Ohio

Ohio’s $15 minimum wage amendment sputters on deadline day, campaign says

Published

2 years ago

July 4, 2024

Ohio’s minimum wage amendment sputters on deadline day, campaign says

The campaign behind a $15 minimum wage amendment in Ohio opted not to submit the hundreds of thousands of signatures it collected before the state’s Wednesday deadline and instead vowed to try for a ballot measure in 2025, according to a statement.

One Fair Wage’s decision means there will be no option to raise the state’s $10.45 minimum wage this November, to the delight of many pro-business groups, including the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce.

“The proponents are calling themselves ‘One Fair Wage?’ I guess my reaction would be, ‘Fair to who?’” said Chris Kershner, president and CEO of the Dayton chamber, in an interview. “It doesn’t sound like mandates on the business community are very fair to the employers in Ohio.”

Under One Fair Wage’s proposal, a $15 minimum wage would be phased in over two years and would be tied to rise at the same rate of inflation.

“When mandates are put onto businesses, businesses have to make operation decisions that impact their companies, their people, their investments and their growth,” Kershner said. He added that the chamber would still need to run the numbers and he couldn’t provide real estimates of how much a higher wage would affect Dayton-area businesses, or how many layoffs it might bring.

One Fair Wage would have needed to deliver its petitions to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office in Columbus before midnight Wednesday.

In order to get on the ballot, any citizen-initiated constitutional amendment aiming for the ballot this year would need to submit 413,487 signatures of valid Ohio voters, with at least half of Ohio’s counties producing signatures that represent 5% of the voters who partook in the last gubernatorial election in that county.

In a statement first shared by the Statehouse News Bureau and later confirmed by Journal-News, One Fair Wage said it fell short in Ohio’s rural areas and, therefore, did not meet the 44-county requirement.

The organization attributed its shortcomings to “violence and intimidation toward our low-wage worker of color canvassers, who were verbally abused and harassed by those opposing raises for workers” in rural counties. The campaign did not immediately provide details to corroborate these accusations when the Dayton Daily News asked.

In a Wednesday night statement, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose called out One Fair Wage for placing blame on rural Ohioans. He characterized it as “a duplicitous, disorganized goat rodeo of a campaign that has made every excuse in the book for their lack of compliance with the law.”

“I won’t sit quietly while any group distorts the truth to cover for their own negligence,” LaRose said.

One Fair Wage’s own statement concluded with a vow to continue collecting signatures and to try again next year.

By holding off, One Fair Wage is playing it safe to ensure that it can use the bulk of the signatures it already collected in the future. Here’s how the cost-benefit analysis works in these situations:

• In Ohio, turning in 413,487 signatures is enough to begin the state’s verification process. From there, the state would send each county’s signatures to the respective county board of elections, which would then verify whether those signatures are valid. The counties would then send their findings back to the Ohio Secretary of State, which would determine if, in the end, the campaign had submitted enough valid signatures to meet the state’s lofty ballot requirements.

• If it’s determined that there weren’t enough valid signatures, the campaign would get a 10-day cure period to try to collect enough valid signatures to get over the line.

• However, if the campaign falls short of the initial 413,487 signature haul, or falls short after the 10-day cure period, the entire process would restart and none of the previously collected signatures could be used in the future.

• Luckily for organizers in positions like One Fair Wage, signatures for citizen-initiated amendments in Ohio are evergreen (so long as the individual’s voter registration remains the same), which gives petitioners the option of simply holding off until they are absolutely certain they’d make the ballot.

This story originally appeared on journal-news.com.

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Ohio

Ohio woman sentenced in $775,000 Medicaid scheme

Published

7 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

COLUMBUS — A Lake County woman was sentenced this morning to jail time and ordered to pay $775,000 in restitution for fraudulently billing Medicaid, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced. “She inflated her earnings through brazen fraud, but her scheme burst wide open when our investigators got the case,” Yost said. “Cheating taxpayers comes with […]

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Ohio

‘Catastrophic’ Ohio farm fire kills 6,000 hogs and pigs, officials say

Published

19 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

‘Catastrophic’ Ohio farm fire kills 6,000 hogs and pigs, officials say

A wind-swept blaze at an Ohio hog farm complex caused “catastrophic” damage and left thousands of pigs dead, fire officials said, marking another devastating barn inferno contributing to the deaths of millions of animals in recent years.

The massive fire occurred on Wednesday, Feb. 25, at Fine Oak Farms in Union Township, Madison County, located west of Ohio’s capital of Columbus, according to the Central Townships Joint Fire District. Fire crews received a report of a barn fire shortly before 12 p.m. local time.

The incident was later upgraded to a commercial structure fire after Chief Brian Bennington observed a “large column of smoke visible from a distance” and requested additional resources. Multiple local fire departments, along with several other emergency agencies, were called to the scene.

“What our crews encountered upon arrival was a very difficult and heartbreaking incident,” Bennington said in a statement on Feb. 26.

The fire chief described the facility as a large farm complex used for hog production consisting of five large agricultural buildings, including four that housed about 7,500 hogs. When crews arrived at the scene, they found two of the barns engulfed in flames, Bennington said.

Crews were challenged by windy conditions that significantly impacted fire suppression efforts, according to Bennington. Three barns were destroyed in the fire, and about 6,000 hogs and pigs were killed.

Firefighters saved one barn and about 1,500 hogs, the fire chief added. No injuries were reported in the incident.

Bennington highlighted the assistance of the farming community throughout Madison and Clark counties, as multiple farmers responded with water trucks to help with water supply efforts. “Rural Ohio’s agricultural community is tight-knit, and they truly step up when one of their own is in need,” he said.

The incident remains under investigation, and the Ohio State Fire Marshal’s Office will determine the fire’s cause and origin. Bennington said there is no suspicion of arson and no ongoing threat to the public at this time.

‘Rapidly changing fire behavior conditions’

Heavy smoke from the fire could be seen for miles, and Bennington said first-arriving units were met with fire conditions coming from the opposite side of the hog farm complex.

The fire chief noted that the incident required extensive water-shuttle operations due to rural water-supply limitations in the area. Crews attempted to cut the fire off by deploying multiple handlines and using an aerial device, but “faced extremely challenging conditions throughout the incident,” according to Bennington.

Sustained winds of about 20 mph with gusts up to 35 mph accelerated the fire’s spread, Bennington said. The high winds made it “extremely difficult” to contain forward fire progression and created “rapidly changing fire behavior conditions” across the agricultural complex, he added.

After about four to five hours, the fire was contained by fire personnel from four different counties, according to the fire chief.

“Unfortunately, the fire resulted in catastrophic damage to the business,” Bennington said in an earlier statement on Feb. 25. “A significant portion of the agricultural structures were destroyed.”

Latest major fire to impact an Ohio hog farm

The incident at Fine Oak Farms is the latest major fire to cause significant damage to an Ohio hog farm in recent years.

In August 2024, about 1,100 pigs were killed in Versailles, a village about 50 miles northwest of Dayton, Ohio, according to data from the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute. In March 2022, about 2,000 hogs died in a barn fire at Kenneth Scholl Hog Farm in Brown Township, just west of Columbus.

Before the fire at Fine Oak Farms, the Animal Welfare Institute reported that other barn fires in Ohio this year killed 162 sheep, horses, cows, chickens, and other animals.

Hundreds of thousands of animals killed in barn fires each year

Data from the Animal Welfare Institute shows that hundreds of thousands of animals are killed in barn fires across the country each year. Since 2013, over 9 million farm animals have been killed in barn fires, according to the organization.

As of Feb. 26, the Animal Welfare Institute reported that 118,738 farm animals have died in U.S. barn fires this year, including the incident at Fine Oak Farms. The majority of farm animals killed were chickens in separate incidents in North Carolina and Georgia in January, and another incident in Missouri earlier this month.

“Most fatal barn fires occurred in colder states, particularly the Upper Midwest and the Northeast. New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois had the highest number of barn fires, respectively,” according to the organization. “The amount of cold weather a state experienced appeared to be a greater factor in the prevalence of barn fires than the intensity of a state’s animal agriculture production.”

In an updated report on farm animal deaths due to barn fires in 2025, the Animal Welfare Institute said more than 2.53 million farm animals were killed in barn fires from 2022 to 2024. The organization noted that the high death toll was “driven primarily” by fires at large operations that housed several thousand to over 1 million farm animals.

The majority of deaths in these incidents during that period, over 98%, were farmed birds, such as chickens and turkeys, according to the Animal Welfare Institute. But in 2023, a massive fire at a west Texas dairy farm became the single deadliest event involving livestock in the state’s history and the deadliest cattle fire in America in at least a decade.

18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas. At the time, Roger Malone, who is the former mayor of Dimmitt, called the incident “mind-boggling.”

“I don’t think it’s ever happened before around here. It’s a real tragedy,” Malone said.

Contributing: Rick Jervis, USA TODAY; Shahid Meighan, Columbus Dispatch

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Ohio

Ohio’s LaRose pushes back on voter fraud critics, Democrats

Published

1 day ago

February 26, 2026

Press Room

Ohio’s LaRose pushes back on voter fraud critics, Democrats

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose discussed voter fraud and Ohio’s efforts to prevent it during a recent radio appearance.

LaRose appeared on “The Bill Cunningham” radio show, where he defended the state’s efforts to minimize voter fraud. A clip posted on X shows audio of LaRose arguing that policies aimed at preventing voter fraud are necessary even though cases are rare.

Here’s what to know.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose says voter fraud in Ohio is rare, compares prevention efforts to TSA security

In the clip, LaRose says that Democrats claim voter fraud is rare, and should be ignored.

“The left claims that voter fraud is rare, so we should just ignore it,” he said. “Well, airplane hijackings are also rare — we don’t abolish the TSA. The reason why we keep voter fraud rare in states like Ohio because we do these very things that they’re trying to take away from me.”

LaRose announced the inaugural meeting of the new Ohio Election Integrity Commission, which replaces what he called the flawed Ohio Elections Commission, in January 2026. The new committee, he says, will be used in “enforcing Ohio’s election laws, reviewing alleged violations, and ensuring accountability in matters relating to voting.”

In October 2025, LaRose said that he forwarded more than 1,000 cases of voter fraud to the U.S. Department of Justice. The cases involved 1,084 noncitizen individuals who appear to have registered to vote unlawfully in Ohio, and 167 noncitizens who appear to have also cast a ballot in a federal election since 2018.

In February 2026, President Donald Trump said Republicans should “nationalize” elections. He also accused Democrats of bringing migrants into the United States to illegally vote, a claim that is not backed by evidence, USA TODAY reports.

Voter fraud in the U.S. is considered rare nationwide, according to NPR, but there are still debates from both political sides on how frequently it occurs.

What is voter fraud?

Electoral fraud is defined as illegally interfering with the process of an election, according to Ballotpedia. This includes in-person voter fraud, absentee or mail ballots and illegal voter suppression.

Criminal penalties can include fines or imprisonment for up to five years, according to U.S. code. In Ohio, election interference can carry a felony of the fourth degree, according to Ohio Code.

Voter fraud is often a topic of debate among Democrats and Republicans, where organizations such as the conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database claiming to show nearly 1,500 cases of election fraud since the year 2000.

Meanwhile, research by law professor Justin Leavitt published in 2014 found 31 cases of in-person voter fraud among billions of ballots cast from 2000–2014, according to Ballotpedia.

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