The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has come out with some strong words for one of Ohio’s charter school management organizations that has the audacity to turn a profit — a practice that has existed since the for-profit charter school process was enacted in Ohio many years ago.
The management company believes it is entitled to redirect the $700,000 profit into the company’s other operations, in the same way that other for-profit companies such as White Hat Management and Altair Learning Management (ECOT) have been doing without state intervention.
But ODE disagrees:
That money is supposed to benefit [...]
Full Story... →As long as we’re mapping things, I thought I’d share a map of the shale wells that have recently been permitted by The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR). These wells will likely use the controversial hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) method for extracting oil and gas.
According to data on ODNR’s website, 185 permits have been issued since 2009, 19 for drilling in the Marcellus shale and a total of 166 permits for Utica shale wells as of 01/01/2012.
The majority of these wells are horizontal wells, but a large number are also vertical wells – which often [...]
Full Story... →The recent earthquakes near Youngstown appear to have been caused by nearby Class II wastewater injection wells. These wells are used to dump brine and other fluids associated with oil and gas production, fluids that likely contain toxic chemicals – often from the fracking process – as well as radioactive or cancer-causing chemicals released from underground.
According to recent reports, nearly 9 million barrels (at 42 gallons per barrel) of wastewater were dumped in Ohio last year, with about half of it coming from fracking wells in other states like Pennsylvania.
With hundreds of these disposal wells [...]
Full Story... →Early last month I discussed attempts by Kasich and Batchelder to help grant Public Safety Director Tom Charles his secret wish: expanding the Ohio State Highway Patrol into a State Police organization, giving them power to investigate crimes and enforce laws on non-state property.
Current law clearly limits the Patrol’s jurisdiction to state owned or leased property except in the case of an extreme emergency, but Charles has convinced his pals in the Governor’s office and the Legislature – and now, it seems, in the AG’s office too – to help him change that.
The first attempt involved giving [...]
Full Story... →Back in October John Kasich asked Ohioans to suggest slogans to appear on Ohio’s new license plates.
At the time, we made some suggestions, and it turns out we may have had at least a little impact on the over 400,000 responses received by the Ohio BMV.
As of this afternoon, the Plain Dealer has all of the responses online in a searchable database. As they point out, a lot of the suggestions have to do with God or Lebron James, but a great deal of them also refer to John Kasich, and most of those were [...]
Full Story... →Last month Josh Mandel claimed he was he was “too busy” to speak to local voters and press at the Akron Press Club despite the fact that they offered to let him pick his own date and gave him the opportunity to have a forum all to himself.
As the PD points out:
[Mandel's] media strategy has him being selective, not only in terms of whom he’ll grant interviews to (conservative program hosts, for the most part) but also about giving his opinion to the Ohio press on U.S. Senate issues.
…Democrats say Mandel, while too busy to [...]
Full Story... →Sears rejecting Ohio’s $400 million offer was the best thing to ever happen to the State of Ohio.
Remember, Kasich claims that using JobsOhio “secret” math, Ohio was guaranteed to get a return on its investment within a year. So, what kind of headlines would Governor Kasich had seen if Sears had accepted his offer?
First, we learned on December 30th that Sears was closing hundreds of stores including six K-mart stores in Ohio this year. Ohio is tied for second with only Florida have more planned store closings. The result is hundreds of jobs lost. Kasich would [...]
Full Story... →Here’s what Governor Kasich sent via his official gubernatorial twitter account last week as President Obama came to Ohio to announce the recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and to discuss the economy in general:
First, Kasich is required by the Ohio’s constitution to have the budget balanced, and he had the benefit of his predecessor, Governor Ted Strickland, leaving Kasich a nearly billion SURPLUS in his last budget. Obama’s predecessor? Not so much.
Second, Kasich hasn’t cut taxes, at least not yet. Kasich kept income tax cuts [...]
Full Story... →On Plunderbund, our focus is usually centered around current events or breaking news in Ohio politics. But John Kasich’s monotonous lectures about how he has saved Ohio by balancing the state budget got me to thinking about the past. Each time he is quoted by the media after a rant in which he brags about his budgetary prowess, it is very common to find someone commenting about Ohio’s Constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget. As a result, Kasich’s boasting about the miracle of his balanced budget falls flat. The Constitutional requirement also means that Governor Strickland, the [...]
Full Story... →In the wake of the recent Youngstown-area earthquakes, the debate over expanded oil and gas production in Ohio is heating up. Since one of the primary areas of concern is public and environmental safety, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at violation records for existing oil and gas wells in Ohio to see how the industry is doing.
We took a look at data from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) obtained through public record requests along with data obtained from ODNR’s RBDMS database and we found that 693 gas, oil, disposal and other [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
