Ginther: $1.24B for capital improvement

Includes $859.1M for housing, safety, more

Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther is proposing a nearly $1.24 billion capital improvement budget that includes $859.1 million in new funding to expand affordable housing, enhance public safety, and improve parks, streets, sidewalks and services citywide.

The total includes $379.3 million rolled over from past annual plans for projects not yet completed.

Of the $859.1 million in new spending, almost two-thirds of it – or $545.1 million – will be spent by the city's utilities to provide water, sewers and electricity. The bonds paying for those improvements are repaid by ratepayers, not taxpayers.

The mayor begins the process with his proposed annual spending plan, which will be reviewed in a series of four hearings before the City Council beginning Tuesday and ending July 14. Council is then expected to vote on a final spending plan by July 25.

In an announcement, Ginther highlighted new spending priorities for the future:

● Over $21 million to help keep more Columbus residents in their homes “and increase access to safe housing everyone can afford.”

● More than $12 million for an Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health (ADAMH) treatment facility and to Columbus Public Health.

● More than $66 million toward improvements at parks, playgrounds and recreational facilities, including $20 million to build the Broad Street Arts Center and $1.5 million to design new

Marion Franklin and Tuttle pools.

● $125 million to equip and fund the Public Service Department, including $9 million for additional refuse vehicles, $30 million for resurfacing, and over $2 million for continued improvements on Hudson Avenue.

“From new police and fire facilities and equipment to increasing affordable housing to improving parks, pools, roadways and sidewalks, these projects will be transformative and help to build a more equitable and inclusive future for all Columbus residents,” Ginther

scandal was the norm from the White House to the Statehouse.

An audit just released this week, though, found that ECOT still owes the state more than $117 million.

Ohio Auditor Keith Faber on Tuesday said the shuttered school owes $106.6 million to the state Department of Education and another $10.6 million to the state Attorney General's office.

As others have before them, Faber's auditors found that ECOT wasn't entitled to all the state money it received, including some in 2016 and 2017 and none in 2018.

ECOT as an entity may be gone, but for the sake of all taxpaying Ohioans, it had better not be forgotten.

Looking at the broad sweep of the ECOT swindle, it seems unfathomable that not a single indictment has been lodged against anyone in connection with its shady operations.

The main man behind ECOT was William Lager, a man with a host of Statehouse connections who founded the school in 2000. He also operated Altair Learning Management Inc and IQ Innovations LLC, which had lucrative contracts with ECOT to provide support services. After ECOT fell apart, Attorney General Dave Yost called Lager “the principal wrongdoer“in the case.

The series of lethal blows to Lager's empire began in 2016, when the Department of Education demanded repayment of $80 million.

But ECOT'S attendance numbers had been disputed by the state long before that, as far back as 2006. Going back even further, to 2001 and 2002, an audit determined that the state had been overpaying the school by millions.

That ECOT'S attendance numbers were disputed so early on in its existence – and how that problem regardless went unaddressed for so long by a string of governors, legislators and state officials – are looming questions that must be the stuff of any civic-minded federal prosecutor's dreams.

And maybe, we can hope, they still are.

Yost, while still the state auditor, excoriated ECOT in 2018 and referred his findings to both county and federal prosecutors.

The feds are a secretive lot who have a habit of neither confirming nor denying the existence of any pending investigation, but there have been a few dropped clues through the years that a probe of ECOT is afoot.

One of the biggest came in 2019, when the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice subpoenaed nearly 20 years of ECOT'S campaign contribution records.

More than three years have passed since that development, but the feds also don't have a habit of rushing their investigations.

Maybe they will wrap things up without uncovering a single instance of criminal behavior.

If you possess a lick of common sense, given what we know already, that outcome would boggle the mind.

But even if that is how an investigation concludes, prosecutors at the very least should know many more details about how ECOT and its principals were permitted to run amok for so long.

Considering Ohio's taxpayers footed the bill, we have the right to know each and every one of them. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker