The morning newsletter of the Ohio Capital Journal
Reporting for the People
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By David DeWitt | Editor in Chief
Good morning Ohio!
Average Ohio residential utility bills are now projected to be about $800 for the summer, a new report says. That's a 17% increase over the $682 Ohioans paid last summer, said the report, by Washington, D.C.-based Third Way.
An electricity meter. (Stock photo from Getty Images.)
By Marty Schladen
The estimates are of total average electricity costs from June to September. They were done using data from Heatmap News, which collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create the Electricity Price Hub.
By Nick Evans
In a case out of Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. The limits had been in place since the 1970s and were created in response to corruption in the Nixon administration.
By Kathiann M. Kowalski, Canary Media
Last year, Ohio legislators enacted a sweeping law meant to get energy generation online faster. Now lawmakers are advancing a bill that would expand preferences for natural gas and nuclear generation while adding even more hurdles for solar and wind.
By Morgan Trau, WEWS
Ohio universities' new centers created by Republican lawmakers to combat "liberal bias" aren't popular with students, so now the Republican state lawmaker who authored the law that created them wants to require attendance.
COMMENTARY
The Ohio Statehouse. (Photo by David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal.)
By Chris Orban
Ohio Republican lawmakers’ overhaul of higher education has rattled college campuses across the state, destroying diversity efforts and shuttering centers. A new bill threatens state money for those that don’t comply with lawmakers’ anti-diversity efforts.
STATELINE
The big challenges and policy issues that cross state lines.
By Alex Brown
President Donald Trump has shown the immense power of the executive branch to stymie offshore wind development, as nearly all projects are in waters where federal agencies operate as the landlord.
THE RUNDOWN
News from other states
By Whitney Downard, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
An increasing number of Americans are concerned about resource-hungry data centers’ impact on energy prices and water consumption, but there is very little research about potential impacts to physical or public health.
NATIONAL NEWS
By Ashley Murray
A large swath of America melted under record heat for the country’s 250th birthday, including in the nation’s capital, where despite being one of the hottest places across the globe Saturday.
By Amelia Twyman
The prime time for ticks is here in the United States, and after an especially active start to the season, experts are urging the public to stay alert and take preventive measures.
CATCHING OUR EYE
The youths. Signal Ohio’s Andrew Tobias and Jake Zuckerman report, “Just 23% of Ohio’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote – among the lowest rates in the U.S.”
Just 23% of Ohio’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote, a number that ranks among the lowest in the country, according to updated numbers compiled by a nonpartisan advocacy organization.
The Civics Center tracks registration rates for the country’s youngest eligible voters in 31 U.S. states, a number limited by their ability to acquire commercially available voter data. Ohio’s registration rate is the 28th-lowest. The 23% registration rate is significantly lower than comparable states like North Carolina (58%), Iowa (47%) and Florida (46%). Among neighbors, it’s lower than Michigan (79%), Indiana (31%), Kentucky (28%) but higher than Pennsylvania (22%).The Athens NEWS. Ideastream’s Conor Morris writes, “My first newspaper is gone. Its lessons still shape the stories I tell.”
The Athens NEWS, the local newspaper in Southeast Ohio where I got my start as a journalist, is no longer. It halted printing in January 2025, and its website is gone.
The NEWS has gone the way of many good newspapers in recent years. The U.S. lost at least 3,500 of them in the last two decades, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Also gone are three-quarters of the jobs. That's bad news for not just the journalists, but entire swathes of the country.Data centers and gas. Cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reports, “Ohio’s AI data center boom is fueling a natural gas power rush.”
Across Ohio, energy companies are racing to build gas-fired power plants that will never send a single watt of electricity to your home.
That’s because these plants—ten of them, proposed or already under construction—are being built for one customer: data centers running artificial intelligence.Iran v. Vietnam. In a Foreign Policy opinion column, Paul Musgrave writes, “Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam: A war of choice has turned into a strategic disaster for Washington.”
At his second inaugural, U.S. President Donald Trump pronounced his hope “that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” By losing his Gulf war, Trump has achieved that goal. His choice to launch a campaign against Iran was encouraged by others, but fully his own. It has led to a reversal that marks a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.
THE POD
THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, FOLKS.
Mahalo!
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