Ohio
Ask Ohio senators a legit question and it might come back to bite you | Opinion
Pride 2025 in Columbus: Walk the parade downtown and in the Short North
Walk through the 2025 Stonewall Columbus Pride Festival and March through downtown Columbus and the Short North Saturday, June 14, 2025.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.
The Ohio Senate’s leaders want Ohio’s voters to sit down and shut up when it comes to what’s in (and what isn’t) in the pending state budget bill.
That cat leaped out of the bag last week when Sen. Jerry Cirino, the suburban Cleveland Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, told two women testifying on behalf of the Ohio Association of School Business Officials that they should support Senate Republicans’ proposed school funding plan, cleveland.com reported.
“I would suggest, for your members and for the two of you, that you do everything you can to support the Senate plan, because as we go into [a Senate-House budget] conference, there’s going to be other competing viewpoints on how to do this, and it only could get worse for you,” Cirino said — in Colums’, Ohi-a, Yew Ess Ay, not a puppet-show parliament in a Soviet-style “republic.”
So much for the Ohio Constitution, which guarantees everyone the right “to petition the General Assembly for the redress of grievances.” (BTW, that’s the Ohio Constitution that Cirino and every other member of the General Assembly swears she or he will uphold.)
Cirino, of Kirtland, apparently first entered public service in 1992, when then-Gov. George V. Voinovich appointed him as a trustee of Lakeland Community College. Cirino resigned as a trustee in 1997. More recently, Cirino was a Lake County commissioner and is said to be aiming to succeed term-limited Sen. Rob McColley, a Napoleon Republican, as the state Senate’s president.
Statewide, McColley may be best known for co-sponsoring 2021’s Senate Bill 52, signed that July by Gov. Mike DeWine, to hamper Ohio solar- and wind energy projects. Since then, “Ohioans and their elected representatives have killed enough solar development to roughly power the state’s three largest cities,” Jake Zuckerman, then of cleveland.com, reported earlier this year.
Attack on the libraries
McColley demonstrates the deafness that selectively strikes key state senators when there’s something they don’t want to hear.
Henry is McColley’s home county. Of Henry County’s four public libraries, voters have most recently approved levies for three of them, with the “yes” margins ranging from 59% to 70%. (Data for a fourth library weren’t immediately available.) And you’d think someone with political ambitions — maybe to be GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s running mate next year — might listen to his hometown constituents.
Nah: State Senate Republicans’ proposed rewrite of the House-passed budget worsens the financial damage that House Speaker Matt Huffman’s budget rewrite does to Ohio’s nationally renowned public libraries, offer every Ohioan — rich, poor; black, brown, white; urban, suburban.
DeWine proposed allotting $531.7 million for the Public Library Fund for the year that’ll begin July 1, then $549.1 million for the year beginning July 1, 2026. Those represent a longstanding state law requirement that state aid to public libraries must equal 1.7% of annual state General Revenue Fund collections. For the year that’ll end June, the Public Library Fund will provide an estimated $504.6 million for public libraries statewide
Huffman’s House, and McColley’s Senate, junked the GRF earmark.
They instead directly allotted $490 million for Year 1, then $500 million for Year 2. Those are steep reductions. This year, state Budget Office estimates, public libraries will have received $530 million from the Public Library fund.
But the Senate additionally aims to deduct from its library allotment $10.3 million each fiscal year for items previously budgeted separately, such as the State Library of Ohio and the Ohio Public Library Information Network.
According to Ohio Library Council data, the Senate plan would reduce state aid to public libraries to $479.7 million on July 1 for the new fiscal year.
If they allow themselves to be questioned, President McColley and Speaker Huffman might admit that the games they’re playing with library funding (and other vital services) are schemes to scrounge money to (a) fund skyrocketing private-school tuition and (b) cut income taxes for the wealthy.
Trouble is, if state income-tax cuts are the medicine for what ails Ohio’s economy, why was 1969 the last year that Ohioans’ per capita personal income was at least 100% of the U.S. per capita?
But — to protect yourself — please don’t ask the Ohio Senate’s Finance Committee about that. Why?
Because “things could get worse for you.”
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com.
Out of prison, Indiana’s caviar king back on Ohio River to find fishing holes taken
David Cox, of English, Indiana, says once he began setting his nets again after a two-year prison sentence and a three-year ban on commercial fishing, all of his once-secret spots were taken.
Can you eat fish from the Ohio River?
In 1975, future presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, bet 20 pounds of New England cod that the Red Sox would defeat the Reds in the World Series. If things went south for Boston, Ohio governor James Rhodes promised to send Dukakis 10 pounds of Lake Erie perch and 10 pounds of Ohio River catfish. The Reds ended up winning and the cod was sent to the Convalescent Home for Children, in Cincinnati.
At the time, people were still eating catfish from the Ohio without too much concern. The fish were also served at several restaurants along the river.
There were warnings in 1977
But two years later, in 1977, The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission released the results of a study of contaminants found in the tissues of Ohio River fish. They warned anglers in cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Wheeling and Gallipolis that man-made chemicals known as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, had been discovered in the river fish. Later, high concentrations of mercury were discovered in the fish, too.
Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the environmental regulations that followed, the river is now cleaner than it was in the seventies. And it’s still teeming with a variety of fish, including catfish, striped bass, drum and black bass, among other species.
But even though PCBs were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979, they are still found in fish, since they remain in the sediment in the bottom of the river. “Organisms live in the sediment and fish feed on them,” Rich Cogen, the executive director of the Ohio River Foundation told The Enquirer. Mercury is also a big problem, according to Cogen.
So the question is: Can you eat fish caught in the Ohio River?
The short answer is yes. But it depends on what species you are eating and where along the river you caught it.
There are also very strict limitations on how frequently you should eat them, according to the web site for the Ohio Sport Fish Consumption Advisory, part of the Ohio Department of Health.
In areas of the river between the Belleville Lock, located 204 miles downstream from the river’s origins in Pittsburgh, to the Indiana border, the advisory agency currently recommends consuming Ohio River fish no more than once a month max. That area includes Adams, Brown, Clermont, Gallia, Hamilton, Lawrence, Meigs and Scioto counties.
Here’s where to check
Recommendations change throughout the year, but you can keep up by visiting the Ohio Department of Health’s Sport Fish Consumption Advisory page, which provides updated information on when certain fish, usually bottom feeders such as carp, are deemed too dangerous to eat at all.
Here’s who should take a pass on Ohio River fish
The agency also warns that people who are more likely to have health effects from eating contaminated fish, includingchildren younger than 15 years old, pregnant women and women who are planning to become pregnant to avoid Ohio River fish altogether.
Just because you have to limit the amount of fish you eat, doesn’t mean the river is a bad place for fishing, as long as you limit your intake or do catch-and-release fishing. Just make sure you have a proper fishing license before casting your line.
Have a question for Just Askin’? Email us.
The Just Askin’ series aims to answer the questions that no one seems to have an answer for, except maybe Google.
Do you have a question you want answered? Send it to us at justaskin@enquirer.com, ideally with Just Askin’ in the subject line.
It isn’t over until it’s over. That’s the case for both the UCLA Bruins football program recruiting and for quarterback Brady Edmunds. Edmunds is currently committed to head to Ohio State but he took a visit from UCLA offensive coordinator Dean Kennedy earlier this week.
Kennedy met Edmunds on Thursday despite the fact that the quarterback has been committed to the Buckeyes since December of 2024 but could the UCLA Bruins be making a run at flipping the quarterback?
Edmunds has only had an official visit with Ohio State but could UCLA heave a heat check on the 6’5” quarterback? New UCLA head coach Bob Chesney is off to an unbelievable start to his recruiting with the Bruins and flipping a recruit of Edmunds’ caliber would be his most impressive move yet.
247 Sports has Edmunds as the No. 16 quarterback in the class, which would give UCLA a clear predecessor for Nico Iamaleava whenever the Bruins current starting quarterback decides to head to the professional level.
It’d be a full circle moment for the Bruins, as Edmunds was originally recruited to Ohio State by former UCLA head coach Chip Kelly, who bailed on UCLA to go run the Buckeyes offense. Ohio State is a great spot for a developing quarterback, as the Buckeyes produce tons of NFL talent, especially at the wide receiver position, which would help Edmunds put up some gaudy numbers in Columbus.
Chesney and the Bruins have geography on their side, Edmunds attends Huntington Beach High School in Southern California, which could potentially become a factor if Edmunds views UCLA as a program on the rise that’d be much closer to his friends and family than out in Ohio.
Time will tell if Kennedy’s visit will make a difference but UCLA’s recruiting has made waves in the first offseason under Chesney and the new regime.
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