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Sponsor: Disgraced treasurer blew whistle on superintendent
Officials with the sponsor for seven charter schools where administrators are accused of stealing more than $2 million told this newspaper they acted as soon as concerns surfaced that money was being misspent.“It was a learning experience as we went,” said Aaron Kinebrew, assistant director of Educational Resource Center of ...
Millions spent on oversight for troubled charter schools
A Cincinnati nonprofit that sponsored seven charter schools where administrators were accused of stealing more than $2 million says it is keeping a closer eye on the schools it is supposed to oversee. But a decade after Ohio handed financial oversight of charter schools to sponsors such as the Cincinnati-based ...
Covered bridge conference costs taxpayers $90K
A year after gaining national infamy as home to the “covered bridge to nowhere,” the Miami Valley this week is hosting a national conference on covered bridges that is getting new attention from budget hawks. The Second National Covered Bridge Conference runs today through Saturday at the Crowne Plaza Hotel ...
GovWatch: Speeding cameras, state parks hijinx and federal fraud
Some claim Dayton’s speeding cameras are unconstitutional. Others simply decry them as unfair. But the most important question some ask is: Are they accurate? In response to a reader request, the I-Team used Ohio’s open records laws to obtain more than a year’s worth of calibration records for the 10 ...
State to spend millions sprucing up shooting ranges
Flush with funds from skyrocketing gun sales, the Ohio Division of Wildlife plans to spent up to $20 million over the next several years adding and renovating shooting ranges across the state. Most of the money for the project comes from a special tax on guns and ammunition that is ...
State investigator loses job over misuse of car
Douglas Edwards of Springfield resigned as head of the State Medical Board’s investigative unit this month after Ohio’s inspector general found that Edwards misused his state-issued vehicle. The inspector general reports Edwards couldn’t account for more than 3,000 miles on the vehicle from October 2011 through September 2012, and that ...
541 area bridges rated obsolete
There are 541 bridges across southwest Ohio that are rated functionally obsolete by the government, state records show (See the full list and more details on each bridge here). This is the same federal rating given to the Skagit River bridge in Washington state that collapsed Thursday. Across Ohio, there ...
Husted: Voter fraud exists, not epidemic
A first-time tally of voter fraud across Ohio found 135 cases referred for criminal investigation following the 2012 presidential election, including 20 people who state officials say voted in Ohio and another state.The report, released Thursday by the Ohio Secretary of State, listed 22 referrals to law enforcement from southwest ...
State accuses 14 daycares of fraud, pulls funding
An unprecedented fraud crackdown has led Ohio officials to cut off payments to 14 child care centers since October — including one in Dayton and five in the Cincinnati area — for allegedly charging the taxpayer-funded program for children not in their care. These centers are accused of overbilling the ...
Auditor helping 1,400 small governments save money
Small government bodies such as libraries, planning commissions and tiny villages will save some of their public dollars under a new program that drastically cuts the costs of state-mandated audits. Since the program was launched in December, 11 governments in this region have cut the cost of their audits by ...
Millions meant for veterans pocketed by suspect ‘charities’
Millions of dollars meant for veterans has been stolen by con men or misspent by charities in recent years, according to Ohio officials who tell the Dayton Daily News they are stepping up enforcement. Recently a sweeping investigation by the Ohio Attorney General of AMVETS found 59 locations around the ...
When it comes to campus police, what happens at UD stays at UD
Investigations of theft, assault and even rape are handled by University of Dayton police who sometimes take people into custody or mete out punishment without any of the oversight expected of other police forces.Under Ohio law, private university police forces have and use broad discretion on whether to issue a ...
Beer flows, police follow in UD student ‘ghetto’
The University of Dayton issued more than 3,500 alcohol violations over a three-year period, outpacing much larger schools and raising questions about whether underage and excessive drinking is as much a part of the school as academics and basketball. The university’s disciplinary referrals for drinking trailed only Ohio State among ...
Charity for troops instead spent money on liquor, movies
The head of a local charitable organization claiming to help soldiers incarcerated for crimes allegedly committed during combat instead used donated funds at liquor stores, Redbox kiosks and for other personal purposes, the Ohio Attorney General said Friday. Riverside resident Cari Johnson, head of the charity A Dollar to Care, ...
Justice Dept. files suit against Cincinnati-based hospice chain
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit this week against the nation’s largest for-profit hospice chain, based in Cincinnati, alleging the company wrongly charged Medicare tens of millions of dollars for care that wasn’t needed or wasn’t provided.VITAS Hospice Care has one location on Kettering Boulevard in Dayton that serves ...
Judge’s vacation time: 14 weeks
Montgomery County Domestic Relations Judge Denise Cross scheduled 14 weeks of vacation last year, more than twice the amount taken by fellow Domestic Relations Judge Timothy Wood, a Dayton Daily News investigation found. Cross also took 14 weeks in 2011. How that compares to other judges is unclear because there ...
Man hired after allegedly misspending public funds
A Centerville man who resigned from Clinton County Children Services after paying back $713 for trips he was reimbursed for but never took is now working next door in Highland County. This is another example uncovered by the Dayton Daily News of public employees being permitted to pay back misspent ...
Group wants to expand Earned Income Tax Credit in Ohio
Some in Ohio are working to get the Earned Income Tax Credit to more people as a means to both fight poverty and boost the economy. Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, presented a proposal to the Ohio House Finance and Appropriations Committee last week to create a state-level ...
Tax payout for low-income workers doubled in Ohio
The nation’s largest cash-assistance program for the working poor has doubled in size since the 1990s and is plagued with an overpayment rate of up to 25 percent, one of the largest error rates of all federal programs, a Dayton Daily News analysis has found. This tax season, the Earned ...
Schmidt skirts legal bills by leaving Congress
Former U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland, has avoided an order to repay roughly $500,000 that the House Ethics Committee ruled she wrongly accepted in legal fees from a Turkish-American group. The order stems from a U.S. House committee ruling that Schmidt violated House rules when she let the Turkish American ...
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