By The Associated Press
Akron Beacon Journal. December 17, 2023.
Editorial: It’s finally time to put bad landlords out of business, fix loopholes on property sales
Other than food, there’s nothing more fundamental to human survival than making sure you and your loved ones have a safe place to live.
It’s a need most Americans take for granted as they can afford to buy or rent suitable housing. But for too many others, their living arrangements are in a constant state of flux thanks to economic challenges and unscrupulous landlords who prey on people and manipulate real estate in lower-income areas.
A recent Akron Beacon Journal investigation extensively detailed the devastating problems these slumlords can create while operating a complex web of companies that make it difficult for local officials to trace true ownership or enforce safety standards.
The business model works roughly like this: Buy a cheap distressed property, rent it for as much as possible for as long as possible, spend as little as possible on upkeep and fail to pay any taxes until the county forecloses. In some cases, owners will then try to buy the same property back at a sheriff’s sale.
For example, Summit County officials worked hard in 2018 to crack down on property owner Gary Thomas, but he’s still in business renting to people today and, as of our Nov. 16 report, owed about $165,000 in property taxes. That’s the largest back-tax bill by any single landlord in the Greater Akron rental market, according to a reporter’s analysis. And he’s also facing numerous code violation complaints.
To us, any property transfer should require the complete payment of all property taxes before a deed can be transferred.
Ohio also should allow judges to bar anyone significantly delinquent on their property taxes from acquiring new properties. This could be accomplished much like Ohio eliminated frivolous lawsuits from prisoners and others by allowing judges to label a small number of people as vexatious litigators.
Why not allow county auditor or fiscal agents to seek a similar legal designation for the rare individuals or companies who don’t pay their taxes? This would force them to obtain judicial approval of new acquisitions, although the web of companies some operate could make this challenging to enforce.
A bill introduced in 2022 by Sen. Louis Blessing III, R-Cincinnati, would have made people ineligible to buy property at sheriff’s sales if they owed any fines for building code violations or current violations that had not been fixed. Unfortunately, the sensible bill died in committee.
Locally, there’s also a need for Summit County and the city of Akron, which both maintain separate rental registration programs, to more closely align their efforts and track the same information to help identify landlord issues. Landlords don’t care about city boundaries.
As Shammas Malik becomes Akron’s mayor in January, we know housing is among his top priorities, including a program to ensure tenants facing eviction have legal representation. Much more work also needs to be done to educate tenants about their rights, enforce building codes and crack down on those who prey on renters.
We urge Malik to work closely with the Summit County Fiscal Office, Summit County Land Bank and our state lawmakers to craft meaningful solutions.
It’s time to close loopholes allowing landlords to exploit the system.
People have a right to safe housing.
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The Plain Dealer. December 15, 2023.
Editorial: PUCO nominating process for position once held by Sam Randazzo is a reminder of some key unfinished business
Few state agencies have greater economic impact on Ohio families and businesses than the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which regulates the rates that electric, gas and other public utilities may charge customers. The panel’s five members, appointed by the governor, serve staggered five-year terms. From among the five appointees, the governor designates one as commission chair.
The PUCO term of the current chair, former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jenifer French, will expire April 10. The Nominating Council charged with recommending prospective commissioners to Gov. Mike DeWine is now seeking applications for that seat on the commission. Deadline for applying to the 12-member Nominating Council is Jan. 11. The council will meet Jan. 25 to recommend four finalists to DeWine.
DeWine had appointed French to the unexpired PUCO term of former PUCO Chair Samuel Randazzo after Randazzo resigned in November 2020 following the FBI’s search of his Columbus residence.
Randazzo, a DeWine appointee who had been recommended by the Nominating Council, and who was unanimously confirmed by the state Senate, was recently indicted on federal corruption charges for the regulatory favoritism he is alleged to have shown Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp as part of the House Bill 6 scandal. FirstEnergy, which owns the Illuminating, Ohio Edison, and Toledo Edison companies, admitted in a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement paying Randazzo $4.3 million in bribes to do its bidding at the commission and in other ways.
A spokesman confirmed that French will seek reappointment to a full five-year commission term — and there is no reason to believe that she has done anything but an exemplary job after replacing Randazzo on the commission and as its chair.
But the PUCO’s formal launch of its nominating process is a reminder of some key unfinished business at the commission.
One includes the PUCO’s need to complete internal probes that are now on hold at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Cincinnati into possible wrongdoing and regulatory missteps while Randazzo led the commission. Without full clarity on those matters, regulatory reform, both legislatively and administratively, is handicapped.
Our editorial board has repeatedly urged the U.S. attorney to allow the PUCO investigations to go forward. They also bear on ratepayer justice, with Ohio ratepayers still shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a day, according to the Ohio Office of Consumers’ Counsel, to subsidize two money-losing coal plants, one in Indiana, as required by unrepealed parts of the fatally tainted House Bill 6.
But given that the PUCO has been kept from completing its own internal investigations, this new nominating process also highlights the risks for the commission itself when it, too, is proceeding in the dark. As things now stand, commissioners lack full understanding of how the PUCO itself could have become so compromised that, as charged in the Randazzo indictment, a PUCO chair was able to kill internal reports and otherwise manipulate regulatory outcomes.
The other unfinished business has to do with PUCO nominating reform. The latest commission opening is a reminder that the commission’s current nominating mechanism was devised by the General Assembly in 1982 to ward off popular election of the commission and public financing of campaigns, as proposed by a voter-initiated issue on 1982’s statewide Ohio ballot. (The 1982 deal worked. In the end, 67% of voters said “no” to electing the PUCO.)
That 1982 deal is what created the Nominating Council to screen applicants and recommend prospective commission appointees to the governor. But this “above-it-all” set-up has never kept a governor, in the end, from appointing whomever he wanted to the PUCO.
Meanwhile, legislative leaders are sitting on House Bill 363, sponsored by Rep. Daniel Troy, a Willowick Democrat, that would require one of the PUCO commissioners to be a consumer representative selected from a list submitted by the Ohio Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents residential ratepayers before the PUCO.
In the near term, a General Assembly that has left swaths of HB 6 on the books is unlikely to make any radical changes in the PUCO nominating pathway. But it’s hardy radical to widen the scope of the Nominating Council’s membership to include a truly diverse set of Ohioans – by occupation and region.
The council as it now exists is an extension of what could be considered the Statehouse Establishment – which has landed Ohio utility consumers where they are today.
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Toledo Blade. December 17, 2023.
Editorial: Plan for rail future
The approval of $500,000 to study the feasibility of passenger train service connecting Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit, as well as other rail options in Ohio, is a welcome step to build on previous studies to determine when – and if – such a route can be created.
The announcement of this money by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) on Dec. 5 owes much to the aggressive lobbying effort by this community and the state of Ohio.
The Corridor Identification and Development Program was included by Congress in the bipartisan infrastructure law.
In November, 2021, President Biden signed that law with its $66 billion for five years of funding for rail expansion, most of it dedicated to passenger rail.
In February, the Northwest Ohio Passenger Rail Association discussed the availability of federal money to study the creation of new and expanded Amtrak routes at their annual luncheon in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza.
An important step in getting that money approved by FRA was a signal that the state of Ohio was on board. That was sent in March with Gov. Mike DeWine’s signing of the state’s $13.5 billion transportation budget which authorized the Ohio Rail Development Authority to explore conventional and high-speed passenger rail service.
In September, at a gathering of rail industry leaders in Toledo, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) warned that Ohio would miss out on rail improvements if it didn’t offer unified plans. Present was Amit Bose, the Federal Railroad Administration’s administrator.
At the time, it was expected that two routes would be studied – a passenger service connecting Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland and one connecting Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.
As it turned out, four connections will be studied by the FRA: a Chicago-Fort Wayne-Columbus-Pittsburgh route with stops in Lima and Kenton, and daily service connecting Cincinnati with Chicago and points East.
While some would say that nostalgia is driving the pressure for passenger rail, rather than real demand for train service when car transportation is so cheap and convenient, we say that the future needs to be planned for. Ohio has railroad routes in abundance, and multiple cities that could benefit from convenient mass transit connections.
The amount of money allocated, $500,000 per route, is a relatively modest expense to continue adding data and understanding to the potential of new passenger rail options.
Train travel is a natural for Ohio, and Toledo, which has an outstanding train station. The award of study funding was a response to coordinated support in Ohio.
However, the study must demonstrate convincingly that there will be a market for new passenger rail service. Given a national debt surpassing $33 trillion, and growing by more than a trillion dollars a year, new taxpayer subsidizing of rail service that doesn’t serve a need is spending we can’t afford.
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Youngstown Vindicator. December 13, 2023.
Editorial: What happened to the days when candidates faced defeat with grace?
The victorious opponent of appointed Struthers Municipal Court Judge Jennifer Ciccone isn’t the only person who should be frustrated by Ciccone’s legal objection — filed and then withdrawn — to the outcome of last month’s general election.
Every voter who resides in the Struthers Municipal Court district, along with every taxpayer in Mahoning County, should be infuriated.
Shortly after the Nov. 8 election was certified giving challenger James Melone a decisive 10.28% victory, Ciccone’s attorney filed court action in the 7th District Court of Appeals disputing the election’s validity, and alleging “improper, irregular and illegal conduct.”
The allegations were made by attorney Michael P. Ciccone on behalf of 28 voters who supported the judge.
James Melone, a county common pleas court magistrate, won the election with 7,390 votes, compared with 6,012 for Ciccone.
Days later, as judges and the prosecutor recused themselves, and attorneys sought answers to the vague allegations, Michael Ciccone suddenly and without explanation dropped the case.
After Michael Ciccone launched the allegations, both Democrat Mahoning Board of Election member David Betras and Republican Mahoning Board of Elections Director Tom McCabe expressed outrage at the allegations of improprieties in the handling of ballots, noting that the vague complaint contained no concrete evidence to prove any of the charges.
McCabe said, “This does a great disservice to the whole process.”
Betras, a lawyer, said of the attorney who filed the complaint: “Lawyers should watch when they make spurious claims. He’s lying to the court. He should know what happens to other lawyers who make false claims.”
In a swift and controversial process, Ciccone had been appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill a vacant municipal court seat just weeks before the election, making her the technical incumbent and possibly giving her a leg up on her opponent.
Jennifer Ciccone, who McCabe said called him the day after the election claiming it “was rigged,” also sought hundreds of pages of election documents from the Mahoning Board of Elections. When asked for comment by our politics reporter after the case was filed and dropped, Ciccone denied any connection to the lawsuit and said she had not questioned the election’s outcome.
Now Betras says he’ll seek punitive action against the attorney who had filed the case.
“He filed it, and now he has to eat it,” said Betas. “You don’t get to call me a felon and walk away. No, no, nope, no. My lawyer is going to file a complaint for our legal fees. Whatever our remedies are against him and her and the people who filed this, I’m going to sue them for legal fees.”
He also did not rule out filing a complaint to seek disciplinary action against the two from the Ohio Supreme Court, saying he’s “not putting up with it.”
Given the circumstances, we are not surprised by Betras’ anger.
Sadly, these kinds of allegations seem to be becoming more and more commonplace in America.
While we fully respect the right by every candidate to request a recount to feel confident with the reported results, we do not respect arguments and allegations made by candidates and especially in court filings, without evidence of such improprieties.
We are disheartened and frustrated by these types of action.
These types of allegations without evidence are a waste of time for the boards of elections and the court, and a waste of time for the taxpayers who foot the bill. Further, they stand to shake the credibility of the entire election system on which our democracy has been built.
What happened to the days when candidates who were defeated handled the outcome with poise and grace?
Every election results in winners and losers. If candidates are not willing or able to accept the results, then they should stay out of the race.
