Saturday Stats

$600M: Amount of Ohioans’ tax dollars already paid to Intel as part of the chip-maker’s contract with the state — in return for which we were promised two massive, job-creating factories in New Albany. We’ve already given Intel that money, and promised them more, plus infrastructure investments to help them out. But Intel just keeps pushing back their deadline, announcing another long delay. Bailey Sandin appeared on WOSU’s All Sides to discuss the setback, and Zach Schiller spoke with Spectrum’s Curtis Jackson about what’s at stake on the project.

BTW: We recently launched a monthly newsletter — CHIPS Ahoy! — to keep Ohioans up to date on projects funded by the federal CHIPS and Science Act — especially Intel’s “Ohio One” project. You can subscribe here. And if you’re near Licking County, join us in person on August 13 to learn more about what is going on with Intel.

32: Number of community organizations and individuals who have signed our letter urging Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb to support Tanisha’s Law. The law follows the gold standard for crisis response programs by creating a city department with authority to direct crisis response, ensuring that local efforts are organized and responsive to communities’ needs. It is named after Tanisha Anderson, who was killed by police when she was having a mental health crisis.

4.9%: Ohio’s unemployment rate, which is one of the highest in the nation. Heather Smith noted that fact in the most recent JobWatch, and Molly Bryden spoke to NBC 4 in Columbus about what we can learn by looking at jobs numbers. Of course, it is going to be a lot harder to trust those numbers now that a person can be fired by the president if he doesn’t like what they indicate about the economy.

$7 billion: Amount the Trump administration is preparing to claw back from communities across the U.S. by terminating the Solar for All program designed to reduce energy costs for low- to moderate-income households by helping them go solar. Two of those grants have been awarded in Ohio, including $156M received by the Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition, and another $156M to the state of Ohio. With electricity prices expected to soar by up to 18% over the next decade, this is one more way Ohioans are likely to pay the price for decisions made in D.C.

PMO History: Policy Matters Ohio has records of interns going back to 2011. (We had interns before that, but those records are lost to history…) Since then, we have welcomed 137 interns, including our current Communications Director, Ben Stein, back in 2018. Thanks to initial funding from the Higley Fund of the Cleveland Foundation beginning in 2021 — funding we have since built upon — we now offer paid summer internships to an annual cohort of 5-7 college and graduate students and early-career professionals working in progressive public policy. Our program pairs interns with staff mentors to co-create projects with a focus on either Research or Communications / Outreach / Development. Interns engage weekly with staff in a curriculum designed to make connections among their individual projects and to our organizational mission, while seeing how their work fits into our coalitions and Ohio’s broader policy landscape. It’s a great way to explore a career in public policy. Applications for summer 2026 will open in January!

This week we said goodbye to our 2025 cohort, 80% of whom are pictured below: Jahari Henry, Celia Hawk, Andrew McIlveen, Annie Wimsatt (left to right), plus Diana Agyei, not pictured because she was already back home in Memphis, hard at work on her PhD! 

 
Action Items

• Attend one of next week’s Town Halls on the Future of Public Education for Children with Disabilities in Cincinnati, Grove City, or New Philadelphia.
• Register to attend the in-person Drive to Justice Info Session that will cover the impact of driver’s license suspensions on people and what’s to come with the passage of H.B. 29.
• Join us at the Licking County Library, Johnstown (Mary E. Babcock) Branch on August 13 to learn more about what is going on with Intel.
• Get your (free) ticket for The People’s Solution Lab in Cleveland on August 16.
• RSVP for the upcoming virtual town hall, Can America keep its promises to Ohio veterans?, on August 20.
• Watch the livestream of the City Club’s upcoming forum. Moral Movements for Social Change: A Conversation with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II. The event is sold out, but you can request to be added to the waitlist.