Workers’ comp-programs boost communities

When Gov. Mike Dewine signed our two-year budget on Monday, it ensured the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation will continue funding and growing several programs vitally important to the health, safety and wellness of our state. It means our primary mission will continue — caring for injured workers, restoring them to work and life to the fullest extent possible.

This budget provides $15 million over the next two years for our Substance Use Recovery and Workplace Safety Program. Launched in October last year, this program provides funding, training and guidance for employers to hire, better manage and retain workers in recovery from addiction. In short, it connects employers to workers needing a second chance on life — workers who prove to be, as studies show, enormously grateful, loyal and productive for getting that chance. Under our new budget, we will expand this program to another nine counties, up from three today (Montgomery, Ross and Scioto).

Our budget also provides $40 million for our Safety Grant Program. This program provides up to $40,000 per employer for equipment and other solutions to reduce workplace injuries and illnesses. From body armor for law enforcement to security updates for school buildings, these grant dollars will make a difference in Ohio, allowing more workers to go home safe and whole each day after their shift. We are proud of the work Ohio employers and employees are doing to create a culture of safety across this state.

Stephanie Mccloud, administrator and CEO, Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, Columbus

State should have kept clean energy standards

I am angry and disappointed that Gov. Mike Dewine and the Ohio legislature have decided to bail out Firstenergy Solutions. In Wednesday’s Dispatch, House Speaker Larry Householder is quoted as saying, “This is something that needed to be done.” Really? We needed to gut our clean energy standards? Can he explain why this also needed to happen?

If this bailout has to do with job loss, what about jobs in clean energy? Why couldn’t they consider a bailout without gutting clean energy standards? I called the offices of my state representative and senator, the offices of Householder and Senate President Larry Obhof, as well as Dewine’s office, asking why the clean energy standards needed to be included. No one in these offices could tell me why.

When these folks are up for re-election and we vote for their opponents, I for one will be happy to tell them why. Sheila Fox, Columbus

Don’t let baby boomers shape our nation’s future

2020 will undoubtedly be the most important election of my lifetime (cliche, I know). As an older millennial, I urge my fellow millennials and Gen Z peers to vote. We are constantly at the receiving end of baby boomers’ scorn, but the fact is, baby boomers destroyed the America they so longingly look to recreate. The ability to hold a middleclass job with a high school education, or to pay tuition with a summer jobs’ savings, or to purchase a house in our early 20s, is a baby boomer fantasy. Baby boomers leveraged our future for entitlement programs they didn’t want to pay for, an affinity for deregulation, low taxes and increased benefits (see Medicare Part D).

Millennials are often derided as lazy and entitled, however we want no more than what our parents’ generation was afforded by the Greatest Generation and then squandered. We must move forward with optimism and a belief in America’s abilities without the cynicism perpetrated by baby boomers at the hand of their favorite spoonfed soap box, Fox News.

I urge Gen X, millennials and Gen Z to decisively reject the politics of fear and choose to invest in our own futures.

Baby boomers wrote the pained history of our past, and we should not let them continue to chart our country’s course; it’s time we take the reins.

Stephen Pruchnicki, Columbus

GOP doesn’t know how business works

This is in response to the Wednesday letter from Jeffery Sampson, who mused that Democrats do not know how to run a business. Considering Hillary Clinton in 2016 won the high-output areas of our nation that constitute “... a massive 64% of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015,” according to a Brookings study, it seems to me Democrats and their elected officials know quite well how to run a business. Indeed, it is the GOP that fails to understand how business works. Businesses need a market. Trump’s tariff taxes have ruined our farmers’ (grain, dairy and others) ability to compete and forced them out of the very lucrative China market.

Instead of helping farmers find new markets, the GOP gave them a hand-out instead of a hand up with their 2018 farm bill. Trump’s tariff taxes and the failure of the GOP to help find new markets have led to thousands of closures.

Republicans paid the price for it in 2018 and, God willing, they will pay the price again in 2020.

Patrick Costa, Columbus

Failing companies see a welcome mat

Need cash to run your business? No problem. Gov. Mike Dewine and Reps. Jamie Callender, R-concord, and Shane Wilkin, R-hillsboro, will be more than happy to pass legislation to bill all Ohio residents and send the money to you. While it is not necessary, it might help if you bankrupt your company first and it is not even required that your operations be located in Ohio.

The best part of this sweetheart deal is that the governor and legislature will make all the arrangements without the people of Ohio having any vote in the matter.

For further details, please refer to House Bill 6 to learn how Firstenergy has done it. Martin Brodnik, Bexley

Embattled expression just plain misunderstood

The Tuesday letter “Some writers must bone up on history” claimed that the chant “America, love it or leave

it” was “not considered racist but for the betterment of the country” during the 1960s, according to writer Dave Oxsher. And I have to agree with Oxsher, to some degree.

Those shouting this mantra, I’m sure, didn’t acknowledge it to be racist 50-plus years ago. Not unlike how the current resident of our White House doesn’t consider it racist in 2019 when he tweets that certain female congresswomen of color should go back to the countries they come from.the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Steve Burkley, Newark

‘Plain folk’ owe it all to General Assembly

Man, are we blessed to live in Ohio! The same inspired General Assembly that didn’t want to expand Medicaid for poor folk a couple of years back extended a welcome to Firstenergy Solutions and gave it hundreds of millions of our dollars to prop up two worn-out nuclear plants and a couple of obsolete, dirty coal generating plants, one of them in Indiana!the same inspired politicians who won’t even discuss a raise in the minimum wage for working people, spent weeks arguing among themselves about how big a tax break small businesses deserved, before sticking it to us again!

Gee, I’m glad we get to keep breathing the dirty air from those coal plants, and worrying about one of the nukes springing a leak. All thanks to the inspired public servants who gerrymandered themselves into total control of The Heart of it All.

How will we plain folk ever express our appreciation?

Roger Digel-barrett, Etna