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Progressives take dueling approaches to lift Ohio’s minimum wage
Ohio progressives are waging a two-pronged war to hike the minimum wage to among the highest of any state in the nation. On one front, a House committee heard testimony Wednesday on a bill sponsored by House Democrats that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. Similarly, people associated with different […]
Senate GOP seeks to anchor down historic low income tax rates
Senate Republicans are pushing a constitutional change to make it significantly harder to raise income tax rates, which are at their lowest points since Ronald Reagan was president. The Senate Ways and Means Committee held its first hearing on Senate Joint Resolution 3 on Tuesday, which would require a supermajority vote in both the state […]
Ohio Senate Democrat targets 18-and-up bars
Democratic state Sen. Tina Maharath wants the underclassmen off the barstools. The senator from Franklin County introduced a bill that would prohibit anyone under 21 years of age from entering establishments where booze drives more than 60 percent of total receipts in a given year. Currently, 18-and-up bars are a Google search away for minors […]
Senate mulls legislation to shore up college transfer process
A state Senate committee is looking over a bill that would shore up the college transfer process for students weary of losing completed coursework along the way. The Senate Higher Education committee fielded testimony Thursday on House Bill 9, which supporters say will increase the rate of students who wind up earning degrees. The committee […]
What you need to know about Ohio’s prevailing wage law
In addition to the federal prevailing wage law, 26 states and Washington D.C. have their own versions of the legislation. Ohio has a prevailing wage law on the books, but lawmakers in 1997 exempted school construction projects from its reach. Efforts to repeal or weaken the law have come and gone since then. With two […]
Lawsuit claims state stonewalled request for documents on drugs used in capital punishment
An attorney claimed the state has stonewalled her public records request, for the second time since 2016, seeking documents on drugs Ohio uses for capital punishment. Elizabeth Och, a Denver attorney, alleged to the Ohio Supreme Court in November that the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has failed to respond outright to a July […]
State data shows 25,600 homeless students in Ohio. That number has been increasing annually.
On any given weekday, about 25,600 homeless students — 1.5% of all enrollees — walked into Ohio’s K-12 schools, according to state data from the 2018-2019 school year. Thirteen years ago, it was 7,560, or 0.5% of enrolled students. The data comes from the Ohio Department of Education, which is required under the 1987 McKinney-Vento […]
Earning $19 a month in jail, man looks to Ohio Supreme Court about a $9,000 court debt
Darren Taylor will likely spend the next 30 years incarcerated, where he earns $19 per month for prison work. On top of $6,500 in restitution, a judge ordered him to pay $9,000 in court costs and rebuffed a request to waive the court fees. Now, his attorney is asking the Ohio Supreme Court a question: […]