his $507,562 being one of them.

    They are all waiting to get their money back from the U.S. government through the forfeiture process, DOJ attorney James Morford told me.

    These are bizarre cases. They’re not against the scammers. The money itself, Morford said, is the defendant. Sam must prove the $500,000 was really his money as it entered and then went through Coinbase. “Simply stated,” Morford said, Sam “must demonstrate that he obtained the funds legitimately.”

    Assuming it goes smoothly, Sam will have his money back by the beginning of 2027.

    A startling fact considering that no one in his life knows he lost a half million to a crypto scam. “My wife doesn’t know. My kids don’t know,” Sam reminded me recently over coffee. Sam smiles as he talks—and he talks a lot—as if he was chitchatting about a botched bet on a baseball game, not the equivalent of someone’s life savings. “I’ll put it this way. I have a best friend. We’ve been friends for 25 years now. We share everything. About our families. Work.” Sam sipped his coffee, and said, “But I would never, never tell him about this.”

    Halfway through our meeting, Sam took out his phone to answer a text. It’s a message on WhatsApp, he showed me, from a Jessica. “I do this every day,” he said, scrolling through a conversation about cooking tips. There are dozens of chats with Asian women with American names. “I’m not kidding. Every day there is someone new. Whoever reaches out to me, I just keep them engaged. And once the engagement does end, I tell them exactly who they are and their intentions.”

    “What do you say?”

    Sam laughed and scrolled to a recent comment. It was to Jessica.

    “Yeah you are looking for a fat pig to butcher, aren’t you?” Sam had written.

    “And then you block them,” I said.

    “Yes, and then I block them.”

    And that $500,000? What will Sam do with it once the check clears in a year and a half? I expected a reverie about retirement. Instead, he smiled monkishly. He looked around at the other café goers, then back to me.

    “That’s the thing about money,” he said. “It will deteriorate your health. Your well-being. Your thinking. Your demeanor. And it’s not like the entire world is bad, right? It’s not like everybody is bad, right?”

    “But I guess that’s my one piece of advice,” Sam said. “Don’t trust somebody if they just randomly bumped into you.”

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Cleveland Heights Voters Overwhelmingly Decide to Oust Mayor Seren in Recall Election

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    Mark Oprea

    Over 80 percent of voters decided Cleveland Heights Mayor Kahlil Seren was no longer fit for office, Tuesday’s election results show.

    Voters in Cleveland Heights decided to recall embattled Mayor Kahlil Seren in Tuesday’s election, the results from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections showed in an unofficial count.

    As of Wednesday morning, 8,307 voters turned out to polls across the city to cast their decision on the issue; a whopping 6,829 of them decided that Seren was no longer fit to lead. The city needed a simple majority to oust Seren three months before the end of his term in January.

    Josie Moore, a 2021 mayoral candidate that helped back Seren’s recall campaign, said she believes Cleveland Heights made the right decision.

    “The people of Cleveland Heights were clear: we could not afford to wait,” Moore told Scene. “We must now act to protect our city.”

    “This wasn’t about politics. It was about responsibility,” she added. “To our city employees, to our finances and to our future.”

    After the results are certified on September 26, Cleveland Heights’ first elected mayor will be forced to concede his seat to City Council President Tony Cuda, who will act as mayor until January 1.

    In early June, Moore and a handful of colleagues traversed Cleveland Heights with fellow supporters to try and validate a recall they all felt was long overdue. They collected 3,845 signatures—well over the 2,900 needed.

    Seren, they claimed, was unfit to lead. He and wife Natalie McDaniel had become embroiled in a series of scandals, including anti-semitic remarks, multiple instances of unprofessional behavior, allegations of wiretapping, and McDaniel’s indictment on trespassing charges.

    There was, Moore and others wrote in a letter this summer, “a pattern of leadership failures that place the city at risk.” Those that, they claimed, led to “extremely high” staff turnover, the resignation of three city administrators and a my-way-or-the-highway take on management that “fostered public alarm and distrust.”

    Seren’s successor will undeniably have to tackle issues of trust when they take the seat from Cuda in January.

    In Tuesday’s primary mayoral election, Jim Petras and Davida Russell, both on Cleveland Heights City Council, finished with roughly 28 percent of the vote each. The two will face off in a general election in November.

    Cleveland Heights City Hall has not released an official statement on the election results thus far, and did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

    “We will not speculate about outcomes. We will await the Board of Elections’ official results and, as required, certification,” Seren wrote in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

    Mark Oprea

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  • Five Takeaways From the Cleveland City Council Primary Results

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    Seven Cleveland City Council wards saw competitive primaries on Tuesday, including one open seat, one featuring two incumbents, and one with an embattled sitting councilman facing censure.

    Turnout, as all expected, was dismal. Just about 7% of registered voters — a little under 9,000 — cast ballots citywide.

    There were no surprises, and there’s only so much you can tease out from the results given the turnout and races. But even with incumbents coming out of the gate strong, a few storylines emerged that are worth following in the coming weeks ahead of the November general election.

    1. Tanmay Shah Has a Real Shot in Ward 12

    Incumbent Danny Kelly came away with 669 votes, according to unofficial results from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, with challenger Tanmay Shah tallying 422 and moving on to November. Andrew DeFratis, the other challenger in the ward, drew 268 votes.

    The ward saw by far the tightest gap between incumbent and challenger, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see DeFratis voters moving to Shah’s camp this fall. Kelly has faced vocal backlash after going to war to turn a vacant CVS on Madison into a gas station proposed by two of his previous campaign donors. It struck many as a bizarre and unnecessary use of political capital on an issue that had widespread community opposition.

    Shah, a union organizer and attorney who was endorsed and supported by the progressive A Better Cleveland for All PAC, looks to have made significant inroads in the ward given last night’s results. And with the two challengers together receiving more votes than Kelly — the only instance of that happening across Tuesday’s races — there seems to be a clear sentiment that makes Kelly the most vulnerable incumbent on the ballot.

    2. Rebecca Maurer Has Ground to Make Up in Ward 5

    Forced to lose two wards, Cleveland’s redistricting process was bound to bring some interesting incumbent-on-incumbent races.

    The new Ward 5, covering Central, Downtown, Slavic Village and Kinsman, is one of them.

    Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer, who vigorously opposed the process and results of the new maps, was drawn into a race against fellow councilman Richard Starr.

    Whereas Maurer’s current ward was split into parts of six new ones, Starr’s current ward includes much of the new turf, including Central. The questions have been how Maurer would fare in the predominantly African-American ward and how turnout Downtown would impact the race.

    Early results weren’t entirely surprising given those facts, with Starr receiving 627 votes compared to Maurer’s 229.

    But given Maurer’s upset win against 16-year incumbent Tony Brancatelli in 2021 and the ground game that it took to make that happen, there’s certainly reason to believe the margin won’t look the same later this year.

    “I am happy to be moving on to the November 4 general election,” Maurer told Scene Wednesday morning. “But I am disappointed in both the low primary turnout numbers and the spread. Our goal is to continue our work of door knocking and community building so that the vote in the general is based on the will of the voters across all of Ward 5.”

    3. Scandals Haven’t Dampened Support for Joe Jones in Ward 1

    Facing a censure vote from his colleagues after a string of investigations into misconduct allegations, Joe Jones nevertheless took home 1,070 votes in Tuesday’s primary. Current State Rep. Juanita Brent received 537 and will advance to the November general while other challengers collected negligible votes. (Aylwin Bridges – 47; Lesa Jones Dollar – 69; Marc Crosby – 48.)

    Jones has been accused of threatening to kill a City Hall staff member, of making inappropriate comments to a female artist, of touching the breast of a staffer, and of general bullying behavior. Despite all that, he received enough votes from the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party’s executive committee to receive the group’s endorsement, not only in the original vote but in a re-vote following news of the latest investigation. (This is not entirely surprising given how members of the executive committee are selected.)

    Juanita Brent entered the race late and, though a Cleveland native from the ward she hopes to represent and boasting name power as a multi-term state representative, didn’t kick off her campaign as early as other challengers. Does the impending censure vote change anything? Can Brent make headway in the closing weeks? Will there be an investigation into some new misconduct allegation in the coming weeks? Anything is possible, including Jones continuing to shed scandals on the way to victory.

    4. Ward 7 Remains One of the City’s Most Interesting Races

    A Cleveland City Council election with no incumbent is a rarity up there with a Browns playoff berth. We have two this year, including the new Ward 7. Austin Davis led primary results with 950 votes followed by Mohammad Faraj with 564. Mike Rogalski received 187 and will not advance to the general.

    Spanning Tremont, Ohio City, Downtown and Detroit-Shoreway, Ward 7 includes some of the most engaged voters in Cleveland. While Davis enjoys early momentum, the race that we thought would be one of the most interesting in the city looks like it will be exactly that. And, as weird as it sounds, we’re curious where Rogalski supporters will migrate to, as his platform never really overlapped with either that of Davis and Faraj.

    5. It’s Still Early

    While we’re reading into some of these results, it is with the caveat that two months remain in the campaigns and primary results with a turnout in the single digits doesn’t necessarily represent how voters who will only cast ballots in the general feel.

    As always, some of these are going to come down to turnout. (We wouldn’t be surprised if one of them is decided by a few dozen votes.) So get out to some events and learn more about the candidates in the coming weeks, and then get your ass to your polling place in November.

    Other results not covered above:

    Ward 3: Deborary Gray comfortably advances to November with 654 votes while the race for second place to run against her was decided by just 16 ballots, with Erich Stubbs advancing (129) over Sharon Spruill (113).

    Ward 8: Stephanie Howse Jones (562 votes) will face Charlotte Perkins (172 votes) in November.

    Ward 9: Kevin Conwell receieved 938 votes. He’ll face Alana Belle (218 votes) in the general.

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    Vince Grzegorek

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  • Signal Ohio Workers Walk Out Amidst Stalled Bargaining Talks

    Signal Cleveland

    Staff at the civic-minded journalism nonprofit walked out on Tuesday amidst a statewide push for a union.

    Signal Ohio journalists in three cities walked out of their jobs for two hours on Tuesday to protest what they say are delays in negotiating with management and management’s current insistence that each city be its own bargaining unit, instead of a single, unified group.

    Since late August, roughly 14 full-time reporters—in Cleveland, Akron and Columbus—have pushed a union drive as a natural next step for the well-funded, three-year-old nonprofit journalism outlet. Signal has 35 employees total; 80 percent signed union cards.

    Employees walked out at noon today after publicly chastising management for hiring Jackson Lewis, a law firm know for its aggressive anti-union tactics, to handle discussions instead of voluntarily recognzing the union.

    The forming group, the Signal Ohio News Workers Guild, said they would bring the National Labor Relations Board into the mix if their single union isn’t recognized by 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

    “We’ve tried to address issues in-house,” reporter Doug Brown, of Signal Akron, wrote. “But ultimately our union is made up of courageous people who have dedicated their careers to accountability, transparency, and community—so here we are.”

    “It’s been a long, disappointing two weeks of silence from our leadership,” reporter Amy Morona said. “There’s still time for them to do the right thing by recognizing our statewide news organization as one bargaining unit.”

    A message to Signal Ohio executives was not returned by Tuesday afternoon.

    Late last week, in response to questions about the current state of negotiations, the organization issued a statement to Scene on behalf of Signal Ohio CEO Rita McNeil Danish and Board President Doug Ulman saying:

    “Signal Ohio is a beacon of hope for local journalism after decades of decline in newsrooms. Local news is essential in our communities, and Signal Ohio is determined to be one of the leaders in forging that path forward.

    “We respect unionization and the rights of any employee to explore joining a union, and we are committed to fostering a work environment of mutual respect, where all employees are fully informed and comfortable making their own decision about this very important issue.

    “We have agreed to recognize the right of our employees to organize and while there are many details to work out, we look forward to negotiating through this process and reaching an agreement that is fair for all and continues to put the communities we are privileged to serve at the forefront.”

    Some 28 Signal Ohio employees are set to join the Northeast Ohio NewsGuild, Local 34001 of Communications Workers of America. They would join four other Northeast Ohio newsrooms at Local 1, including the Canton Repository.

    Mark Oprea

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  • Homeschooling in Ohio Is Seeing Another Recent Surge After Spiking During the Pandemic

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    Mark Oprea

    CMSD school buses outside last year’s State of the Schools.

    More Ohio students are being homeschooled now than during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

    The number of Ohio students being homeschooled was trending upward pre-pandemic, spiked to about 51,500 students during the COVID-19 pandemic and dipped back down slightly. 

    But homeschooling recently saw another surge with about 53,000 homeschooled students during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. 

    The number of homeschooled students in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce: 

    • 2023-24: 53,051 students
    • 2022-23: 47,468 students
    • 2021-22: 47,491 students
    • 2020-21: 51,502 students
    • 2019-20: 33,328 students
    • 2018-19: 32,887 students
    • 2017-18: 30,923 students

    There were about 3.1 million home schooled students nationwide in 2021-22 — quite the jump from 2.5 million in spring 2019, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. 

    “Home schooling was already on a slightly slower upward trajectory, and had been for a number of years,” said Douglas J. Pietersma, research associate at National Home Education Research Institute. “What COVID did, from our perspective, is just infused it.” 

    He expects the number of home schooled students to keep growing. 

    “It’s not going to put public schools out of business or anything like that, but it’s going to be a slow growth that is certainly going to be measurable over time,” Pietersma said. 

    Remote learning during the pandemic made parents become more aware of what was being taught in schools, said Melanie Elsey, Christian Home Educators of Ohio’s legislative liaison. 

    “I don’t think that it was a mass exodus from the public or private schools into homeschooling, but for parents who felt like they could accomplish more with one-on-one attention to learning … You can tailor the education to meet the needs of their children,” she said. 

    Not everyone who switched to homeschooling stayed after the pandemic, Elsey said. 

    “Some of them put their children back in because it was too much of a commitment,” she said. “So I think it was sort of a time period that parents felt comfortable trying something different to see if they could help their children learn more.” 

    The modern home education movement sprung out of the 1970s and “skyrocketed” in the 1980s, Pietersma said. 

    “People were either upset with the quality of education in general,” he said. “Then another group of people, it was more about the content of education.”

    Today there are many reasons why a family might opt for homeschooling. 

    “Obviously, the quality of education is still one of the big issues,” Pietersma said. “Safety issues are a huge thing. People who have had their children in schools where they’ve been bullied or assaulted or had exposure to drugs … given the size of school, it may be not impossible to prevent some of those things.”

    The reason for homeschooling varies and it is not always because a family is not satisfied with their local school district, Elsey said. 

    She homeschooled her children, but did not originally think it was for her family. However, she changed her mind after she enjoyed being home with her children through their preschool years. 

    “We prayed about it and really felt like it was something that was worthwhile,” Elsey said. 

    Jeannine Ramer has homeschooled her four children — two are now in college and two (ages 17 and 13) are currently being homeschooled. 

    “Homeschooling has really strengthened our family relationships, my kids are very, very close and supportive of one another, and I think that’s all of the hours spent at home and just really learning together,” said Ramer, who lives in Alliance.

    They were not initially planning on homeschooling their children, but Ramer’s sister-in-law homeschooled her children and encouraged them to think about it as their oldest approached preschool age. 

    They decided to try it for a year or two, but found it worked well for their family. 

    “We loved it,” Ramer said. “We’ve had the ability to tailor each child’s education to that child.”

    A parent does not need to be a licensed teacher in order to homeschool their children, Elsey said. 

    “It’s amazing how well families do because they have access to resources, really, all over the world, when you can get curriculum from anywhere that meets the needs of your students to learn to pursue their interests,” she said. 

    Families who decide to homeschool their children enjoy the flexibility, Pietersma said. 

    “They can tailor the education that they’re providing to their child in so many ways that an institutional school can’t just because of sheer numbers,” he said. “One teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t take the lesson plan and tailor it to each of the 30 students.”

    Ramer’s oldest child was interested in printing and design work as a teenager, so they were able to craft his high school education to those areas. Now he is studying industrial and innovative design in college. 

    “It just allowed us the ability to foster that,” she said. “There was much more flexibility.” 

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Co-Owner of Flats Bar Boarded Up by Bibb Says Establishment Had Nothing to Do With Mass Shooting

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    Mark Oprea

    Play Bar & Grill, at 1051 West 10th in the Flats East Bank, was where Cleveland Police believe a fight originated on Sunday evening, one that left six people shot. Its owner denies any involvement.

    Play Bar & Grill, the venue where Cleveland Police believe a Sunday night confrontation that ended in a barrage of gunfire began, remains covered in plywood as authorities carry out an investigation some say shouldn’t involve the bar in the first place.

    The move comes at the hands of Mayor Justin Bibb, who, some hours after the shooting occurred at 6:12 p.m. Sunday, directed officials to “immediately shut down and board up” Play Bar & Grill as authorities collected shell casings around the block. Six people, including the alleged shooter, were injured.

    “We will hold everyone accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” Bibb said in a statement.

    Such a reaction by the city prompted Play Bar & Grill’s owners to speak out in protest of what they see as excessively knee-jerk and inappropriate.

    The shooting “was not on this property, not on the premises at all,” co-owner David Hill said in an Instagram video on Sunday. “They were shooting down the street.”

    “You can’t make this up, y’all—the only Black-owned business in the Flats,” he said. “Black Mayor Justin Bibb made the decision [to close Play] without no investigation, no paperwork!”

    Hill contended nothing happened in his bar that precipitated the shooting and that the gunfire erupted after Play had already closed for the day due to excessive crowds.

    No suspect has been named in Sunday’s incident, although Cleveland Police said in a statement to Scene that they are amongst the victims taken to the hospital by EMS.

    click to enlarge Cleveland Police reiterated Monday afternoon that they believe the confrontation that sparked Sunday's mass shooting began at Play Bar & Grill, then trickled outside onto West 10th and Front Ave. - Mark Oprea

    Mark Oprea

    Cleveland Police reiterated Monday afternoon that they believe the confrontation that sparked Sunday’s mass shooting began at Play Bar & Grill, then trickled outside onto West 10th and Front Ave.

    In a press conference Monday afternoon, Chief Dorothy Todd reiterated CPD’s belief that the altercation originated inside Play. Todd also clarified their were six people shot in sum; roughly 40 shell casings, a city spokesperson told Scene, were found around Front Ave. and West 10th.

    “This is still an active investigation,” CPD said. “We will provide additional information as it becomes available.”

    The city can close a business by emergency order. Play’s ownership will have a chance to contest the order, though Hill told media on Monday he yet wasn’t informed of how or when.

    A representative for Flats East Bank did not return a message for comment. Its website does not list Play Bar & Grill as of Monday afternoon.

    Online, many seemed to support Hill’s business and balk at Bibb’s choice to put up plywood as the investigation is carried out.

    “People did the shooting,” one commented. “Why is the bar being punished for it?”

    “That is like charging a driver to fill a pothole,” another wrote, “because they drove over it.”



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    Mark Oprea

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  • Ohio Lawmaker Proposes Three Bills to Rein in Property Taxes, Working Group Debates Deferrals

    click to enlarge

    The Ohio Channel

    Sponsor (R) Rep. Gary Click

    Ohio state Rep. Gary Click is joining the chorus of Ohio officials floating ideas to rein in property taxes.

    The Vickery Republican recently introduced a “trilogy” of property tax reforms restricting what levies are available, potentially requiring more of them to go to the voters and imposing higher thresholds to pass more expensive levies.

    “I know that our constituents are demanding a response, and this is me saying, ‘I’m listening,’” Click said.

    His ideas join several others up for debate. A handful of proposals would cap the growth in property taxes — either to a specific percentage, the rate of inflation or based on a homeowner’s wealth. Others would expand the homestead exemption.

    After vetoing several property tax measures in the state budget, Gov. Mike DeWine put together a new working group to come up with suggestions as well. The group continues to meet and is tasked with sharing their ideas at the end of the month.

    Click’s trio

    The first bill Click filed, House Bill 420, would eliminate continuing levies. In short, every property tax proposal on the ballot after 2030 would need to have an end date.

    “We’re not saying that these are bad levies that are out there,” Click said. “But it’s saying, okay, each generation should have a voice in saying ‘I understand what I’m paying this tax for, I agree, or I disagree.’ I think that’s too much, or not enough, or whatever it is, but that each generation gets to have their voice heard.”

    State Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)

    Continuing levies filed prior to that cutoff would expire unless they were approved to pay for bonds. Any taxes that did expire as a result of the bill would be eligible for renewal, but taxing authorities would have to take the proposal to the ballot.

    Click’s second measure allows local organizers to reduce what’s known as “inside millage.” The Ohio Constitution allows local authorities to levy up to 10 mills (or 1%) in property taxes without going to the voters. Anything beyond that amount requires voter approval. House Bill 421 would allow petitioners to go to the ballot to lower that 10-mill ceiling further.

    Organizers would need to gather signatures from 15% of the area’s voters in the most recent gubernatorial election to get the question on the ballot. The bill also requires two-thirds approval from local taxing authorities to put the question of restoring the 10-mill ceiling on the ballot.

    “What works in Sandusky County might not work in Seneca County; what works in Seneca County might not work in Crawford County or Marion County,” Click argued. “And so each county gets to assess and look at the situation, and what works for their community, rather than imposing a statewide assessment on property.”

    His last proposal, House Bill 422, would require supermajority support for proposals with higher millage rates. Levies of less than one mill (or 0.1%) could pass with a simple majority, but those of one mill to 1.9 mills would need at least 60% approval and those of two mills or more would have to clear 66%.

    “The more you want, the more you ask for, the higher the bar is going to be,” Click said.

    His second and third proposals, however, could test the boundaries within the state constitution. The Ohio Constitution sets the terms, barring local authorities from taxing property “in excess of one per cent of its true value” unless those levies are “approved by at least a majority of the electors.”

    Whether courts would interpret that section as guaranteeing 10 mills of unvoted property tax or a simple majority standard for additional levies is an open question. So far, Click said, he hasn’t heard any warning about constitutional conflicts.

    Working group check in

    The governor’s working group continues to wrestle with recommendations for lawmakers. At its most recent hearing, the group debated a pair of delay tactics.

    First, the working group considered offering some kind of deferral for homeowners hit with eye-popping property tax bills. But even that simple idea raises a host of other questions. Should it be one-time or renewable? Should the state charge interest? What about minimum requirements — do homeowners need a certain amount of equity or ownership history?

    The group largely settled on capping deferrals at a dollar amount whether they run once or consecutively. It also nixed the idea of charging interest, while leaving the door open for charging an administrative fee. In terms of minimum requirements, a home equity benchmark was popular, but Warren County Auditor Matt Nolan explained it would be difficult to assess.

    “You know, I can pull your mortgage to see what you took a mortgage out for,” he said, “but I can’t see how much you’ve paid down on that or not, and are there other outstanding liens that aren’t recorded?”

    Instead, the group landed on a 10-year home ownership minimum as a decent proxy. The members also seemed open to making ownership transferrable, so seniors who downsize don’t wind up resetting the clock.

    But not everyone was on board with deferrals. Lake County Auditor Chris Galloway likened pushing off payment amounts to kicking the can down the road.

    “It doesn’t change what somebody’s tax liability is,” Galloway said. “All we’re doing is changing the taking — collecting those taxes from grandma or her corpse, right?”

    Instead, Galloway suggested lawmakers pause property tax increases temporarily while they come up with a comprehensive response.

    “The idea behind it is to, like, hit the pause button somehow,” he said. “To stop the outrage, to stop the bleeding, to be able to say, let’s give ourselves some time to fix this problem right.”

    Auditors would still go forward with assessing properties and updating valuations, but tax bills would hold steady. That delay might give lawmakers time to pass legislation like House Bill 186 — an idea popular with working group members that would limit tax increases to the rate of inflation.

    But other working group members, particularly Chair Bill Seitz, seemed skeptical of the idea. Those paused tax increases would eventually come due, and in the meantime, the benefits would land unevenly. For instance, Galloway acknowledged taxpayers who saw spikes after last year’s reassessments, including those in his county, wouldn’t get any immediate relief.

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Ohio Lawmaker Wants Utilities to Give Customers Rebates for Reducing Power Use

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    (Photo by Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal.)

    Rep. Roy Klopfenstein, R-Haviland, describing his bill on the Ohio House floor.

    Ohioans could soon be able to sign up for programs that reduce their energy bills in exchange for allowing the utility to dial back their consumption. These demand response programs already exist for big energy consumers like factories, but state Rep. Roy Klopfenstein, R-Haviland, thinks residential consumers should have the opportunity as well.

    “This is one more tool in the toolbox that gives the distribution folks, the ability to manage the power so those that need it the most — and you can put whatever you want in there — that they are never without power,” he said.

    In a press release describing the measure, House Bill 427, Klopfenstein offers a few examples. Utilities might roll back your smart thermostat on a really hot day, or cycle home appliances like your water heater.

    Klopfenstein’s measure doesn’t specify the exact terms of a program. Instead, it directs state regulators to consider proposals from utilities so long as the programs are voluntary and open to everyone. It also requires that customers can override the power reductions. The Public Utility Commission of Ohio gets tasked with weighing whether programs are cost-effective for consumers and offer long-term savings to the energy grid.

    Many states offer demand response programs for residential customers, with varying incentive or rebate structures. In California, for instance, PG&E’s Power Saver Rewards Program notifies customers that demand is high and then gives them a dollar per kWh of power they save.

    “My rural cooperative has had a radio control on my electric hot water heater probably for 40 years,” Klopfenstein said. “This gives them the ability to shut the hot water heater off to limit demand during peak times. And in 40 years, I have never recognized when it was shut off.”

    Although he got paid up-front to participate, Klopfenstein said he doesn’t get a monthly incentive on his bill. Because he gets power through a co-op, though, he said the better they manage demand the lower his bills are overall.

    “Now, I will tell you what I believe consumers will want today, they’re going to want to be rewarded probably more than I am — and that’s OK.” Klopfenstein said. “Somewhere in there there’s a balance, but we need to give them a tool to manage the power distribution.”

    Supply and demand

    Klopfenstein sponsored a sweeping energy measure known as House Bill 15 earlier this year. That measure aimed to encourage new energy generation by offering tax incentives to new facilities and streamlining the regulatory process. The bill also ended a controversial coal plant bailout tied to the House Bill 6 scandal.

    Notably, that bill got broad bipartisan support and Rob Kelter, managing attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center, sees Klopfenstein’s newest proposal as a continuation.

    “Good energy policy manages both supply and demand. Ohio lawmakers took measures in HB 15 to increase supply, and we commend Rep. Klopfenstein and Chair (Rep. Adam) Holmes for moving quickly to lower demand,” Kelter said. “Republicans and Democrats worked together on HB 15, and we know there will be similar cooperation here.”

    In a press release, the Environmental Law & Policy Center estimates residential demand response could “create estimated net savings of between $34.5 million and $104 million for the utility system, depending on participation rate.” The group added that companies can roll out programs to reduce demand far faster than they can increase supply by standing up new power plants — even with HB 15 greasing the skids.

    Klopfenstein explained residential demand response almost made it into HB 15 itself. But it showed up as an amendment late in the process, and lawmakers stripped it out so they could debate it further.

    Still, the idea appears to have supporters on both sides of the aisle. Nolan Rutschilling from the Ohio Environmental Council said demand response is “crucial to addressing skyrocketing energy costs.”

    “This legislation allows utilities and retail energy providers to establish programs that save customers money, reduce strain on our electric grid, and create more capacity in the PJM market, lessening the burden on all energy customers,” he added.

    Ohio Conservative Energy Forum Executive Director Shayna Fritz said, “providing demand response solutions will ensure we are helping our energy remain reliable during peak times. We worked with Ohio lawmakers on critical energy legislation such as House Bill 15 and look forward to working with them again to develop the best solutions for all residents.”

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • With Residential Units Rising on Part of the Scranton Peninsula, Will Retail and Development Follow on Its Industrial Half?

    click to enlarge

    Mark Oprea

    The Collins, the first apartment complex to open up on Scranton Peninsula, is also the start of the area-as-neighborhood.

    When Arnold Hines began his search for a new apartment earlier this year, he took into account price, space, amenities and areas where he could ride his e-bike.

    In early August, Hines picked out The Collins, a new apartment complex that opened its doors in January on the southwestern part of the Scranton Peninsula. During a recent tour, Hines told Scene its location was one of the reasons he ended up leasing there.

    “I love the fact that it’s in the Flats, its adjacent to Ohio City and Tremont and Downtown,” Hines, an events producer in his fifties, said in mid-August in the complex’s courtyard. “Really, we’re right here, in the center of everything.”

    Hines is pretty much right. The Collins, and its soon-to-open neighbor across Carter Road to the west, Silver Hills, is the first official notch forward in a master plan for the peninsula going back to at least 2018. And the first residential property ever built there.

    The blossoming neighborhood will boast more than 600 units of housing for about a thousand people by the end of the decade.

    Living at The Collins, where rents start around $2,000 a month, comes with standard luxury perks: An outdoor pool flanked by flatscreen TVs and grills. A gym stocked with all-black equipment. Ritzy coffee machines and garage of complimentary bikes.

    It certainly seems like the latest master plan, released by Geis and JRoc Development, in 2021, is beginning to come to fruition. One imagined with blocks of taprooms, happy cyclists, boutique offices and coffee shops.

    “You can start to see some vision of that,” Aaron Pechota, vice president of develop at the NRP Group, the developers behind The Collins, told Scene. “It’s a really cool residential neighborhood with some commercial uses.”

    But go up Carter Road, past BrewDog and a stunning sight of Downtown, and another world appears. Overgrown grass lots fenced in with barbed wire. Construction companies and riverfront yacht services. Marine workers lugging orange cones. Yards of idled cars waiting to be repaired or junked. And, further down Scranton Road, rows of faceless brick buildings abutting brownstones that haven’t been touched in decades.

    Since 2023, the Bibb administration has touted its interest in reshaping Cleveland in the image of the 15-minute city, a city with everything a resident may need—groceries, meds, groceries, coffee, hardware—within the span of a 15-minute walk or quick bike ride. Cleveland City Planning’s pursuit of testing out Smart Code, the planning code embedded with this philosophy, could boost this citywide if passed.

    click to enlarge A huge swath of Scranton Peninsula—roughly 70 acres—is owned by Scranton Averell, Inc., land that hosts yacht service companies, construction firms or industrial wasteland. - Mark Oprea

    Mark Oprea

    A huge swath of Scranton Peninsula—roughly 70 acres—is owned by Scranton Averell, Inc., land that hosts yacht service companies, construction firms or industrial wasteland.

    Scranton Peninsula isn’t exactly making strides towards such a status. Yet.

    The Collins’ three buildings have no retail spaces; neither does Silver Hills’ buildings. So far, the only for-sure commercial uses with neighborhood benefits are BrewDog, a Scottish brewery which opened up on the peninsula’s north side in 2021; and Great Lakes Brewing Co.’s possible site for a brew garden and new facility, situated directly south of The Collins.

    Pechota said the decision not to include storefronts along Carter was admittedly a conservative one, based on high interest rates and a city tax abatement policy tons of developers like him balk at.

    “It’s just not a high-traffic area,” Pechota said. “I mean, to try and convince Giant Eagle or Kroger to move down there? There’s just not enough traffic.”

    “Seeing glass is nice and it’s pretty,” he added. “But unless it’s in a dense area, a lot of times they sit vacant.”

    As brokers love to gab about, retail is a numbers game: grocers or Chipotles decide to lease out storefronts based mostly on how many live in and around that storefront. About 60 percent of The Collins’ 314 apartments—about 190 units—is leased up as of early September, a spokesperson for NRP told Scene.

    And the area itself is still clearly growing. Carter Road, which was resurfaced this year, has sidewalks that seem bare and almost purposeless with no one walking on them. Even The Collins has yet to complete its sky lounge and kick off its bike rental program.

    “It may just be one of those things—if you get the people first, then the rest will follow,” Michael Mitro, the community manager of The Collins, told Scene on a recent tour. “And I hope it does.”

    If Scranton is to get its own grocer, dog grooming shop or bakery, then it’s most likely going to happen outside of the apartment complexes on its western edge. That is, on some of the 70 acres or so that lie around it, built on those grassy lots, or converted from those vacant buildings. (Like BrewDog itself, from a century-old sawmill.)

    The problem is that, at least from the perspective of the hopeful developer, that land in and around The Collins and Silver Hills isn’t set to be sold anytime soon.

    “We don’t have any intentions of selling anything,” Dennis Troyan, a realtor who’s helped broker with Realty Professional since the late 1970s, said in a phone call. “When we do decide to do something, we’ll do it.”

    Troyan, whose name is splattered across a handful of signs that look like they were designed in the 1990s, is the broker for Scranton Averell, Inc., an inscrutable group of investors situated across the globe that own control of every single lot outside of what’s been recently developed. Land that hosts truck terminals or junk yards.

    To put it simply: if those 70 or so acres are going to one day host a Constantino’s, a bike co-op or a new bookstore, then Troyan and Scranton Averell are probably going to be involved in that transition. And that transaction, Troyan confirmed with an air of acerbic tone, doesn’t seem to be tilted towards apartment living.

    “I think the bloom is off the rose,” Troyan said. “I don’t think they’re renting as fast. I don’t think multifamily has the attraction it does years ago.”

    Scene reached out to Scranton Averell to gauge their opinion on Scranton as a neighborhood. “There is no one here you can talk to,” they said in a phone call. “This is law firm. This is a law firm you’re calling. Thank you. Bye.”

    Scranton Peninsula may fall short, at least for the next decade or so, of its neighborhood concept envisioned by JRoc years ago.

    Even as the land nearby develops — whether that be the Metroparks’ park plans for the former Cantanese Classics to the west, or the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center to the northeast, the Bedrock “Rock Block” neighborhood straight across to the north.

    And after all, maybe that’s just what the Flats is? A tug-of-war identity pull between the maritime and city living.

    “What’s one of the attractive things about the riverfront? You have freighters making there way 300 times a year to Cleveland Cliffs,” Jim Haviland, head of Flats Forward, said. “There’s nothing like seeing these vessels passing by—whether you’re living there or not.”

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Downtown Cleveland Special Improvement District Renewed Until 2032 With City and County Buy-In

    click to enlarge

    Mark Oprea

    Downtown’s Special Improvement District, the pool of funds that help keep the area clean and safe, was renewed Wednesday for another seven years.

    The Downtown Cleveland Special Improvement District, funded by a pool of money from property owners to help keep the city center safe and clean, was renewed on Wednesday for the next seven years, Cuyahoga County said in a release.

    That district, the boundaries of which stretch from East 17th to the Cuyahoga River, will provide Downtown some $43 million in funding through at least 2032.

    This year is also the first year that both the city and the county signed on to help fund the district, a handshake that didn’t come without tension. Cuyahoga County Council met with representatives from Downtown Cleveland, Inc., the nonprofit that runs the district, four times since its renewal was first proposed last year.

    County Executive Chris Ronayne, who often argued with Council members in favor of the county’s buy-in to the district, reasserted on Wednesday the importance of the $1.3 million total from county taxpayers over the next seven years.

    And for a logical reason, Ronayne said: Downtown is Cuyahoga; Cuyahoga is Downtown.

    “A strong Downtown drives growth throughout Cuyahoga County,” he said in a release. “We’re proud to partner with Downtown Cleveland, Inc. on this initiative. Together, we’re helping ensure downtown remains a hub of opportunity, innovation and vitality for the entire region.”

    That money, doled out by DCI, will help fund yellow-shirted Ambassadors, host concerts, keep sidewalks clean and handle lower-level conflicts. It could also be used for pretty much anything, from hiring security guards to buying Christmas decorations on Public Square. (Or for more AI cameras, as DCI plans to do.)

    Much of the delay came from the County’s Economic, Development & Planning Committee, who grilled DCI across multiple meetings on why exactly the County Headquarters Building off East 9th and Euclid needed to be included in DCI’s quota—60 percent of property owners in the district opting in.

    Sixty-six percent of the properties in the district boundary, which run from East 17th to the riverfront, will pay a yearly tax to help keep the public realm tidy. - DCI

    DCI

    Sixty-six percent of the properties in the district boundary, which run from East 17th to the riverfront, will pay a yearly tax to help keep the public realm tidy.

    “Here we are carrying the water again,” District 5 Councilman Michael Gallagher complained to DCI’s VP of Operations, Ed Eckart, during a meeting on March 12. “I don’t mind doing it, because I feel sorry you guys are in a city that doesn’t give a damn about you.”

    DCI collects roughly $5 million a year from a district tax. Each fee is determined on building size and land value.

    That’s to say, County Headquarters has more chips to toss into the pot than Rebol. The rub is that, according to state law, any city or county properties are only included in that buy-in if they choose to be included.

    Cleveland City Council opted in this summer.

    “Cleveland is at its best when our downtown is thriving, and this reauthorization of the improvement district will only accelerate that progress,” Mayor Bibb wrote in a statement. “We are committed to building a downtown that’s more welcoming, more vibrant and a place where people and businesses want to invest their time and money.”

    Jason Beudert, the head of Hangry Brands, which runs five businesses in and around East 4th—Jolene’s, Society Lounge, Geraci’s Slice Shop, Lionheart Coffee and, soon, The DugOut—told Scene he’s happy to hear about the district’s renewal.

    “As a lessee, we’re proud to be there,” he said in a phone call. “Any investment into the city, to make it safer and more inviting and welcoming to, not only residents but visitors, is a huge win for not only my businesses, but every other business around me.”

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    Mark Oprea

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  • LifeWise Academy Will Be in Nearly Half of Ohio School Districts This School Year

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    Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal

    LifeWise Academy is an Ohio-based religious instruction program that started in 2019

    LifeWise Academy, a controversial Hilliard-based religious instruction program, will be in almost half of Ohio’s public school districts this school year. 

    The academy will now be in 613 Ohio schools in 303 school districts for the 2025-26 school year, said Christine Czernejewski, a spokesperson for LifeWise. 

    Back in January, LifeWise was in about 160 Ohio school districts — a nearly 90% increase since the start of the calendar year.

    The academy’s new count comes after a new law took effect in April that requires Ohio school districts to have a religious-release time policy. The previous law merely permitted a policy. 

    “While the recent clarification in Ohio law has helped reinforce districts’ ability to offer release-time religious instruction, the growth is primarily driven by increased demand from families across the state,” Czernejewski said. “Communities have been proactively bringing LifeWise to their local schools because they understand the positive impact of Bible education during school hours.”

    LifeWise operates in 34 states and plans to enroll nearly 100,000 students this year, according to its website. 

    “Demand for LifeWise is surging, and we couldn’t be more excited to see families taking advantage of our programming, from urban areas to remote towns,” said CEO Joel Penton.  

    The non-denominational Christian program teaches the Bible to public school students during the school day, and started in Ohio in 2019. The courses usually take place during lunch or during elective courses.

    But LifeWise has many critics and parents have said their students have been ostracized and bullied for not taking part in LifeWise.  

    “These kids are affected when they don’t go,” said Zachary Parrish, a parent who had LifeWise file a lawsuit against him for copyright infringement. “They feel left out. They don’t understand why their parents aren’t letting them go.” 

    Parrish now lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but his daughter was a second-grader in Defiance City Schools in 2021 and he is not surprised Ohio has seen such an uptick in districts offering the religious classes.  

    “They’ve been in Ohio the longest,” he said. “They’ve got the most connections in Ohio. It’s where the organization is from. It’s where all the leadership is from. So it doesn’t surprise me that Ohio is the hotbed for it.”

    Religious instruction under the law

    The United States Supreme Court upheld release time laws during the 1952 Zorach v. Clauson case, which allowed a school district to have students leave school for part of the day to receive religious instruction.

    Religious release time instruction must meet three criteria: the courses must take place off school property, be privately funded and students must have parental permission.

    Tina Sobo, a rabbi at Temple Israel Dayton and mom of two students in Miamisburg Schools, said students in her congregation have heard antisemitic comments from their classmates when they return from LifeWise. 

    “The curriculum teaches that because my kids are Jewish and don’t believe in Jesus, we’re going to hell … And touching on just some of the low-level antisemitism, just really more ignorant type comments,” she said. “It’s a very specific version of Christianity that, I think, goes against, in my opinion, goals of creating an inclusive, positive religious environment in America.”

    LifeWise, which started in Miamisburg in January, “unequivocally condemns antisemitism or any form of harassment or discrimination,” Czernejewski said. 

    “Our mission is to provide Bible-based character education,” she said. “If any student were to make inappropriate or hurtful remarks toward their peers, whether inside or outside of school, that behavior would be inconsistent with what LifeWise teaches.”

    Rachel Evans, a mom of a student in Centerville City Schools, does not want to send her son to LifeWise because their family is Jewish. LifeWise is launching in Centerville this month. 

    “You have these kids who are taught that they need to save people because they’re taught that hell is just the worst place you could go,” she said. “And they’re really trying to help their friends, but that can be really damaging to a kid.” 

    Hearing LifeWise is in almost half of Ohio’s school districts makes Evans scared for her son’s future. 

    “I have had past experiences where I was proselytized to at a very young age and it’s not a good feeling,” she said. “… The whole point of it is to disrupt the school day. … There are so many other times when this would be appropriate, and I think during the school day is not it.” 

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Trump Science and Medical Grant Cuts Impact Ohio Universities and Children’s Hospitals

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    (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal.)

    On the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

    More than 30 National Institutes of Health grants in Ohio have been impacted by recent cuts at the federal level. 

    Thirty-two NIH grants are currently being impacted and eight NIH grants have been reinstated for an estimated loss of $16.75 million, according to Grant Witness, a project that tracks the termination of grants of scientific research agencies under President Donald Trump’s administration. 

    More than 5,110 NIH grants have been impacted, totaling $4.52 billion lost, according to Grant Witness. 1,290 grants have been reinstated. 

    The United States Supreme Court recently allowed NIH to terminate $783 million in grants tied to diversity initiatives.

    NIH ended hundreds of grants linked to DEI studies earlier this year after a series of Trump executive orders. Two separate groups of plaintiffs went to federal court in Massachusetts to challenge the termination of the NIH grants and a federal judge ruled in their favor, but U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to intervene. 

    Ohio’s affected grants, according to Grant Witness.

    • Case Western Reserve University has nine grants affected, including one that could be possibly reinstated.
    • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has two grants affected.
    • Kent State University has one grant affected.
    • Ohio State University has 18 grants, including six that could be possibly reinstated and one with frozen funding.
    • The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital has three grants affected.
    • The University of Cincinnati has six grants affected, including one that could be possibly reinstated.
    • The University of Toledo has one grant affected.

    The Ohio Capital Journal reached out to all affected universities and hospitals, but most of them did not respond by deadline. 

    “We have not experienced the sweeping reductions in funding that have been proposed for some other institutions,” Ohio State University Spokesperson Ben Johnson said in an email. “When you look across our entire portfolio, we have not had a significant number of grants canceled. However, each cancellation is significant to the researchers involved and we are working to support those individuals.”

    Ohio State’s research portfolio totaled $1.6 billion last year and about $775 million of that was federal funding, he said. 

    The University of Toledo acknowledged a NIH grant was terminated and university spokesperson Tyrel Linkhorn said there were no layoffs associated with the termination. 

    In addition, Ohio University has been notified of two NIH sub-awards totaling $13,040 that have received stop-work orders, university spokesperson Dan Pittman said. 

    “Ohio University leaders will continue to assess evolving guidance from federal agencies and provide additional details and guidance as needed; during this time, we encourage all (OU) researchers to continue their efforts to explore research opportunities and to pursue funding,” he said in an email.

    The types of NIH grants affected in Ohio range from studying the long-term effects of COVID, vaccine hesitancy in rural communities, inflammatory bowel disease, bisexual adolescents’ and young adults’ risk for depression and suicidal ideation, minority women’s mental health and creating healthy habits for heart health, among others. 

    “The cuts to the NIH funding … are going to severely reduce the amount of research that universities in Ohio are able to engage in,” Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “And this, of course, is a problem nationwide, but this is a great concern for our research institutions in the state of Ohio.” 

    This will hurt local economies and Ohio’s economy as a whole, she said. 

    “I think that anybody who understands the kind of economic engines that our universities are has to be able to see the way that this is going to severely undermine the research missions of our universities,” Kilpatrick said. 

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Cleveland City Hall’s Economic Development Department Gets New Leadership

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    City of Cleveland / LinkedIn

    Mayor Bibb tapped Joevrose Bourdeau Small and Tom McNair to lead two different development departments at City Hall, the city said on Tuesday.

    With news that Jeff Epstein is departing City Hall for a new gig leading the Port of Cleveland, Mayor Justin Bibb this week announced new leadership for Cleveland’s economic development team.

    Tom McNair will replace Epstein as Chief of Integrated Development and Joevrose Bourdeau Small will take McNair’s role as Director of the Department of Economic Development. Small was most recently the assistant director in the department.

    In a statement on Tuesday, Bibb sold the two as proponents of the ERA agenda—actually building good, affordable homes across the city and nursing widespread development—the kind represented by Bedrock’s $2 billion neighborhood lined up along the Cuyahoga River and Bibb’s Shore-To-Core-to-Shore tax increment financing strategy designed to catapult more developer interest in the city’s core.

    Both new hires “will carry the Cleveland ERA forward with fresh energy and a steadfast commitment to the communities we serve,” Bibb wrote. “Both bring deep experience, a strong commitment to public service, and the kind of collaborative spirit we need to keep Cleveland moving forward.”

    McNair’s main task at hand will undeniably be tied to water: attracting and maintaining private interest and developer intrigue in Bedrock’s plans for the riverfront, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars surrounding the land north of Huntington Bank Field.

    All while ensuring other city projects in the pipeline go as designed, from the $60 million renovation of the West Side Market to the $1.6 billion planned makeover of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

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    Mark Oprea

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  • ACLU Says Ohio ICE Detentions Are Illegal, Demands the Release of Hundreds

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    ICE

    An ICE officer in an udated photo

    In light of an opinion issued Tuesday by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, the American Civil Liberties Union said that eight Ohio counties don’t have legal contracts with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement. That being the case, the ACLU of Ohio said, those detainees must be released.

    However, one Ohio sheriff’s office said its contract with the feds meets the legal standards Yost laid out. Another said he’ll fix any problems, but he’s not releasing anybody.

    For its part, Yost’s office declined to answer questions.

    After taking office in January, President Donald Trump swiftly began implementing his policy of mass deportation. It was sold on promises that he would throw out violent criminals, but only 7% of those deported have been convicted of violent crimes.

    Meanwhile, stories are accumulating of dodgy cases against beloved asylum seekers. Claims of human rights abuses are mounting. And some economists predict that removing so many from the workforce will make already-high inflation even worse.

    Once a strong issue for Trump, by mid-July, just 35% of Americans approved of his handling of immigration, according to a Gallup Poll.

    But regardless of the issue’s popularity, Ohio sheriffs have an incentive to take in ICE detainees. They get $125 per-person, per-day, while the feds cover most of their non-food expenses. That revenue has helped fill gaps in their budgets, one Ohio sheriff said.

    In an opinion published Tuesday, Yost seemed to raise doubts about the legality of at least some of the arrangements. In response to a query from the Butler County Prosecutor’s Office, the attorney general said county jails could hold ICE detainees longer than 48 hours, and they could provide services such as transport — but only under contracts between the feds and the county commissioners.

    “The board of county commissioners may enter into an agreement with federal immigration authorities, on behalf of the sheriff, to detain aliens subject to removal in the county jail,” the opinion said. “The sheriff, however, does not have independent contracting authority for this purpose.” 

    At least two of the eight Ohio counties contracting to hold ICE detainees — Butler and Mahoning — are doing so after modifying contracts to hold prisoners on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service. The ACLU of Ohio on Wednesday said that wasn’t sufficient.

    “Attorney General Yost has made abundantly clear that all county agreements with ICE must be authorized by the board of county commissioners,” Freda Levenson, the group’s legal director, said in a written statement. “County sheriffs cannot bootstrap themselves into having this authority. Striking these agreements means there is no legal authority to hold the immigrants currently incarcerated in our county jails. The people detained under these invalid agreements are being held unconstitutionally and must be released immediately.” 

    The attorney general’s office was asked if the ACLU was correct in saying that Yost’s ruling meant that hundreds of detainees were being held in Ohio illegally. It declined to answer.

    “Your question is different than the specific question asked by the Butler County Prosecuting Attorney and we offer no answer in response — our office does not issue legal opinions or guidance to nonclients,” Steven Irwin, a spokesman, said in an email. “The opinion issued to the Butler County Prosecuting Attorney addressed a specific, narrow question on a positive power of government. We have nothing more to say at this time.”

    The ACLU said eight county sheriffs offices had improper ICE agreements: Those in Butler, Fairfield, Fayette, Geauga, Lake, Portage, Mahoning and Seneca counties.

    However, Butler County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Anthony E. Dwyer on Thursday said county commissioners there had signed off on his department’s arrangement with the feds. He sent along the commissioners’ resolution approving the modification of a contract to take in prisoners of the Marshals Service to also allow the jail to take ICE detainees. 

    “We got that agreement signed off on by the county commissioners,” Dwyer said in an interview. “The ACLU is a little mistaken about what they’re saying about Butler County.”

    He added, “People have regularly come to commissioners meetings and talked about it, so it’s shocking that they’re that far behind that they don’t know that.”

    Butler County housed 303 ICE detainees on Thursday. Mahoning County Jail in Northeast Ohio houses around 100 on a normal day. 

    Sheriff Jerry Greene was asked whether Yost’s opinion affected the legality of their detention.

    “The answer is I don’t know at this point,” he said in an interview Thursday. “I’m not sure if the commissioners would be considered as officially parties to the contract. When we put it together, they were definitely in the know and we informed them every step of the way.”

    As for the ACLU’s call to release the detainees, Greene was adamant.

    “The answer is absolutely not,” he said. “I am doing this to support the federal government. We have housed federal inmates for years. We’re definitely going to make sure we’re constitutional and following the law… but I’m not releasing anybody. We’ll remedy it as soon as possible.”

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Marty Schladen, The Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Rising Star Workers Union to Host Benefit Show After More Baristas Are Fired

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    Mo Eutazia

    A “sip in” protest attracted a line around the block in support of the Rising Star Workers Union, on August 3. Organizers will be rallying supporters once again at a benefit show this Sunday at Kentucky Gardens in Ohio City.

    Organizers at the Rising Star Workers Union will be leading a rally this weekend to back recently fired employees.

    On Sunday, from noon to 4 p.m., nine artists will be performing in a benefit show at Ohio City’s Kentucky Gardens to aid a handful of baristas who were fired from Rising Star’s Lakewood location in midst of a union drive picking up steam in the past month.

    And a timely one this week. Two more workers, Caleb Reese and Katelyn Bishop, were let go for apparently violating a company harassment policy, Reese confirmed with Scene. Five total have been let go since RSWU held a public “sip in” on August 3.

    “I’m really upset about it. It sucks,” Reese said in a phone call on Friday. “It was two weeks before my five year anniversary with Rising Star. I’ve never been reprimanded otherwise. To be terminated just like that? It’s really disappointing.”

    Earlier this summer, Rising Star baristas at the café’s spot off Detroit Avenue made public their plans to unionize following what they say were months of negligence by management.

    In an interview in mid-August, baristas Allison Jeswald and Nia Gatewood told Scene that the root of their organizing efforts lied in the store’s carbon dioxide monitor that was, unbeknownst to them, faulty and in need of replacement.

    Gatewood herself even went to the hospital, she said, because of it. Jeswald was fired shortly after, in late July.

    Talks amongst baristas at other locations led to Gatewood, Jeswald, Reese and others organizing a “sip in” at the Lakewood spot on August 3, a response to Rising Star higher ups closing the store five hours early that weekend. (Baristas were still paid in full, the company said, save for tips that would’ve been doled out.)

    Hundreds showed up throughout the day to support the union, to buy coffee in lines that snaked around the block. By 2 p.m. that day, Lakewood police were called after several attendees were accused of “entering restricted areas.”

    “If our employees choose to join or not join a union, that is their choice,” Rising Star said in a statement at the time. “But that is not what happened today. There is no place for harassment in our cafe. There is no place for hate or intimidation.”

    Rising Star did not respond to an email request for comment in time for publication.

    Sunday’s benefit is co-hosted by the Cleveland Art Workers, a collective of local creatives, and will include performances by RA Washington, Sierra DeLaine and Wish Queen. A suggested donation of $15 will go to the fired workers.

    Rising Star’s Lakewood location is not back to its normal hours, two employees told Scene. Reese hopes the benefit show will prove that camaraderie signals to ownership that—above sip ins, unions and protests—the fired baristas care about their jobs.

    “I just wish they would meet us halfway, and have a normal conversation about this,” he said. “Instead just reaching out to retaliate.”

    Kentucky Gardens is located at 1753 West 38th St.

    Mark Oprea

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  • Cuyahoga County Deputy Involved in Fatal Chases Accused of ‘Lying’ in Hiring Process

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    Courtesy Marshall Project

    A sheriff’s department SUV in an undated photo

    This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

    A Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputy who participated in high-speed chases that killed two bystanders admitted to “lying” during his background check and keeping details off his application, according to his personnel file.

    Deputy Kasey Loudermilk denied having already accepted a job as an officer with the Cleveland Clinic during the sheriff department’s hiring process. He also did not list on his application that the Ohio State Highway Patrol and Highland Heights police had disqualified him for failing polygraph and physical agility tests, according to Loudermilk’s personnel file.

    “He apologized for lying and openly admitted to accepting the job at the Cleveland Clinic, but would rather work for our agency,” Sheriff’s Detective Kevin Harvey wrote in the conclusion of a 250-page background investigation.

    Dishonesty on job applications typically disqualifies most people, but Loudermilk still got a sheriff’s badge and gun and landed on the controversial Downtown Safety Patrol.

    How Loudermilk got his job sheds more light on hiring practices within the sheriff’s department after another deputy was deemed unfit to be an officer, but was hired anyway.

    Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department leaders, police experts said, ignored warning signs and should have never hired either deputy, as the failures create trust issues with the public.

    “This is an indication that there are systemic issues in the hiring process,” said Kalfani Turé, an assistant professor at Widener University who studies police practices in Pennsylvania. “The agency had forewarnings and made bad decisions.”

    Loudermilk, who is now on administrative duty, did not respond to a request for comment. Kelly Woodard, the county’s director of communications, declined to answer questions about the hiring process.

    “Deputy Loudermilk was hired under a sheriff appointed prior to this administration,” she wrote in a statement. “The Sheriff’s Department is committed to attracting qualified candidates and ensuring a fair hiring process.”

    Cuyahoga County Council President Dale Miller questioned the sheriff’s department’s hiring practices.

    “If someone deliberately lies during the application process, we should not be hiring them,” Miller told The Marshall Project – Cleveland. “That is a problem.”

    Since 2018, Loudermilk has worked for police departments in North Perry, Grand River, University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic, state records show.

    He joined the sheriff’s department in November 2022.

    Harvey learned Loudermilk accepted a job at the Cleveland Clinic after speaking to Loudermilk’s supervisor at the University Hospitals’ police force, records show. Loudermilk denied taking the job when Harvey questioned him.

    After a second phone call, Loudermilk came clean.

    Loudermilk listed on a polygraph questionnaire during the sheriff department’s hiring process that the Ohio State Patrol rejected him because he failed a polygraph exam. He said he later took a second exam and passed, according to a sheriff’s polygraph report.

    He also told the examiner that Highland Heights police officials disqualified him because he failed a physical agility test.

    The examiner wrote that Loudermilk did not disclose the details on his application because he did not have enough space available.

    Loudermilk passed the polygraph, but the examiner wrote that “the significant information should be considered” when deciding if Loudermilk was an acceptable candidate.

    Jeff Wenninger, a Cleveland-area expert on police tactics, said law enforcement demands high standards, as most departments have a zero tolerance for lying.

    “It should be considered a character disqualification,” Wenninger said. “False and misleading statements make it reasonable to question an officer’s integrity in actions, report writing, testimony and failing to report observed misconduct.”

    The polygraph report showed Loudermilk had credibility issues, which now brings liabilities to the county, Ture said.

    Loudermilk pursued a car early Sunday that struck Sharday Elder’s vehicle on Superior Avenue and Addison Road. Elder was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to a sheriff’s incident report, which stated that speeds exceeded 100 mph. The driver Loudermilk was pursuing now faces charges of aggravated vehicular homicide, involuntary manslaughter and operating a vehicle while under the influence. He pleaded not guilty Thursday, News 5 Cleveland reported.

    Loudermilk also led a chase in March where the other driver struck Tamya Westmoreland’s Range Rover at the Eddy Road exit off Interstate 90, according to reports. She died, along with the driver who fled from Loudermilk.

    Another sheriff’s deputy, Isen Vajusi, was forced off a suburban police force after he failed field training, The Marshall Project – Cleveland and News 5 Cleveland reported in June. That department found that he lacked confidence, had difficulty in stressful situations, and “hesitates because he is afraid of making a mistake.”

    In May, he fired rounds at a teenager and was temporarily assigned to another unit. He is now on administrative duty with the downtown unit.

    The news outlets reported recently that Vajusi pointed a rifle out a window in a December chase where speeds topped 100 mph.

    Two months before that chase, Vajusi had shot a teenager in the leg.

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    Mark Puente, The Marshall Project

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  • Lawsuit Challenges New Proof of Citizenship Requirement at Ohio BMV for Voter Registration

    The women’s political organization Red Wine and Blue has sued Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose over changes to the voter registration process at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

    Thanks to the federal “motor voter” law, car registration agencies around the U.S. have offered voter registration services to applicants since the early 1990s. New state law in Ohio requires applicants provide proof of citizenship before the bureau registers them or updates their registration.

    Red Wine and Blue argued the change, passed as part of Ohio’s two-year transportation budget, “makes it harder for lawful, eligible Ohio citizens to exercise their fundamental right to vote.”

    “Frank LaRose and Republicans in the state legislature should not be able to disenfranchise anyone,” she continued. “Especially not the rural Ohioans, elderly voters, students, and women who have changed their legal names through marriage and divorce who are disproportionately affected by this legislation.”

    In a press release LaRose dismissed the case as a “baseless” and “activist” lawsuit. He added the state of Wyoming instituted similar changes and courts there have already upheld the policy.

    “It’s common sense that only U.S. citizens should be on our voter rolls,” LaRose said. “I won’t apologize for, or back down from the work we do to ensure the integrity of our voter rolls.”

    “We will win this case,” he insisted, “just like we’ve fought off the other baseless actions that such groups have brought against us.”

    At root, the changes shift the burden from state agencies to individuals.

    Under prior law, registrants had to attest under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen. Verification then happened behind the scenes with elections officials at the state and local level.

    On the one hand, drivers renewing their license who previously proved their citizenship shouldn’t have a problem. On the other, it’s not hard to imagine ordinary people showing up to the BMV without a marriage abstract or divorce paperwork; or a senior letting their license lapse and then losing the ability to renew without tracking down a birth certificate.

    Researchers at the University of Maryland have found more than 21 million Americans — about 10% of the eligible voting population — don’t have ready access to proof of citizenship.

    The complaint

    The Red Wine and Blue complaint focuses on attestation requirements in prior law. A sworn state statement was good enough in Ohio for decades, and it’s the standard many other states and the federal government rely on, too.

    “Indeed,” the complaint adds, “Ohio currently allows residents to register to vote based on an attestation of citizenship — so long as they register somewhere other than the BMV.”

    The problem with imposing proof of citizenship requirements, the group claims, goes back to the motor voter law. That measure states registration agencies may only require the minimum amount of information necessary to determine a voter’s eligibility.

    “Because the (National Voter Registration Act) separately requires that all applicants must attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are United States citizens,” the complaint states, “requesting any ‘proof’ of citizenship beyond that attestation goes beyond the ‘minimum’ amount of information that is ‘necessary’ to determine an applicant’s eligibility.”

    In short, Red Wine and Blue contends that Congress said a sworn statement is fine and that states aren’t free to go further.

    Attorneys for Red Wine and Blue warned the secretary about that point in a letter prior to filing their lawsuit.

    In a response, LaRose’s general counsel, former Senate President Larry Obhof, dismissed them out of hand.

    The U.S. and Ohio Constitutions bar noncitizens from voting, he wrote, and Ohio law bars them from registering.

    “When a license registrant does not present proof of United States citizenship and has not done so in the past, Ohio does not have ‘the minimum amount of information necessary’ to assess whether the registrant is eligible to register to vote,” Obhof said.

    The broader context

    In recent years, right-wing organizers have grown increasingly insistent that noncitizens are flooding the American electoral system.

    Republican officials including Donald Trump and JD Vance have fanned those flames, and in the final weeks of the 2024 election, Ohio boards of elections were flooded with thousands of bogus registration challenges.

    LaRose himself has made a point of pursuing alleged voter fraud aggressively. Ahead of last year’s election, his maintenance efforts erroneously swept in naturalized citizens.

    LaRose’s office has flagged hundreds of individual registrations for review since taking office.

    As part of a 2023 investigation, Ohio Capital Journal spoke to dozens of county prosecutors about those cases. Many described a similar pattern: ineligible people received a form and filled it out thinking it was required. In some cases the applicants even checked a box stating they aren’t a citizen but county officials registered them anyway.

    Those cases are about confusion rather than fraud, the prosecutors claimed. Ohio’s new proof of citizenship requirements might limit those cases, but Red Wine and Blue contends many more Ohioans will be harmed in the process.

    And for all the fear mongering about noncitizen voting, no one has been able to show it’s a substantial problem.

    Following a more thorough review of LaRose’s flagged cases in 2024, Attorney General Dave Yost turned up a grand total of six cases of voter fraud. The 2024 post-election audit came back with an accuracy rate north of 99% yet again.

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal

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  • Stephanie Haney Is the New Host of Ideastream’s ‘Sound of Ideas’

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    Ideastream

    Stephanie Haney, the lawyer-turned-journalist who worked for WKYK for six years, begins hosting Ideastream’s Sound of Ideas program on September 2.

    Stephanie Haney, the legal expert turned journalist who most recently worked at WKYC, is the new host of Ideastream’s “Sound of Ideas” program, the company announced in a statement this week.

    Haney, who led “Verify” and “Legally Speaking” segments for the local NBC affiliate from 2019 until earlier this year when her contract wasn’t renewed, has delved into digital scam cultures and a wide range of local topics for TV and streaming audiences.

    On the Sound of Ideas, Ideastream’s flagship news program which is broadcast on WKSU’s 89.7, Haney will have a slightly different platfrom.

    “I’m honored to join Ideastream and take on the role of Sound of Ideas host,” Haney said in a press release. “I look forward to engaging with our listeners, amplifying diverse voices, and fostering meaningful dialogue that both informs and inspires.”

    She follows a roster of some notable and memorable hosts, including Mike McIntyre, Rick Jackson, and, most recently, Jenny Hamel.

    After working for years as a fashion model, Haney pursued legal studies, graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She went on to get degrees in political science and criminology from Ohio University, then a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California.

    In 2019, Haney joined WKYC, where she developed her “Verify” series, in which she often used invited guests to highlight a range of scams in the modern world—email phishing, AI phone calls, “fake discount” voicemails supposedly from Spectrum.

    “Part of my job will be to talk about the issues you care about,” she said in a recent post. “So tell me, ‘What isn’t getting covered enough?’”

    She’ll be on Monday through Thursdays at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on 89.7, on YouTube and on the Ohio Channel, or wherever podcasts are listened to.

    Haney’s first show will be September 2.

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Northeast Ohio Is a Big Part of Trump Deportation Network

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    ICE

    An ICE officer in an udated photo

    The airport, a jail, and a prison in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley have emerged as a major part of the network the Trump administration is using to conduct mass deportations. As it has, residents and advocates are raising concerns.

    For his part, the county sheriff said he doesn’t have strong opinions in the deportation debate. He said he’s taking immigration detainees to supplement a thin budget.

    The debate illustrates how moral and practical concerns can clash in the second Trump administration. The clash is particularly poignant in the Mahoning Valley, a place settled by immigrants who built an industrial powerhouse. That powerhouse has seen decades of decline in the wake of globalization and competition from overseas.

    President Donald Trump ran last year on claims that the United States was overrun with violent criminals he would deport. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been rounding up undocumented immigrants — and some who are legally seeking asylum. He’s also seeking to deport hundreds of thousands of others who are legally here under temporary protected status.

    Despite Trump’s claim that he would focus deportation efforts on violent criminals, just 40% of the 112,000 arrested by ICE between Jan. 20 and late June had any criminal conviction. Only 7% had been convicted of violent crimes and just 5% of drug crimes, Stateline reported.

    Even so, arrests have continued to surge. Nearly 60,000 people were in ICE custody as of Aug. 10, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

    As they are, Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley are playing a big role. 

    From February through July, 202 ICE planes carrying detainees traveled through the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport — the seventh most of any in the United States, according to Witness at the Border, which compiles the statistics. At the same time, the county jail and a private prison in Youngstown are housing about 500 ICE detainees, many of whom are shuttled to and from the airport.

    Chris Harris, a local resident, said it’s wrong for local institutions to participate in what she sees as Trump’s needless persecution of a powerless minority.

    “I’m fundamentally, morally, and spiritually opposed to our government rounding up immigrants, people of color, people who have or don’t have documentation, putting them into detainment, a lot of times with no due process,” she said in an interview last week. “Folks are just sitting in jail. A lot of times they have no way to contact an attorney, no way to contact family. People can’t find their loved ones in detainment. And then they’re getting shuttled from one detention center to another across the country. Fundamentally, I’m against that. I’m opposed to that. It’s a faith thing for me.”

    Harris and a small group of others had been tracking and photographing ICE flights through the airport, which she said had usually taken place every morning and every night. But she said the flights now appear to have been moved out of public view.

    As ICE planes have shuttled detainees around the country and overseas, they’ve prompted accusations that it’s a gambit to keep detainees out of touch with their attorneys and to deny participation in their legal proceedings.

    Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said it’s a system of injustice.

    “I think it’s incredibly disturbing that we have set up this network of jails and charter flights,” she said. “We’re spending billions of dollars. We’re establishing prisons in foreign countries to house people who, up until the time of their arrest, were working and taking care of their families and following a legal process.”

    Andrew Resnick is a spokesman for the Western Reserve Port Authority, which operates the Youngstown airport. He said his agency was aware of the Boeing 737 planes passing through the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, but said they were there as a consequence of a federal lease with a fixed-base operator.

    “It is important to note that the Port Authority serves as the commercial sponsor of the federally owned Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport (an FAA asset),” Resnick said in an email. “Our primary job is to ensure the ongoing operations of the facility through the safety and maintenance of airport facilities and grounds.”

    While the port authority appears to have no say in the ICE presence at the airport, two jails in Youngstown are voluntarily housing around 500 ICE detainees daily. 

    Every Thursday, Harris leads a prayer vigil at one or the other. She said nuns from a Catholic convent nearby and a few others regularly join her. But she said bigger numbers have been slow to materialize.

    “People are scared. They don’t want to admit what’s happening. They don’t want to think about it,” Harris said. “We’ve got to stand up. If you’re not doing something, you’re part of the problem. I refuse to be part of this problem.” 

    The larger of the two facilities is the Northeast Ohio Corrections Center. It’s owned by a private company, Nashville-based CoreCivic, which contracts with the federal and state governments. 

    A spokesman was asked to confirm whether it housed 400 detainees in the Youngstown facility, as a source reported to the Capital Journal. The spokesman, Brian Todd, referred the question to ICE “out of respect.”

    “Out of respect for our government partners at ICE, we kindly ask that you contact them directly regarding contractual/capacity questions,” he said in  an email. 

    ICE didn’t respond to questions about the movement of detainees through the Mahoning Valley. Todd sent a February press release by CoreCivic indicating that the private prison company would take a major stake in Trump’s mass-deportation project.

    Five weeks after Trump took office, the company announced “that it has entered into contract modifications to add capacity for up to a total of 784 detainees from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) at its 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, its 1,072-bed Nevada Southern Detention Center, and its 1,600-bed Cimarron Correctional Facility in Oklahoma. In addition, CoreCivic has obtained a contract modification to specify that ICE may use up to 252 beds at its 2,672-bed Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi.”

    Tramonte of the Immigrant Alliance said the money flowing to such private companies could be better used.

    “That’s billions of taxpayer dollars that we could be spending on public education, health care, nutrition, priorities for American people instead of implementing a mass-deportation system,” she said. “It’s absolutely disturbing.”

    The other Youngstown facility housing detainees, the Mahoning County Jail, typically houses about 100 a day. Sheriff Jerry Greene makes no bones about his motives for taking them — it’s for the money.

    At $125 per-inmate, per-day, the department stands to take in an additional $4.5 million a year with most expenses other than food being covered by the feds, Greene said in an interview last week.

    “I knew I had bed space,” he said. “The moment Trump won, I got on the phone with ICE in Cleveland and told them if they needed bed space, we’d like to put in for that. They jumped at that.”

    Greene said his jail already housed prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service, so all it took was a contract modification to take in the ICE detainees. He acknowledged that some members of the community objected to their presence in the jail, but he said they harbor some misconceptions.

    “They’re accusing us of going out and kicking in doors and ripping people away from families, but really we’re just a number here,” Greene said. “Mahoning County has 100 beds. We get inmates from everywhere — from Maryland, Detroit, California, Florida you name it. We have a number we can take and they keep us full.” 

    Greene, formerly a Democrat who last year switched his affiliation to Republican, said he doesn’t have an opinion about Trump’s deportation policies “other than I believe that if people are in this country illegally, they shouldn’t be. Would I call myself a fanatic about it? Absolutely not. But I agree with that part of it. If you’re not supposed to be here, you shouldn’t be here.”

    It was pointed out that some of those being deported are in the country legally. Some are in the midst of asylum proceedings, and Trump is working to deport hundreds of thousands more with temporary-protected status. 

    “When you peel this onion back, there’s probably going to be layers of good and bad to it,” Greene said. “But at the end of the day, I’m here to support the federal government, and this also benefits us.” 

    During the first Trump administration, some Ohio counties were sued on claims that detainees were mistreated in their jails. Greene said mistreatment is not going to happen in his jail. In fact, he said, among his staff, ICE detainees are known to be good to work with.

    “When you talk about mistreatment, it’s funny, because the comments that come from our medical staff and our deputies is that… the ICE inmates are great,” he said. “They don’t give the deputies problems like other inmates do.”

    To Greene, the matter is simple: Somebody is going to house the detainees, so it might as well be Mahoning County where he says they’ll be well-cared for and the county’s depressed economy can benefit.

    “If we didn’t house these hundred inmates, they’d be housed somewhere else,” he said. “They might be in a tent in the Everglades.”

    But to Harris, the activist, it’s part of an anti-immigrant scheme that flies in the face of the region’s heritage.

    “It’s so frustrating because we’re all immigrants over here in Youngstown. My dad came from East Germany,” she said. “He was a refugee seeking asylum. Folks, you’re Italian, you’re Irish, you’re Serbian, Ukrainian. This is your heritage.” 

    Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.

    Marty Schladen, The Ohio Capital Journal

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