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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Jobs, education and Wright-Patt focus of Kasich’s state of the state address
Our statehouse reporter Laura Bischoff is in Stuebenville to cover Gov. John Kasich’s state of the state address. We will be blogging during the speech here and have complete coverage in Wednesday’s newspaper. The speech started around 1:26 p.m. and ended at 2:50 p.m.
2:50 p.m.: Kasich ends his address.
2:43 p.m.: Kasich says urban areas of Ohio have a 35 percent drop out rate.
2:40 p.m.: Kasich says only 14 percent of students in 4-year colleges in Ohio graduate. He said the emphasis should not be on enrollment, but on graduation.
2:38 p.m.: Kasich says there are 80,000 unfilled jobs in Ohio. He says there are 77 programs in 13 agencies focused on job training. He said there’s “no accountability.” He said companies need to forecast their job needs more. He says community colleges need to play a bigger role. He said the graduation rate at community colleges in Ohio is only 10 percent.
2:34 p.m.: Protesters disrupt Kasich while he’s speaking.
2:30 p.m.: Kasich says Ohio needs an energy policy that “makes us independent.” “We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal,” he said.
2:22 p.m.: Kasich says unmanned flights at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is “the future of aerospace.” Says getting the FAA to expand the airspace will boost development at Wright-Patt and the Air National Guard Base in Springfield.
2:05 p.m.: Kasich gives an award to the Snow family from Fairborn. Spc. Jesse Adam Snow, a 2003 Fairborn High School graduate, was killed in Afghanistan in November 2010. The Snow family was one of the first recipients of the Governor’s Courage Award.
1:55 p.m.: Kasich says he’s pushing to reform Ohio law to allow felons to do jobs such as cutting hair and driving trucks that they’re not allowed to do now. Kasich made the pitch for these changes in his State of the State speech Tuesday in Steubenville. He and Republican lawmakers changed Ohio’s sentencing laws last year to keep more non-violent offenders out of prison, where they’re more likely to pick up bad habits that could lead to new crimes. AP
1:51 p.m.: Says Ohio is the number one job creator in the Midwest today. “We are the Number 9 job creator in America.” He said that’s up from 48th last year. “We’re a powerhouse here in Ohio.”
1:48 p.m.: Kasich says no parent should have to have a student in a school where they’re “not safe and they’re not learning.” He said teachers don’t mind being evaluated, but want to make sure that their are multiple ways for them to be evaluated. He says Ohio is moving forward on education.
1:36 p.m.: Kasich says last year Ohio ranked 48th in the nation in jobs lost. He said only Michigan and California had lost more jobs. He said the state was $8 billion a year ago. He says the solutions to try and solve the state’s budget crises over the last year were “strongly bipartisan.” He said there was 89 cents in the state’s rainy day fund a year ago. Says there is $247 million in the fund now.
1:30: Says Wells Academy in Steubenville is the number one school in the state despite having a large population of economically challenged students. “It’s very data driven, they know what works,” Kasich said about the staff at Wells.
1:26 p.m.: Gov. Kasich has taken the stage to start his state of the state speech in Stuebenville. Said he decided to move the address to Stuebenville to get out of Columbus. Said he knew a year ago he was going to move the speech to another location.
1 p.m.: About 100 demonstrators have gathered outside the Steubenville school where Gov. John Kasich is giving his State of the State address.
Some of the protesters gathered Tuesday oppose the use of a new oil and gas drilling technique and others support the Occupy movement.
Locked-out Cooper Tire & Rubber worker and steelworker’s union member Shane Hanley says he showed up to “let the governor know we ain’t forgotten what he did last year.”
Kasich is expected to highlight education and shale gas drilling in the speech at Wells Academy elementary school in Steubenville.
The speech also is a chance for him to reconnect with voters after last year’s bitter campaign over public worker union limits. A law that would have set the limits was repealed by voters in November.- Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press
12:35 p.m.: Gov. Kasich decided to have the state of the state speech at a school in Stuebenville rather than in Columbus. Here’s a story from the AP on the city and school where the speech will be today.
By JULIE CARR SMYTH Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio — An eastern Ohio city that’s been a poster child for the successes and struggles of American manufacturing becomes the first site outside Columbus for a State of the State speech, as Gov. John Kasich prepares to set out his agenda for the coming year.
Kasich is expected to highlight the themes of education and shale gas drilling in Tuesday’s address in Steubenville, a once proud steel-production center along the Ohio River. The governor left Columbus by car Monday afternoon to head east. He planned to stay overnight at a hotel, spokesman Rob Nichols said. Members of the Cabinet planned events with local officials around the area before and after the address to highlight Kasich’s policy initiatives.
Nichols said the location choice wasn’t arbitrary. It plays to the Republican governor’s priorities. He chose Wells Academy, the top-ranked public elementary school in the state, as the venue to bring attention to a school that’s been able to hit achievement marks without a big budget. Steubenville is also “the beating heart at the center of Ohio’s shale play,” Nichols said — offering Kasich an opportunity to tout gas and oil industry investments that are bringing blue-collar jobs back to the region.
Neither Kasich’s critics nor his close advisers expect Tuesday’s address to be detail-heavy. Kasich dislikes delivering prepared speeches and shuns teleprompters. Aides initially estimated his first State of the State speech last year would last 15 minutes; it then went well over the allotted hour.
On Monday, Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern predicted “an extended speech with little in the way of nouns, adverbs, subjects and predicates.”
Redfern assembled reporters ahead of the speech to tout the role he says was played by President Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and other Democrats in the jobs recovery that he expects Kasich to highlight.
Ohio unemployment fell to 8.1 in December, down from 8.5 in November and from 9.5 in December 2010.
“It’s not about moving Bob Evans across town. It’s about investing in American automobile jobs that help real communities like Defiance in a tangible, trackable, empirical way,” said Redfern, referring to the relocation and expansion of Bob Evans Restaurants from Columbus to neighboring New Albany. “That’s what this president did along with Senator Brown and others, and no amount of looking the other way by this governor will change that.”
Kasich spearheaded the creation of JobsOhio, a private, nonprofit job creation board that will use proceeds from state liquor profits to invest in economic development. The deal is complex, and it took much of his first year to iron out technical details, navigate legislative approval, and field legal challenges.
The governor has credited new policies he says have made the state more business-friendly. Nichols said Kasich will address the role of Ohio’s two-year community colleges in helping get students and displaced workers prepared to take 80,000 unfilled jobs in industries in the state that lack qualified workers.
He said the governor also will touch on adding public education dollars to the classroom “for instruction as opposed to administration.”
TweetGingrich campaigns in Dayton, Cincinnati
By Lynn Hulsey and Eric Schwartzberg
DAYTON - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spent nearly 20 minutes of his speech in Dayton Tuesday on a history lesson about the Wright Brothers invention of the airplane and then said they would not have succeeded if government “bureaucrats” had been involved.
But Gingrich also praised inventions that came from NASA, the government’s space program, and said his Republican opponents lack vision when they criticize his desire to expand space exploration.
He said it could be done without spending a tremendous amount of money by simply removing the “bureaucrats”, lines that earned repeated applause from the audience that crammed the lobby of Memorial Hall in downtown Dayton.
Gingrich visited Hawthorne Hill, the former home of Orville Wright, in Oakwood after the speech.
Gingrich attacked his opponent Mitt Romney, saying he raised taxes, passed health care reform and had a poor job creation record when he was governor of Massachusetts. But Gingrich reserved his sharpest criticism for President Barack Obama.
““Speaker Gingrich has a history of undermining conservatives and embarrassing his own Party,” said Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. “This is who Newt Gingrich is: an unreliable leader who undermines conservatives, hurts our party, and emboldens President Obama and his liberal allies.”
Gingrich called for voters to give Republicans control of Congress and said he would work as part of a team to turn back programs supported by Obama. He also asked Congress to repeal health care reform and the Dodd-Frank financial system reform bill, both enacted in 2010, and the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley public accounting reform law. Gingrich said he would sign the repeals the day he takes office.
Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Seth Bringman said, “Ohioans need a president who stands up for our workers, our auto industry and our middle class families. That’s not Newt Gingrich and that’s not Mitt Romney. That’s Barack Obama.”
Gingrich started Tuesday with an event in Cincinnati. He stopped by Price Hill Chili on the city’s west side for the first of three Ohio stops today. He fired a number of salvos at President Barack Obama.
“The key to this election is to recognize how big a choice we’re going to make this fall,” Gingrich said, explaining why current unemployment numbers because of those not presently seeking work. “That’s why I’ve said over and over again, this is the best food stamp president in American History. You want an example of choice? I’m running because I’d like to be the best paycheck president in American history.”
But Gingrich, who is looking to amass early votes ahead of Ohio’s March 6 primary, also took time to take time to criticize Mitt Romney, the current front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination.
“I don’t think that a moderate can defeat Obama because they don’t have enough space to debate,” he said. “I think if you look at RomneyCare and ObamaCare, they’re too similar, and if you look at his record as governor, they’re too similar.”
Gingrich drew an example from what he called “the Obama administration’s attack on the Catholic church.
“The fact is Gov. Romney insisted that Catholic hospitals give out abortion pills against their religious belief when he was governor. So you have a very similar pattern, again … and I think a Massachussetts moderate finds it very hard to draw a sharp contrast with somebody who is an Illinois radical.”
Approximately 300 people showed up to cheer the former Speaker of the House, listen to his plan for America and shake hands with him and wife Callista before they headed to Dayton. JoAn Sides, 71, drove from Highland Heights, Ky. to be at the restaurant four hours ahead of scheduled arrival.
Sides said she was undecided and leaning toward Rick Santorum but said Gingrich’s message “resonated in her heart” and factored greatly in swaying her support.
“He’s talking about today, what he’s going to do,” Sides said. “When you’re doing debates, they’re arguing with each other or talking about Barack Obama. I want to know point by point what he’s going to do. He laid some of that out today. He talked about America … (about) God being in charge of us. Without God, we don’t have any America. We’re nothing.” Gingrich ends the day with a speech in Columbus.
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