Kasich wants jobs, jobs, jobs, but lawmakers say, ‘La, la, la’
The antics of Ohio’s Republican-run General Assembly are undercutting the jobcreating efforts of Republican Gov. John Kasich. You may think that unlikely. You may think that illogical. But it is what it is. And it’s there.
As anyone knows who has eyes to see and ears to hear, Kasich has been talking jobs, jobs, jobs, since Day One of his governorship.
Now Kasich is asking Ohioans to give him a second term. His Democratic challenger is Cuyahoga County’s Democratic executive, Ed FitzGerald. And Ohio’s economy, which remains soft, is a fair target of FitzGerald’s campaign.
Meanwhile, though, the legislature’s two top Republicans, Medina’s William G. Batchelder and Celina’s Keith Faber, are slapping together a purported “energy” bill, Amended Substitute Senate Bill 310.
And Senate Bill 310 is offmessage, Kasich-wise, because it could strangle an emerging source of new Ohio jobs and investment: energy production using the sun and wind, and the Ohio-associated R&D and manufacturing linked to those renewable sources of energy.
Senate Bill 310 would freeze for two years the renewable energy standards set by a virtually unanimous General Assembly in 2008. Both Faber and Batchelder voted yes on those standards. What’s changed — or rather what hasn’t changed — in six years? This: Ohio electric companies’ generating fleets are still anchored to smokestacks. That tells voters and ratepayers much of what they need to know about the whys and wherefores behind Senate Bill 310.
In terms of Ohio’s emerging job-growth prospects, Kasich, in one pew, and Batchelder and Faber, in another, aren’t just singing different hymns. They’re holding different hymnals.
And by all rights, Kasich should be hoarse. When he took office, Ohio’s unemployment rate was 9.1 percent. On Friday, the Job and Family Services Department announced Ohio’s April unemployment rate. It’s 5.7 percent.
True, as respected Greater Cleveland analyst George Zeller noted, the 5.7 rate, by itself, doesn’t tell the whole story. Ohio job-growth is soft: “Ohio’s recovery from both the 2000 recession and the 2007 ‘Great Recession’ is still too slow. … Ohio has now been generating job growth at a rate below the USA national average for 18 consecutive months. Thus, an urgent need continues to speed up the excessively slow rate of Ohio’s recovery.”
But good news is happening in parts of Ohio that could use some. Consider a couple of Page One stories the Dayton Daily News reported Friday: “Big companies on the way” to the Miami Valley. A new, 800-employee Procter & Gamble distribution center was announced. And a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass, is buying part of General Motors’
In terms of Ohio’s emerging job-growth prospects, Kasich, in one pew, and Batchelder and Faber, in another, aren’t just singing different hymns. They’re holding different hymnals.
former Moraine plant “to produce the glass for one in four autos sold in America.” In three to five years, 800 workers are expected on the payroll. JobsOhio, Kasich’s brainstorm, “brokered” the Fuyao deal, which, Kasich’s office said, will represent “the largest Chinese investment ever made east of the Mississippi.”
Do swaths of Ohio still hurt? Obviously. The stats don’t count Ohioans who have given up looking for work. The stats don’t take into account the many Ohioans who are, in effect, underpaid — “underemployed” — in the jobs they hold now. And the stats certainly don’t profile some of the Ohioans treated most unjustly by the last slump: older Ohioans laid off from longheld career jobs. Supposedly, laws forbid discrimination against older job applicants. The real world says otherwise.
The real world also suggests Republican Kasich and the legislature’s top Republicans aren’t on the same page. And the real world teaches that a mixed political message is no message at all.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.