Could Cuyahoga County alone doom Ohio’s anti-democracy Issue 1 with higher-than-predicted turnout? Today in Ohio

CLEVELAND, Ohio — What will the turnout be in the Aug. 8 election? Republicans have said they expect the historically low 8% of last August, but Cuyahoga County thinks it could reach 50%.

We’re talking about how even modestly higher voter turnout could have a major impact on the results of Issue 1 on Today in Ohio.

Listen online here.

Editor Chris Quinn hosts our daily half-hour news podcast, with impact editor Leila Atassi, editorial board member Lisa Garvin and content director Laura Johnston.

You’ve been sending Chris lots of thoughts and suggestions on our from-the-newsroom text account, in which he shares what we’re thinking about at cleveland.com. You can sign up here: https://joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn.

Here’s what we’re asking about today:

If the fervor is strong enough in Cuyahoga County to defeat the sinister Issue 1 ballot issue that is aimed at torching democracy in Ohio, could that make all the difference in a low-turnout election?

The people behind Issue 1 are fringe, far-right elected leaders who got their jobs because of the corrupted party primary system through which we pick candidates. The fringiest candidates are the ones who emerge from primaries, when few people vote, and then in November we all are faced with terrible choices. There appears to be a better way, which reporter Sabrina Eaton explained over the weekend. What is it?

We thought we’d be under siege on Issue 1 ads long before now, especially since early voting began last Tuesday. The lack of ads make you wonder whether the normal backers of conservative causes are worried about being tied to something that is so anti-voter, something that could fail. We’re apparently about to see the first pro Issue 1 ads, but they’re not coming from the pro Issue 1 campaign. Who is paying for them?

The story of Punchy the bull – the bovine creature found roaming the streets of Cleveland – got a lot stranger Friday. Turns out his name is not Punchy, and he is actually a she. So, how did that happen?

For too many decades to count, the names of crime victims were considered public record, in Ohio and most, if not all, of America. But our gerrymandered legislature rushed through a law without comment recently that changed that. Why, and how did this happen?

Reporter Adam Ferrise took a deep dive into the case of Jugo Vidic, a Parma Heights butcher who was charged earlier this year as a war criminal in the former Yugoslavia. This is one hell of a tale. Who is he?

Why has Howard Hanna, a force in Northeast Ohio real estate, pulled its listings from sikes like Redfin, where a lot of people look for homes to buy?

University Hospitals has long provided maternity services in Ashland County. But no more. Why not?

What is the gun of choice for criminals in the Cleveland area?

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Read the automated transcript below. Because it’s a computer-generated transcript, it contains many errors and misspellings.

[00:00:00] Chris: So that roaming bull in Cleveland was a cow. How did the police get that wrong? It’s one of the stories we’ll be talking about on today in Ohio, the news podcast. Discussion from cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. I’m Chris Quinn. I’m here with Lisa Garvin, Courtney Alfi and Laura Johnston. Lela Tassi has a day off.

Let’s go. If the fervor is strong enough in Cuyahoga County to defeat the sinister issue, one ballot issue that is aiming it torched, aimed at torching democracy in this state. Could that make all the difference in a low turnout election,

[00:00:34] Laura: Laura? Yeah, it could. We really don’t know what kind of turnout we’re going to see last year in August, remember that extra primary we had because of the gerrymandering and the Supreme Court decisions, we only had about 8%, and that’s what Republicans are banking on.

That’s what they’ve said in their meetings. That’s what Frank LaRose thinks. But elections officials in CUA County think we could see turnout as high as 50%. We’re seeing a lot of people requesting those absentee ballots. And [00:01:00] there’s no real bar here because Ohio hasn’t had a statewide vote on a ballot issue in August since 1926.

So if we get a bigger turnout, especially in urban counties that tend to be more democratic, this could be a huge. Difference for the campaigns.

[00:01:17] Chris: You’re starting to hear more Republicans that are against this cuz they realize this isn’t a right left thing. This is about the power of the people. Uh, and there is a sense this seems to be growing.

This could actually go down, even though the people behind it have tried to make it a conservative thing. This is to stop outof state liberals from messing with the constitution when it’s outta state. People who are messing with the constitution. Exactly. And, and you know, one sense of that Frank LaRose had an overnight announcement that he’s running for the US Senate, which I think surprised everybody.

I think most people thought he’d wait till after issue one because he was the architect of this thing, and then he’d announce. But if this loses, then if he announces after issue one, everybody would say, Frank LaRose, fresh [00:02:00] off a humiliating defeat on issue one announced he’s running for the Senate, and I’m wondering if he slipped this through now just in

[00:02:07] Laura: case.

Maybe, I mean, it’s, it’s not a surprise that Frank LaRose was running for the Senate, what was it, on July 4th? He had that really hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink Twitter post about what he was to do, filling out his forms. So, I mean,

[00:02:21] Chris: we all I know, but he put out a press release overnight on a Sunday with a Monday.

Yeah. That is bizarre. You’re right. Strange. And look, Frank LaRose got reelected as Secretary of State last year in his entire campaign. He never once mentioned, oh, I’m gonna be an architect of an issue that tries to take the power of the voter away. No. Right. Within days of him winning his reelection campaign, he drops this.

This idea. I mean, it’s one of the sleaziest moves I’ve ever seen. I mean, this is the guy who, who tries to defend the election system while also trying to erase people’s confidence in the election system. He constantly tucks outta both sides of his mouth and he’s, you know, one of the [00:03:00] architects of this, Matt Huffman, is the other, what’s

[00:03:01] Laura: weird is he’s from northeast Ohio, right?

We like give all of this. We talk about Matt Huffman and, and Householder and all these people from the rural part of the state. And Franklin Rose is from Hudson. He grew up in northeast Ohio, so I, I don’t really understand it, but some of the big counties have had more people signing abortion rights petitions this year than who even voted last August.

And so you’re really seeing that mobilization. And so I do think that people who care about the abortion issue, even if it’s not officially part of this campaign, are going to come out.

[00:03:33] Chris: I also wonder whether the, the, the other sign that this thing is in trouble for the proponents is the lack of. Any advertising by the pro issue one people, they were talking about a six and a half million dollar campaign with television ads.

They haven’t had any. And you wonder whether the people they were hoping would donate, have their hands up saying, no, no, I’m not gonna tie my name to this anti-democratic movement. I, I saw what happened to Bud Light when they got [00:04:00] involved in a. Political issue and I wonder if they’re just not getting the money.

The television advertising is coming from the abortion folks, right. Who are petrified of this. Right. Uh, and they’re working the churches. I keep getting notes from people in the Catholic church. It sounds like every Catholic church is telling people to vote Yes for this. Cuz

[00:04:15] Laura: I was in church. I was in church when I heard that and I was like,

[00:04:19] Chris: okay.

It’s a single issue thing. Exactly. But even the Catholic church doesn’t get that their parishioners aren’t in alignment with them. Always on abortion. You’re listening to today In Ohio, the people behind issue one are fringe, far right elected leaders who got their jobs because of the corrupted party primary system through which we picked candidates.

It’s gerrymandered. The Fringiest candidates are the ones who emerged from the primaries when few people vote. And then in November, the rest of us are faced with terrible choices. There does appear to be a better way. Which reporter Sabrina Eaton explained over the weekend. Courtney, what is it?

[00:04:56] Courtney: Yeah, it’s ranked choice voting, which seems to be [00:05:00] a growing consideration across the US and it’s starting to bubble up as an idea here in northeast Ohio too, and, and backers of ranked choice voting.

You know, compared to the voting, we all think of the traditional voting where you. If you get a plurality of the vote, you walk away the winner. This rank choice voting system, backers, say kind of guards against special interests guards against those hyperpartisan, kind of primary leanings. It guards against parties and how they kind of impact the, the, the ballot here and, and let’s look a little closer to home where this was starting to gain steam but didn’t quite get across the finish line.

In University Heights, that city’s charter commission. Recommended switching from normal plurality voting to this rank choice voting system this year. And we’ll get into why their city council batted that idea down in a little bit. It’s not gonna move forward, but the hope was to get people more engaged, feel like their votes counted for more, [00:06:00] and, and here’s how it works.

It basically every voter ranks. Multiple candidates on a single ballot in order of preference. This is my first choice. This is my second choice. This is my third choice. And if no candidate gets an initial majority of that first choice vote, then the candidate with the fewest first choice ballots drops out.

And the ballots for that eliminated candidate are reallocated. Then you just go down the list. So you’re not looking at the first choice anymore, you’re looking at the second candidate. Voters preferred, and this really kind of results in, in actually arriving at a majority. I. And it, it supposedly, you know, guards against that, that fringe tendency that you’re talking about, Chris.

Well,

[00:06:40] Chris: the reason is because if I’m running and there’s five candidates, I can’t go full Frank LaRose because I’m going to need to appeal to both sides. To get enough votes to win. And so unlike the party system where the crazier your antics are in both parties, the more likely it is you’ll get [00:07:00] elected because you’re so fringe.

This wipes that out. The, the other part of this is an open primary. If you have an open primary system where anybody can vote, then the candidates that emerge, we all have a say. We all pick. So you know, Republicans can vote for the Republican, Democrats can vote for the Democrat, moderates can vote for the moderate, and then in November we all vote on that, that collection of candidates.

The sad thing was University Heights Charter Review Commission put this in. They actually cited our reporting is part of their official document, and then the city council bailed because I just don’t think they have the stomach for such a big change.

[00:07:38] Courtney: Well let, let’s talk about what they said here. This is an interesting little side, I guess, tangent to this conversation.

You know, city council members there voted this down. There were a handful of issues that they were gonna put before voters. They chose not to put this one on this false ballot, but basically one council member told us, Their reasoning for why they didn’t support this. They said the [00:08:00] Cuyahoga County Board of Elections doesn’t have the equipment right now to deal with it.

And they suggested maybe we look at this in the future when the board has the capacity. So we fact check that with Board of Elections Director Tony Pertti. And he said right now that is the case. The county’s equipment, its software isn’t de, isn’t designed for rank choice voting. He said it would take about a year, a little over a year to get this software in place, get the vendor to do what they need him to do to allow for this.

At the same time, another city council member at University’s Heights says if we go ahead and make this change, the CU County Board of Elections has to figure out right how to make it work. That’s their mandate. So,

[00:08:40] Chris: Right. And they, and you actually could put a time on it. You could say this starts in, in January, 2025 to give them the time to do it.

Uh, now I, I thought it was great that the Charter Review Commission did some very thoughtful things, and I thought it was sad that the Dysfunctional Council of course, backed off on it. I do think we need to do [00:09:00] something, you know, the party. Primary system was the reform more than a century ago to end the party boss system.

But because of gerrymandering and other factors, the party primary system has been completely corrupted and we get terrible candidates as a result. And people who won’t work together, and with rank choice voting, you would get people that are much more likely to be moderate, which most of Ohio is. Good story by Sabrina Eaton.

It is on cleveland.com. Check it out. This is today in Ohio. Let’s go back to the story I mentioned a minute ago. We thought we’d be under a siege of issue one ads on television by now, but we really aren’t. There’s about to be a bunch, Lisa, who’s paying for ‘em? What are they gonna say?

[00:09:41] Lisa: So on Friday, the group called Protect Women Ohio, which is working to defeat the November Abortion Rights Amendment on the ballot, is spending three, 3 million bucks to pass State issue one.

Um, they’re spending about a million dollars on digital ads and then 2 million on a. 32nd TV ad that started running, I [00:10:00] believe over this weekend. I haven’t seen it yet. The ad does not mention abortion, but it does feature a drag queen and with the narrative that a yes vote would keep this madness out of Ohio classrooms.

So the ads started running on the 15th. They’re supposed to run through the 21st, which is this Friday. Uh, protect Women Ohio spokeswoman, Amy Naoshi. She attacked the A C L U for its stance on a Republican law change that requires schools to notify parents if their kids use a gender other than their assigned sex at birth.

Um, she’s, she. Saying this is an attempt to force a dangerous anti parent amendment into the Ohio Constitution and that’s exhibit A. And so that’s their argument against state issue one. One of many and supporters are worried about being out spent by those opposed to state issue one, which is already been running TV ads.

They’ve been carpeting, neighborhoods with flyers. So the ads will match about the weekly rotation that’s of [00:11:00] the. Anti-ISIS issue one. Ads by one person, one vote, and one person, one vote has been leaning on this as an attack on democracy, but for the first time last week, their ads started to mention abortion.

[00:11:13] Chris: There’s another group that started an ad over the weekend. That’s hilarious. It’s an outside group. On the more progressive side, and it has, it starts with a couple starting to have sex and all of a sudden they’re interrupted by a Republican lawmaker sitting in their bedroom telling them they can’t use a condom because the Republicans are in charge now and they don’t believe in birth control.

It’s hilarious. Um, and again, all over the top, Hey, look at the heart of this. This is a move to. To fool people into giving up the power of their vote. It, it’s, it’s taking away all of our ability to, to use the constitution, to reign in out of control legislators, which is why the Constitution says what it says.

Now, a hundred plus years ago, Ohio got [00:12:00] together and said, we can’t have outta control legislators. We need this ability. All these ads are going so far afield. I’m, I’m not sure. People are gonna recognize exactly what’s at stake here. Well,

[00:12:11] Lisa: and you know, they, they’ve been kind of, you know, leaders have been trying to stay away saying that it’s not about abortion.

But then Frank LaRose was quoted to saying it’s a hundred percent about abortion.

[00:12:22] Chris: Yeah, it’s a hundred. This is about abortion. If, if issue one goes down, people will vote on abortion. In Ohio, we know the majority of Ohioans favorite, the amendment will likely pass, but. That’s what the majority of Ohioans want.

What the Republicans are trying to do is have 40% of the people dictate policy to the 60% of the people, and it’s just flat out wrong. So get out there and vote early. Voting is open. Go to the Board of Elections and vote. Get your absentee ballot. Don’t wait for August 8th. You’re listening to today in Ohio.

The story of punchy the bull, the bovine creature found roaming. The streets of Cleveland. Got a lot. Stranger Friday. [00:13:00] Turns out his name is not punchy and he is actually a she. Laura, I cannot understand how this could have happened.

[00:13:06] Laura: I do not understand how anyone could have mistaken utters for some other piece of anatomy here, but it’s not a bull that was reported by ple.

This is a female calf. She’s little mis. Punch. So she’s in Ravenna, actually at the Happy Trails Animal Sanctuary where she’s recuperating. She’s a little malnourished. If you look at that photo, you’re like, yep, she looks like she could definitely use like a nice, nice, um, heap of hay. But so they said, she’s our little girl and she’s settling in well and decompressing.

She’s had quite the adventure. We still don’t know who she ever belonged to, and we may never know.

[00:13:41] Chris: Yeah. That, that, that’s the weird part of this is that we don’t know. And you start to wonder was this I. Cow stolen or something. I, I just, it’s bizarre to me that, that somebody would not stand up to claim their roving cow.

It, it’s almost like a, a truck broke down in [00:14:00] Cleveland carrying it or something. They let it go, but it’s just strange that you wouldn’t claim it. I just, the first police, I. Report on this was about how one of their police officers is an expert, cuz they’d been on a farm or whatever and they wrangled it, right?

And they determined it was a bull and they couldn’t even read the ear tag, right? Is that name was punchy And apparently the ear tag says punch.

[00:14:22] Laura: Yeah, I don’t know. This is. I, I mean, I, I have no idea how you get this wrong. Like it feels like if you take one good look, you’re like, okay, I understand this.

But no, this is the story that just keeps giving. Like, cuz you know, Friday morning we had a story saying, we still don’t know, but she’s the punch. Punchy is at this happy trail sanctuary where sh she could be somebody’s pet. Of course, when we wrote that story, we used. Probably he, maybe we used it, but then it broke later in the day.

Um, Sean Klia called me, he goes, you’re never gonna believe this. And he’s our crime editor. And I was like, what? And he is like, it’s not a bull, it’s a cow. And I was like, okay, we have to write another story. [00:15:00] Oh yeah. And you were off. And I almost texted you to bother you and be like, you’re never gonna believe this.

But I was like, we’ll, just. We’ll just let it land in your inbox.

[00:15:08] Chris: Oh, no, I, I, when I saw it, I got in touch with an editor who had belittled me for calling this animal a cow to begin with, because obviously I couldn’t tell my bull from a cow, so I’ll never let him forget that I was

[00:15:19] Laura: right. I feel like there’s definitely some kind of pun here about no bull, you know?

Um, yeah. Yeah. So many puns.

[00:15:28] Chris: Love to know the backstory of this thing, you know, so to today in Ohio, For too many decades to count the names of crime victims were considered public record in Ohio, and most, if not all of America, but our gerrymandered legislature rushed through a law without comment.

Recently that changed that. Courtney, why and how did this happen?

[00:15:49] Courtney: Yeah, this is wild. I can’t imagine following crime and not having access to victims’ identities. But that is the case here in Ohio now, apparently. So we’ve been hearing for several [00:16:00] years now about Marcy’s Law, which offers a lot of, you know, the idea was victims’ rights, uh, for folks who are victims to crimes and, and that it took a few years to get that 2017 passed law.

Enacted, but now we have had it on the books for a while and lawmakers rushed through a change to that law that has some pretty wide ranging effects. And this tweak that they moved through basically gives the benefit of the of, of privacy to the victims on the front end. So up until now, even under the prior iteration of the law, Victims’ names appeared in police reports and they appeared in court records unless they specifically asked the court to, to take their names out of the court records.

Under this new change, there’s a presumption that all victims want this privacy right, and therefore their names are removed on the front end from police department records, which means when you go get that very basic, very first document to understand. What happened [00:17:00] in a crime in your community? You’ll no longer see who the victim of that, that crime is.

We,

[00:17:06] Chris: in our newsroom, we don’t use a lot of victim identities. We do for murder cases, but, but generally speaking, we, we don’t, because we recognize that they’re usually victims through no fault of their own. And why should they have their names out there on top of that? Uh, but the, the danger of this is accountability.

There’s also a thought that the police want this because when they shoot somebody, they don’t want their names out there and they can claim they’re a victim of crime because the reason they had to shoot somebody is they were threatening, and so because the police were under threat, they’re victims and they won’t be named.

That would be sleazy because that’s an accountability issue. If police shoot somebody or use excessive force, the public deserves to know who they are.

[00:17:54] Courtney: And, and that is happening. We are seeing that. So Columbus police have invoked this, [00:18:00] this new part of the law to shield the identities of officers who killed a man in a shootout earlier this month, the Columbus dispatch reports that the police department down there.

It’s declining to release the names of the officers who killed this man signing Marcy’s Law. And funnily enough, it was the city of Columbus who apparently was among those, or a key person who lobbied the. For this change in law, the city attorney told us basically that there are so many different crimes they investigate that have little chance of being solved, or little chance of identifying the perpetrator that this Marcy’s law and this victim’s rights process basically resulted in amount of paperwork officers having to walk individuals through these victims’ rights.

Forms when there really wasn’t a chance for justice in a lot of those cases. So basically to cut down on the paperwork, Columbus says that’s why they sought this change. Yeah,

[00:18:57] Chris: it is really an accountability issue. It’s, it’s [00:19:00] one of those, for instance, when when we questioned Cleveland’s claim that it was losing money on the Kia in Hyundai theft.

Trend that’s going on. Uh, we, we wanted to talk to some of the victims of those crimes to see what they had to say about how they were treated by the city. This would be a lot harder now, which is what the city would want. They don’t want us to talk to people that are unhappy with the way the, the, the impound lot treated them.

And so it just makes. Life more difficult. We could always do call outs. We have a huge audience and we could say, Hey, if your car was stolen, we wanna talk to you. But this does hurt accountability. I get that victims don’t wanna see their names out there. And it when, when you’re a victim, it through no fault of your own.

How is it fair that you get put out for public consumption? But I, I do maintain, we’ve done very little that we stopped using a lot of victim names a long time ago,

[00:19:55] Courtney: and it’s, you know, worth noting here one example of kind of what the public loses about knowledge, [00:20:00] you know, what’s going on in their community.

That recent example where we saw two Cleveland Browns players be the victim of a crime downtown, he had their cards stolen. We won’t learn that anymore if their names aren’t in the reports.

[00:20:11] Chris: Right, right. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. Reporter Adam Furries took a deep dive into the case of Hugo. I think that’s how his name Hugo Vitek, a Parmer Heights Buscher, who was charged earlier this year as a war criminal, and the former Yugoslavia.

This is one hack of a tale, Lisa. Who is he?

[00:20:30] Lisa: Yeah, and I think it’s Yugo, uh, but I could be wrong. But he is 55 year old Yugoslav Vidic. He was arrested in Parma Heights recently and charged with lying on his US Visa application and about his service in the Yugoslav People’s Army, uh, back in the nineties.

He’s a longtime butcher. He’s been a butcher since he was 18. Back in Croatia. He owned Hugo’s Meats and Parus and. 2005 and worked for several grocery store chains as a butcher, including Dave’s market and Save A Lot [00:21:00] People said he was good with a knife, but his story starts in 1991 when he joined the Yugoslav People’s Army, which was a group of ethnic Serbs who opposed Croatian independence from Yugoslavia.

He rose quickly through the ranks of the Red Berets tactical unit, became a lieutenant, and then he was part of a group that. Storm, the Gavrilo meat processing plant in Croatia where he worked. He was the only one of that group without a mask, like he wanted these people to know it was him. He forced the women employees to strip to their underwears, and then he grabbed a coworker, St.

Stephan Combs, who had been seen shaking hands with the president of the Croatian Republic. And so he cut combs off arm. Arm off at the elbow with a knife, and then combs was tortured by others in the group, and then his body was thrown into a mass grave and not found for a year. So war crime tri charges were filed against Vidic in 1994.

A trial held years later. A five Judge [00:22:00] Panel found Vidic guilty in 1998 in absentia. They gave him a 20 year sentence, but he had already fled to Brett Belgrade’s. He was not present at the trial. In 1999, he moved to Lakewood, Ohio to live with his sister, and then ended up in Parma and had various butcher jobs.

Um, at the Dave’s market, Lee Harvard Store four employees accused Vidic of sexual harassment so bad that the E E O C filed a lawsuit. Saying there was an open, no notorious pattern of harassment. Dave settled for $300,000 and fired VIDIC in 2010, and then the Ohio Agriculture Department got involved.

They had an investigation that found it. Vidic took about. 30 to a hundred pounds of meat trimmings a month from Save-A-Lot where he worked. And then he used those trimmings to make sausages in his sausage shop. Well, this meat never gets inspected because it’s trimming. And he also, in his labels, claimed that he used prime cuts of meat when he obviously was, wasn’t.

So his [00:23:00] meat selling license was suspended in 2019. He pled guilty to misdemeanor selling uninspected meat. But then he was right back at it a month after he was, you know, convicted. He started doing it again, stealing meat trimmings and making his sausages. And he pled guilty again in 2020. So, yeah, quite a long story and ended up here in Ohio.

[00:23:20] Chris: Yeah. I’m, I’m on, I guess I’m confused about how somebody that is in the country, uh, I guess on exile or whatever, is allowed to stay when he keeps getting caught. Breaking the law. And then why didn’t anybody recognize before now that he’s this wanted war criminal that did horrendous things in his former country?

Fascinating story that Adam put together. I remember when it first broke, we wondered, I wonder what the backstory is here. And it’s way more interesting than we surmised. You are listening to today in Ohio. Why has Howard Hannah, a force in the Northeast Ohio real estate industry pulled its listings from sites like [00:24:00] Redfin where a lot of people look for homes to buy.

[00:24:04] Laura: Laura. Hey, they want you to look on the Howard Hannah site and they want you to register so they have your email address because everybody wants an email address these days. That’s how you get in touch with. Possible customers. So they began this experimental change three weeks ago. You get more information about the house you’re looking at through the Howard Hanna site.

But yeah, they’re the first major company in the country to do this. And if you look around at for sales signs in northeast Ohio, I don’t know for sure, but it looks like Howard Hanna might be the leader because they are everywhere.

[00:24:36] Chris: So is this just, they need to know who’s looking? This is a way to make sure they’re, they’re getting the contact information

[00:24:42] Laura: Yes.

Basically. And so it, it’s proprietary, so they’ll have it. And if you wanna look at their stuff, I, I think they’re big enough in this market that people will do it. It’s not like, I mean, I don’t think it’s going to hurt the houses on the market because they won’t see as many. Possible buyers. [00:25:00] I think everybody will just make the adjustment because you don’t have to pay or anything, you just have to give over your information.

So the c e O of Howard, Hannah said we tried, we did this to try to create more leads and traffic to our website and for our agents who hopefully will sell more of our homes quicker. And they say it’s more transparent to buyers because it gives more details and information. I gotta think that, I mean, you know, sites like Zillow, I don’t know how old they are, but now everybody uses them because they take everything, um, I would imagine they’re gonna kind of try to find a way to fight back on this.

Well, except

[00:25:32] Chris: does Howard Hannah lose business then? Because like you said, I think the first place people turn is to Zillow or Redfin. They don’t go to the individual realtors and so does that cost Howard Hannah, if I’m always on Zillow looking at houses, am I more likely to focus on what’s available there?

I

[00:25:51] Laura: think. You’re not gonna get the casual looker, right? The person who drives by a house and is like, Ooh, I wonder what that costs. Or like, you’re just in a neighborhood and [00:26:00] you’re like, I just wanna see the map of like the home values in this, just to get an idea. But if you are looking for a house and as someone, I mean, it’s been a while, but if you want a house, you are going to be on everything you possibly can to see as soon as it pops up.

What is out there because you wanna be the first one to see it, and you wanna be the one to put in the offer if it’s the house you want. So I think if you are seriously home shopping, you will have no, no problem registering for this. The casual like looker, that might be a problem.

[00:26:27] Chris: Yeah, I’d be interested to see if they stick to this, if six months down the road they’ve seen a downturn in their business because they’re not.

Right in everybody’s face.

[00:26:36] Laura: Um, yeah, I mean, they’ve gone from 189 people registered to their website from three weeks ago to 2,500 now. So if you, if you wanna look at a Howard Hannah listing, you gotta get on.

[00:26:48] Chris: Okay. You’re listening to today in Ohio University hospitals has long provided maternity services in Ashland County, but no more.

Courtney, why not? Yeah,

[00:26:58] Courtney: UHS Samaritan Medical [00:27:00] Center in Ashland is closing its labor and delivery department that happens on August 8th. Last patients will be admitted a few days to before and the hospital saying it’s because of staffing, it doesn’t have enough staff here. And disclosure means Ashland County is gonna have.

No hospitals offering labor and delivery services. There are a couple alternatives in Lorraine and nearby, but this is it. Samaritan is also the only full service acute care hospital in the county, but this is somewhat. Of a wider trend. You know, you’re seeing it in Ohio, you’re seeing it with, uh, you’re seeing it in rural communities.

Samaritan will be the third labor and delivery department that, uh, has shut down in recent years across the state. There’s been 28 closures or consolidations in the last dozen years. 11 happened in the last year alone, so this is ongoing. And pregnant patients who expected to deliver. And Ashlynn, they’re gonna have to work with caregiver givers to [00:28:00] move their care elsewhere.

And, uh, Samaritan’s still gonna offer other services, like they’ll still have an ob g yn and midwifery and, and lactation services, but, You know when we’re talking Ashland County, there’s an aging population here. There’s a birthing decline, 300 birth pre pandemic at Samaritan Hospital down to an expected 180 this

[00:28:23] Chris: year.

We talk a lot though about. The infant mortality rate in this country and in Cleveland and about maternal health, the, the number of moms, especially those in poverty who die involving childbirth. You gotta think that not having a hospital that’s, that can take care of people would affect that.

[00:28:46] Courtney: Yeah, I, I, I’m very curious where this leaves folks.

As you know, they talk about an aging population in Ashland County. We know population trends, younger folks, childbearing year folks are more likely nowadays to [00:29:00] be in cities, more populated areas than their predecessors. It just, it kind of marks this, this shifting demographic. Change, I’d

[00:29:08] Chris: say. Yeah, but it does create a hardship for somebody.

I mean, to drive all the way across the county to to give birth. That’s sometimes you don’t have that kind of time. Yeah. The

[00:29:18] Courtney: closest is in Lorraine County in Richland, so it’s not a quick drive.

[00:29:22] Chris: Okay. You’re listening to today in Ohio. That’s it for Monday. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks Courtney. Thanks Laura. Thanks everybody who listens to this podcast.