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Last year, 157 Ohioans lost their lives in domestic violence-related incidents making it the highest number ever recorded by the Ohio Domestic Violence Network. Ohio cannot prevent every act of domestic violence. However, lawmakers have an opportunity to provide families with another tool to protect themselves. A bipartisan bill pending in the Ohio General Assembly, House Bill 846, would create a registry for repeat domestic violence offenders. The legislation is spons

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s announcement that he now supports abolishing the death penalty marks one of the most significant reversals of his long public career. DeWine, a former Greene County prosecutor and one of the architects of Ohio’s modern death penalty law, says he no longer believes capital punishment deters murder. He also points to the practical difficulties Ohio has faced in carrying out executions and the lengthy appeals process that often stretches for decades.

America’s student loan crisis is no longer just a problem for recent college graduates. It has become an economic issue affecting families, employers and communities across the country.

Most Ohio voters can name the president. Many can name the governor. Some may even know their mayor. Ask who controls property tax assessments, oversees the county jail, maintains local roads or manages election operations, and most residents would draw a blank.

For the past few years, Republicans successfully campaigned on inflation, affordability and rising energy costs. In Ohio, those messages resonated with working families, suburban commuters and rural voters who spend more time on the road than much of the country. Now with fuel prices climbing again, Republicans risk facing the same economic frustration once used against Democrats.

Vivek Ramaswamy has opened one of the biggest fights in Ohio politics. Any serious debate about taxes, state spending or the size of government in Ohio eventually runs into Medicaid. The program has grown so large it now shapes nearly every major budget discussion in Columbus.

Jury duty still matters. It may matter more today than it has in decades. At a time when trust in nearly every American institution is declining, jury service remains one of the few ways ordinary citizens directly participate in government.

Tuesday night answered who is driving politics in Southwest Ohio and who is not. Primary elections are not about broad consensus. Across the region, the electorate that showed up was smaller, more engaged and more ideologically sorted than the general electorate that will appear in November. At the top of the Republican ticket, Vivek Ramaswamy secured the nomination for governor with a campaign reflecting the current identity of the party: disciplined, message-driven and clo

The biggest decisions Ohio voters will make Tuesday might be the ones they know the least about. While attention will focus on the high-profile races at the top of the primary ballot, the contests that could have the most lasting impact are further down — judicial elections that will shape how laws are interpreted across the state for years to come. Two seats on the Supreme Court of Ohio are on the ballot this year. Though primary elections often receive little attention, thi

Election season often feels dominated by national headlines and statewide races. Meanwhile, the offices most directly affecting your day-to-day life are often ignored or unrealized. County commissioners are a huge example. The positions do not generate headlines, but they control a lot of local tax dollars, what gets built in your community and how efficiently county government operates. Roads, public safety funding, development decisions and even how aggressively local gover

Every spring during primary season, most attention goes to recognizable races like Governor, Congress, the Statehouse. Campaign ads fill the airwaves, mailers stack up in the mail and it’s easy to feel these are the only offices up for election. If you’ve ever worked your way to the bottom of a primary ballot, you’ve probably seen something less familiar: candidates for state and county central committees. It’s not surprising many voters skip those races. In most cases the na

Ohio is rapidly becoming one of America’s fastest-growing hubs for massive data centers, the digital warehouses powering artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big tech. State leaders are celebrating the investment. Local governments are chasing development. Utilities are preparing for unprecedented demand. But one question is becoming harder to ignore: who is going to pay for all that electricity? The answer: possibly you. Data centers don’t just use a lot of electrici

Recently, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) dropped a 200-page organizing manual, a detailed roadmap aimed at fixing what went wrong in 2024 and winning in 2026 by building stronger local relationships. Democrats openly admit their strategy failed and are shifting how campaigns operate on the ground. In 2024, Democratic campaigns became obsessed with massive output, such as phone calls, texts, and door knocks that looked impressive on paper but didn’t translate into mea

The city of Beavercreek is doing something many communities have talked about for years but rarely acted upon: rethinking how it taxes its residents. For decades, Beavercreek has been an outlier in the region. The city is one of the few sizable cities in Ohio that never adopted a municipal income tax, relying almost entirely on property taxes to fund services. Note, most townships in Ohio rely solely on property taxes for revenue. However, in Beavercreek it was not by acciden

Nearly every election season in Ohio, voters are asked to decide on another local school levy. If education is already supported through state taxes and if lottery profits were meant to help fund schools, why do districts keep needing additional funding? Public schools in Ohio receive about $18,300 per student annually, according to the Ohio Legislative Service Commission for FY2025. The figure combines funding from local taxes, state aid, federal programs, and smaller revenu

The Ohio property tax debates are red hot now. With the debate raging, homeowners are comparing increases, talking about rising property values for their 2027 tax bills and questioning whether taxes are getting too high. This debate has missed a larger reality: property taxes don’t affect only homeowners. Across Ohio, property taxes greatly impact the cost of running a business, influence rent rates and ripple through the entire local economy. Ohio’s effective property tax ra

On a quiet street in Dayton, a retired couple opens the mail and finds the familiar envelope from the county treasurer. The house is paid off. The mortgage is long gone. They’ve lived there for 30 years, but the tax bill keeps coming. It’s a scene playing out across the Miami Valley from Springfield to Middletown, in neighborhoods where people thought they had financial security. And it helps explain why an idea that once sounded radical is now getting nods and applause: get

For far too many Ohio homeowners, property tax season no longer feels like a routine civic obligation but rather a financial squeeze tightening year after year. This frustration is grounded in real numbers that should be concerning. According to the Tax Foundation, Ohio’s effective property tax rate, the amount paid annually as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value, stands at 1.31%, placing the Buckeye state among the highest property tax rates in the country. Ohio ran

On a routine stop at a neighborhood convenience store, you might hear: “Can I get a couple of lottery tickets?” It’s a small purchase for the hope of instant wealth while being beneficial to the Ohio education system. Anyone concerned about school funding in Ohio, the bigger question isn’t who wins the jackpot, but wasn’t the lottery supposed to fund education? Since Ohio voters approved the state lottery in the 1970s, Ohio’s constitution requires all net profits from the Ohi

School funding in Ohio is a hot topic, and continues to get hotter as several school districts in the region have placed property tax levies on the ballot this coming May election. However, in Ohio, there is an alternative means than districts just relying on traditional property tax levies. These levies aren’t abstract ideas. According to the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission (LSC), one-third of Ohio’s 611 school districts have adopted a school income tax. Many