Unlikely Allies Push Ahead On Legal Challenge Of JobsOhio

By Karen Kasler, Statehouse Bureau Chief

Ohio Public Radio and Television

July 31, 2012

 

A coalition of progressive groups and a pair of Democratic state representatives are going back to the Ohio Supreme Court over the state’s job creation agency JobsOhio.  But this time they’re getting help from an unlikely ally.

 

Progress Ohio and Democratic state Sen. Michael Skindell and Rep. Dennis Murray filed lawsuits claiming Gov. John Kasich’s public-private entity JobsOhio was an unconstitutional corporation with minimal transparency. ... And they’re getting help from Maurice Thompson at the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, a Tea Party-backed offshoot of the conservative think tank the Buckeye Institute.

 

READ MORE: http://beta.wosu.org/news/2012/07/31/unlikely-allies-push-ahead-on-legal-challenge-of-jobsohio/

 

The Ohio Constitutional challenge to JobsOhio filed by the liberal policy group ProgressOhio and joined by the conservative 1851 Center for Constitutional Law has been dismissed by the Ohio Supreme Court.  Five of the seven justices ruled that the two groups could not prove they were harmed by the creation of the JobsOhio and therefore had no legal standing to file their case questioning JobsOhio constitutionality.

 

Presumably, if someone was harmed by a JobsOhio decision, they could file a lawsuit questioning its constitutionality.  However, since the decision-process of JobsOhio is made in private, and the State Legislature exempted JobsOhio for most public records requests, how can anyone determine if they were "harmed"?  That's a nice bit of circular logic the Ohio Supreme Court used to dodge the simple question of "Is JobsOhio constitutional?":

 

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/06/10/JobsOhio_ruling.html

 

http://wosu.org/2012/news/2014/06/10/liberal-policy-group-cant-sue-ohio-jobs-agency/

I'm sure I'm lacking nuance here.... 

 

But is it just me, or does anyone else feel like JobsOhio might as well be a proxy business development rep for Greater Columbus, with Cincinnati, Cleveland, et al being secondary considerations. 

25 minutes ago, YABO713 said:

I'm sure I'm lacking nuance here.... 

 

But is it just me, or does anyone else feel like JobsOhio might as well be a proxy business development rep for Greater Columbus, with Cincinnati, Cleveland, et al being secondary considerations. 

 

I don't know the structure of JobsOhio so I similarly might lack nuance, but I think we can reasonably assume good intentions here and this is an unintended consequence of organizational structure. 

 

JobsOhio has is broken into several regional areas of focus, but I assume most, if not all, of the leadership is based in Columbus and so there is an implicit bias towards those developments because leadership is more familiar with those projects and project areas. 

 

Solution being disperse the leadership among the regions. 

If there was Columbus wouldn't be getting all blue collar jobs while shedding white collar jobs. Columbus has half as many non-healthcare white collar jobs as Cincinnati according to BizJournals. Unless the Republican-controlled state government wants rid of college-educated white collar voters and wants to load up on blue collar Republicans voters.

Sigh... I'm going to have to say this in every thread, aren't I? Anduril went with Columbus because Rickenbacker provides 1) lots of room to expand and 2) already has 700,000 square feet of manufacturing space that they can move into immediately. None of the Greater Cleveland airport sites offer that. It's not a JobsOhio conspiracy. 

In fact, according to them they chose Rickenbacker because of its proximity to... Wright-Patterson.

51 minutes ago, YABO713 said:

I'm sure I'm lacking nuance here.... 

 

But is it just me, or does anyone else feel like JobsOhio might as well be a proxy business development rep for Greater Columbus, with Cincinnati, Cleveland, et al being secondary considerations. 

I don't think this is the case. Look at their recently announced projects. There's stuff all over the state.

https://www.jobsohio.com/news-events/news-press

 

Columbus is just better positioned to get huge manufacturing developments because they actually have space for it.

You can be Downtown in 20 minutes from this site.

 

Basically the fact that Columbus grew so lopsidedly to the north means that all three other directions are Open for Business. 

Edited January 16Jan 16 by GCrites

28 minutes ago, BigDipper 80 said:

Sigh... I'm going to have to say this in every thread, aren't I? Anduril went with Columbus because Rickenbacker provides 1) lots of room to expand and 2) already has 700,000 square feet of manufacturing space that they can move into immediately. None of the Greater Cleveland airport sites offer that. It's not a JobsOhio conspiracy. 

 

Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't see anything specifically mentioning Anduril or Greater Cleveland sites as of the most recent posts in this thread.

Also the particular township Project Thor is located in (Madison Pickaway County) has had super restrictive zoning that forbid residential anything on less than 5 acres since the '80s. No subdivisions, no big box stores, nothing but farms and recently industrial. There was literally one non-home-based business in the entire township until warehouses went up. One.

JobsOhio Hides Payroll Information, Despite Claims of Transparent Operations

 

Ohio’s “private” economic development corporation boasts that even though it’s legally private, it practices the “highest standards of accountability and transparency…” But when it comes to how much the agency pays its employees in what used to be public dollars, its disclosures are far from complete.

 

It doesn’t name the employees receiving salaries as the Ohio Checkbook does for all state employees. Instead, it uses vague and redundant job titles only. It doesn’t distinguish between full and part-year employees. And it refused to provide the information on a searchable spreadsheet, although it maintains it on one.

 

Created in 2011, JobsOhio has been controversial from the start. It’s exempt from open records law and its website proclaims it engages in “complete public reporting of how it spends private dollars.”

 

But it’s a corporation that was set up by the state legislature and it was allowed to make the only bid to run the state liquor franchise while paying the state far less than it’s worth. 

 

The “private dollars” it spends all used to go into the state treasury. And JobsOhio “complete public reporting” doesn’t lay out the contracts for more than $1 billion in incentives it’s given to businesses, what was promised, or whether the beneficiaries kept those promises.

 

More below:

https://columbusunderground.com/jobsohio-hides-payroll-information-despite-claims-of-transparent-operations-ocj1/