Bureaucrats and elected officials in Columbus have gotten quite good at using public money to create what they want us to believe are "private" entities. OneOhio Recovery Foundation, for example, is registered as a private nonprofit organization, despite having been launched by Gov. Mike DeWine and state Attorney General Dave Yost to distribute the public money from settlements of lawsuits related to the opioid epidemic.
That organization has rightly received challenges to its attempts to operate with less transparency than would be required of a public entity.
Another example is JobsOhio, formed in 2011 -- also by state officials -- to pull profits from the STATE liquor franchise into the coffers of what was labeled a private corporation. Its function, too, was to distribute those public funds -- in this instance to bolster economic development, but still with little transparency.
Because of the nonprofit veil with which it has draped itself, JobsOhio's operations are not always easy to sort through, without the help of Freedom of Information Act requests. But WFMJ in Youngstown took on the task and discovered JobsOhio is granting more than $2 million in economic incentives to West Warren Development LLC, to build an industrial park. One of the three managing partners of West Warren Development is Chuck George.
George had also recently been named board president of one of JobsOhio's seven regional network partners, Lake to River.
As the Ohio Capital Journal summed it up, "George is board president of one of the 'network partners' of an economic development agency that is lending at least $2 million in what used to be public dollars to a private business he heads."
Predictably, JobsOhio says it doesn't see a problem with that, telling the Capital Journal there is a distinction between George being on JobsOhio's board and being on one of its regional partners' boards.
That may be technically true, but it certainly is a bad look. The fact that JobsOhio has sought the opacity of being a "private" organization doesn't improve appearances.
Meanwhile, after 13 years of JobsOhio distributing more than $1 billion in public money to support development, Ohio's economic growth is fifth-worst in the country; and we're no closer to the dream of having a large employer within commuting distance of every Buckeye State resident.
Were JobsOhio subject to the same transparency rules as any other public entity, perhaps we would have a better idea why. But they are not, and if that bell cannot be unrung, the best we can do is remind our elected public officials that when they create an entity that spends public money, purportedly for the public good, and then cover it with the word "private," taxpayers and voters are forced to wonder: What are they trying to hide?