Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July > 27
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Martin Gottlieb: Is Kasich’s Indiana really Ohio’s right role model?
The last time Ohio had an election for governor, one candidate wanted to talk about another state: Florida.
J. Kenneth Blackwell, then the Republican secretary of state, pointed out that Florida was doing a lot better than Ohio in a lot of ways. It was growing and prospering. People were leaving Ohio for Florida.
He traced these facts to a difference in tax policies. Florida had lower taxes and, most specifically, no state income tax.
Listening to him, one thought, really?
You want to compare Ohio to Florida? Not Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania or New York, but Florida?
You think that when people leave Ohio for Florida, the reason must be taxes?
Maybe ideologues are impervious to weather.
After 2006, the Florida economy collapsed. It collapsed sooner and harder than economies elsewhere. All of a sudden, property couldn’t be sold and jobs couldn’t be found.
At right-wing think tanks across the country, interns were told to find out who had raised taxes in Florida. Or so one presumes.
Now there’s another candidate for governor with a favorite state. John Kasich likes Indiana, or, more precisely, its governor, Mitch Daniels, a fellow Republican. In making his case for lower taxes and less regulation, Kasich talks about how much better things are going in Indiana because of smart policies there.
Daniels has emerged as a favorite on the political right, even getting talked about for president. He was first elected in 2004. The state had had a string of unbalanced budgets. Daniels, with a combination of cutbacks, efficiency measures, tax cuts and tax increases, brought the budget into balance and even created a surplus. When other states went into the red quickly after the 2008 collapse of the economy, Indiana didn’t.
He was re-elected in 2008 by 18 percentage points, while Barack Obama was becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in decades.
On top of all that, there has been some statistical and anecdotal evidence that businesses are choosing Indiana, and that it is one state in the region that is actually growing.
So at least Kasich’s selection of a role model has a stronger logic than Blackwell’s.
But some statistics cited in Daniels’ favor are kind of like the one about Ohio being named — over and over, under various governors — by a magazine called Site Selection as the national leader in the number of businesses moving here. You know there’s something wrong with that stat even if you don’t know quite what it is.
Sometimes Indiana is identified as a state whose unemployment rate has gone down during a particular period, when most states have seen a rise. And at certain stage this year, Indiana was claiming to lead the country in job creation, seeing 7 percent of the new jobs this year, despite having only 2 percent of the population. (Actually, Ohio led the nation in jobs created for one month this year.)
In the big picture, though, things look different. Take taxes. An organization called the Tax Foundation notes that Indiana is Ohio’s only neighbor that has higher taxes than Ohio, when you combine state and local.
Or take jobs. In June, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 10.6 percent, Ohio’s 10.5, though Indiana used to have a lower rate.
A lot of people think the unemployment rate doesn’t tell you much. So the Brookings Institution think tank decided to simply ask how many people are working?
It found that between late 2007 and mid-2010, the percentage of Hoosiers working dropped from 63.5 percent to 57.2. That was the sixth biggest drop among states, and bigger than any state in the Midwest.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that Indiana has lost 5.8 percent of its jobs since early 2007, compared to Ohio’s 7 percent.
The top of Kasich’s website has a running count of Ohio jobs lost on Gov. Ted Strickland’s watch. The number is the cornerstone of his attack on Strickland, who took office in early 2007. Somebody running against Daniels could have the same kind of counter.
Ohio’s search for a state continues.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
Editorial: GE expansion can pave way for more wins
The really important news about General Electric Co. deciding to build a $51 million research center in the Dayton area happened in April when the company announced that it was coming here — not to Kentucky, not to Michigan, not to Britain and not to Cincinnati.
GE was looking at all of those places.
What sealed the deal for Dayton was not one thing, but an alignment of forces: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its Air Force Research Laboratory are here, and the University of Dayton’s research institute is seen as a comer in the research GE wants to do.
The latter helped GE to tap a grant under the state’s Third Frontier program. That money — $7.6 million in capital funding — is conditioned on the company having a university partner.
Meanwhile, the state of Ohio designated Dayton as the state’s “aerospace hub of innovation,” a declaration that’s formalized a pitch that Ohio and the region are making about Dayton.
The next step is that GE has to pick a specific site to land. GE Aviation Systems is located in Vandalia. Understandably, Vandalia is pulling out all the stops to get the research center there.
The center could grow from a dozen jobs initially to 300 in the next decade. Among the sites Vandalia is pointing to are a greenfield near the airport and property near GE’s plant on National Road.
Meanwhile, Dayton wants to see the new facility locate in downtown’s Tech Town or on the vacant land that UD acquired from NCR between Patterson Boulevard and Stewart Street.
GE is saying two things: It wants to look at existing buildings first, before it considers building a new one, and it wants to be close to Wright-Patterson. There may not be a ready-made building that meets GE’s specific criteria — its needs big bays, for instance — but the company could find something that could be retrofitted.
It’s hard to know all of GE’s considerations, but the region’s are obvious: It wants the research facility to be every bit the showcase that GE envisions, in a prominent spot that other aerospace companies and suppliers will want to be near. For the aerospace hub designation to really take hold, a concentration of businesses — outside of Wright-Patterson’s fence — makes a statement. Proximity also creates intellectual synergy that companies and universities say is important in research.
UD is taking the point on working with GE because, without UD, GE couldn’t have gotten the Third Frontier money.
Given what the university is trying to do with its research institute — moving it to the former NCR world headquarters and spending as much to retrofit that building with new labs and equipment as the school paid for it — UD’s people will have a hard time being objective about possible sites. They can easily imagine a stunning new building that would be one of the first things you see coming off the gleaming Stewart Street bridge on its yet-to-be-developed west campus. They can picture other companies following.
GE will do, and should do, what’s best for it. Whatever the choice, the community can’t lose. But there are certain places where the research center could be a force-multiplier, an especially important magnet.
GE just has to forgive the advocates who can’t contain themselves from pointing that out.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Suburban Communities, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Guest column: Baby Vanessa case highlights problems with adoption procedures
This commentary was written by Kevin C. Mulder, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Inc.
Re the July 25 editorial, “Baby Vanessa needs a parent”: This legal case is both difficult and heartbreaking. From the start, Benjamin Mills Jr. has sought a remedy through the judicial system that would recognize his relationship as his child’s father and place her in a good home in Dayton.
As the Dayton Daily News noted in the editorial, “Mr. Mills has done all the right things to protect his rights,” and it is “not Mr. Mills’ fault that this case has dragged on for so long.”
Mills wishes to have a relationship with his daughter, and he continues to believe this matter should be tried in the courts, not the media.
The essence of our system of justice is that a court decides such issues based on all the evidence presented to it.
As the late Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Moyer has stated, “We sometimes lose sight of the fact that Legal Aid representation is important to us as a society, not just to those who receive the representation. Because we live by the rule of law, it means that everyone is bound by the same rules and that means that everyone must have access to those who implement or enforce the rules.”
The case raises serious issues regarding the rule of law for involuntary adoptions, in which one of the parents has not consented to the adoption. An involuntary adoption can lead to the loss of parental rights — something that usually happens only when the government decides a parent is not fit to be a parent.
Legal Aid of Western Ohio has had many cases in which clients have presented concerns about the lack of due-process protections for the non-consenting parent in adoption proceedings.
This case raises such concerns, including how the child was taken from Dayton to California without Mills’ knowledge, let alone consent, and whether the appropriate legal process has been followed since to resolve the child’s future.
The due-process issues are serious issues that need to be addressed, not just for Mills’ benefit, but for the benefit of all involved in adoption proceedings.
In addition, aside from Mills, there is a good home for this child with her grandmother and two siblings (all of whom have the same parents) in the Dayton area, or with other family.
The removal of the child to California not only removed her from Mills, but also from her extended family.
The adoption proceedings being pursued in California, despite Mills’ desire to have his child be with her family in this area, have led to the current situation.
