Ohio is one of the most restrictive states in the country in its earnings requirements to qualify for unemployment compensation. Though the increase in the state minimum wage has allowed more workers to qualify, Ohio is one of only three states in the country where a minimum wage worker employed 29 hours a week all year would not be eligible for unemployment compensation. It is also one of only three states in which a worker making $9 an hour all year for 20 hours a week would not qualify. Those are among the findings of an analysis by Policy Matters Ohio on how Ohio’s monetary eligibility standard compares with that of other states.

Press Release

Analysis

Eighteen states and Washington D.C. are together spending nearly $2 billion each year in public benefits funds for clean energy to help break down existing market barriers to clean energy products and services, such as lack of awareness and high upfront costs. Across the 18 states, annual funds range from $2.3 million to $440 million. The state of Ohio collects $5 million each year, through a 9 cent monthly surcharge on electric utility bills, putting Ohio at the bottom of the pack. Ohio should strengthen its Advanced Energy Fund and use it to implement a statewide outreach campaign, provide customer rebates for green products such as solar panels, develop Ohio’s clean energy supply chain, and retrain Ohio’s workers for the green energy economy. Amanda Woodrum, Policy Liaison for Policy Matters Ohio, testified on December 11 to urge state representatives on the Alternative Energy Committee to consider expanding Ohio’s Advanced Energy Fund as part of House Bill 357.

Full Testimony

Read Investing to Re-Energize Ohio

On December 6th, Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann held a public hearing and call to action on payday lending. David Rothstein, a researcher for Policy Matters Ohio, testified about the Ohio economy, the explosion in the number of payday lending locations across Ohio (1400% increase in locations between 1996 and 2006), and the spread of payday lending locations beyond the urban centers around which they once clustered. Rothstein also testified on the structure and practices of payday loan establishments, including the methods of lenders with regards to back to back loans, and collection techniques. Recommendations were also made about interest rates and alternatives to loans that trap families in a cycle of debt.

Testimony

Payday Lending Public Hearing Flyer

Read Trapped in Debt

Ohio Employment Down 50,000 since Recession

Six years after the official end of the last recession, the state hasn’t recovered the number of jobs it had when the downturn ended. There are 50,000 fewer jobs in Ohio than in November 2001, according to seasonally adjusted payroll numbers for nonfarm wage and salary jobs released Dec. 21 by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). 

Full Report

It’s too easy to blame the city’s housing collapse on Rust-belt economics. How bad government and greed made it one of the nation’s foreclosure capitals.
By Les Christie

CNNMoney.com

CLEVELAND (CNNMoney.com) — As the Treasurer of Cuyahoga County in Ohio, Jim Rokakis spends a lot of his time trying to deal with Cleveland’s foreclosure crisis.

When asked recently just how bad it is, Rokakis unfurled a six-foot by four-foot Cleveland city plot map. Each lot was covered with dots of red ink where foreclosed homes filled the plots. From a few feet away, the map looked heavily freckled, while some neighborhoods nearly melted together in crimson masses.

Foreclosures hit Cleveland early and hard. By the summer of 2007, it had four of the top 21 ZIP codes for foreclosure filings in the United States. According to RealtyTrac, the city’s 44105 ZIP, known as the Slavic Village, was the hardest hit U.S. community with 783 filings.

What made Cleveland the nation’s foreclosure epicenter?

Like most rust-belt cities, it’s suffered serious economic setbacks. The city lost jobs at more than three times the national rate during 2001 through 2003 and has not had a meaningful recovery since, according to Richard DeKaser, chief economist at Cleveland-based mortgage lender National City Corp. The state of Ohio recorded a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing job losses since 2001.

Add considerable population shrinkage: With 450,000 people, Cleveland has fewer than half the residents it boasted in 1950, when only six cities in the nation were larger.

Still, Rokakis and others don’t buy the “It’s the economy, stupid,” explanation.

All over the state, even in prosperous communities, foreclosure filings at least quadrupled in 70 of the state’s 88 counties over the past 11 years, according to Zach Schiller, of Policy Matters Ohio, an economic think tank. “They grew even when the economy was doing better,” he said.

According to Rokakis, Cleveland got hammered because lax governmental oversight from the state allowed Wild-West lending. “No one was watching,” he said. “There was no sheriff in town. The state legislature was dominated by banking interests.”

Cleveland tried to enact local anti-predatory lending ordinances in 2002, but national lenders then abandoned the market, according to Mark Wiseman, who heads the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, which is part of the county treasurer’s office.

One bank representative, speaking under condition of anonymity, said the ordinances would have put local lending criteria well above and beyond the national standards. The lenders wanted no part of that.

Wiseman said banking lobbyists got the state legislature to nullify the local ordinances. Until this year, Ohio was one of only two states that did not include mortgage borrowers in their consumer protection statutes. And when the state passed anti-predatory lending laws in 2006, the punitive damages part of the law was gutted during the lame duck legislative session at the end the year.

The latest effort to rein in the mortgage industry is a compact drawn up by the governor and state attorney general’s office last Spring. It asked that lenders, who helped create the predatory lending crisis, help keep Ohioans in their homes.

The plan’s relatively mild provisions include such steps as notifying borrowers about resetting adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) six months in advance. But, according to Paul Richman, senior executive for government affairs for the Mortgage Bankers Association, too many of the other compact provisions were unworkable.

The plan required servicers to pay incentives for mortgage workout counselors to encourage them to find solutions that kept people in their homes, mandated specific staffing levels and required dedicated caseworkers for each client so borrowers would always have a specific contact person to call.

And, there was a question as to how much legal weight the document carried. None of 20 mortgage servicers and lenders targeted have yet agreed to sign on.

For Rokakis, this long-term lack of accountability enabled lenders to continue to make bad loans virtually unchecked. These included many subprime, hybrid ARMs, also called “toxic ARMs,” products he considers predatory.

Rokakis told of a 78-year-old Cleveland woman recently saddled with an unaffordable, 30-year ARM arranged by her minister, a mortgage broker. “I asked him why,” said Rokakis, “you would give an elderly woman an ARM. He said, ‘She wanted the house.’”

Rokakis shook his head. “I want a date with Uma Thurman,” he said, “but you have to be realistic.”

The lending industry views subprime, hybrid ARMS, not as inherently predatory, but as credit-repair products that give risky borrowers affordable rates, enabling them to establish credit worthiness and then refinance into fixed-rate loans.

But for many financially inexperienced ARM borrowers in Cleveland, and across the nation, it didn’t work that way. Some didn’t understand how much their adjustable payments would rise. They also encountered difficulty when they wanted to refinance, especially as home prices stagnated.

Some loans were untenable from the start, granted based on applications with no documentation from the borrower. Consumers, urged by mortgage brokers and other originators, sometimes fudged their own figures. In others, reports indicate that mortgage brokers simply forged papers to win loan approvals.

But even the staunchly pro-consumer Rokakis admitted that predatory lending victims are not entirely blameless for their own problems.

With times hard, “People were looking for a way to make a living,” he said. “There were all these ‘Buy real estate with no credit and no down payment deals.’ The way to wealth was real estate.”

Speculation took off, and expectations ran wild before they were dashed.

According to Mark Seifert, executive director of the East Side Organizing Project, which provides foreclosure prevention services, his staff used to look out the window just before groups of troubled home owners were due in to attend counseling sessions.

“We’d see Escalades, Range Rovers, Cadillacs out in the parking lots” he said.

Now Rokakis’s office is dealing with the aftermath. “One guy came in wanting Wiseman’s help to save 12 separate properties,” many of which he bought on speculation, entirely on credit with none of his own cash invested.

He’s not the only one. Now that prices have been falling for the past couple of years, far too many homeowners have found themselves in the same boat. Now the only option they have is foreclosure.

Ohio Employment in a Sideways Pattern

Ohio’s job market continues with at best a sideways pattern.  Ohio employment in October was almost identical to what it was six months ago and more than 11,000 jobs below a year earlier, according to seasonally adjusted payroll numbers for nonfarm wage and salary jobs released Nov. 16 by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS).

Full Report

House passes bill to end cuts to unemployment
By Catherine Candisky

The Columbus Dispatch

It’s an amazing turn of events for a proposal that has lingered in the legislature for more than a year and a half.

The House unanimously approved a bill yesterday to make senior citizens eligible for full unemployment benefits when they lose their jobs.

In fact, lawmakers added language to the bill to make it effective immediately upon the signature of Gov. Ted Strickland, avoiding the standard 90-day wait.

The Senate, which unanimously passed the bill in May, is expected to concur today with additions made in the House and send the bill to the governor.

“It’s an issue I’m supportive of and look forward to signing the bill,” said Strickland, who put aside earlier reservations about the proposal.

Welcome to the fast track.

Senate Bill 116, by Sen. Joy Padgett, R-Coshocton, will abolish Ohio’s so-called Social Security offset, a move that senior citizens and their advocates have sought for years.

Ohio is the only state in the nation where 100 percent of a person’s Social Security is subtracted from his or her unemployment compensation. As a result, senior citizens who lose their jobs receive reduced unemployment benefits, and often none at all.

“Ohio’s current unemployment compensation system is blatantly unfair to low-income seniors who must continue to work after retirement age in order to stay financially afloat,” Padgett said.

“… Employers already make contributions to the Unemployment Insurance Program on their employees’ behalf regardless of their age, so why should Ohio’s seniors not be receiving the same benefit as their younger co-workers?”

Philip E. Cole, executive director of the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, said seniors who are working at the same time they are collecting Social Security are doing so because they need the money — and losing a job is as hard for them as it is a younger person.

“When the state says to them, ‘We will deny you what should be yours because you are older,’ the state only makes their lives harder,” he said.

Ohio is poised to join 41 other states that allow Social Security recipients to collect full unemployment benefits. Eight states have a 50 percent offset, deducting half of a person’s Social Security from his or her unemployment compensation.

“It is time for Ohio to move in this direction. Senior citizens deserve no less,” Rep. Larry L. Flowers, R-Canal Winchester, told his colleagues before the House vote.

Rep. Michael J. Skindell, a Lakewood Democrat who sought the “emergency clause,” said it will make the bill effective immediately and ensure that unemployment benefits are restored before the holidays.

“Otherwise, seniors won’t be eligible before the end of January,” he said.

Thousands of senior citizens will benefit from the legislation, noted Zach Schiller, research director for Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland research group.

According to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, as many as 4,600 seniors will qualify for benefits. The estimated cost of those unemployment claims range from $12.4 million to $24.8 million a year.

The balance of Ohio’s unemployment compensation fund is $548 million.

Despite the delays, the proposal had no organized opposition, although the Ohio Chamber of Commerce has expressed concern about the effect the legislation will have on the unemployment compensation fund.

The governor and others talk a good game about alternative energy. Then they embrace Senate legislation that should be much stronger

Columbus Dispatch

Ted Strickland and other Democrats campaigned across the state last year touting the economic promise of renewable and advanced energy sources. An Ohio bleeding manufacturing jobs? Alternative energy sources would lead to new realms of employment. The governor pressed forward on this front in unveiling his plan for restructuring the state’s electricity industry (with a deadline looming for full and misguided deregulation in January 2009). He outlined a requirement that by 2025, 25 percent of the electricity in Ohio must be generated from the likes of clean coal, nuclear and fuel cells, and half of the standard met through renewables such as wind, solar and hydro power.

The governor has noted that other states have moved ahead more quickly. He has talked rightly and repeatedly about Ohio needing to play catch-up, making the kind of impression that would attract investors in advanced and renewable energy sources.

In that way, the governor deserves credit for proposing the goal. Unfortunately, his plan lacked such elements as benchmarks necessary to measure and achieve progress. Worse, the rewrite of his legislation by the Senate Energy & Public Utilities Committee (delivered last week) backs away further, suggesting that compliance won’t be enforced until 2025, denying the Public Utilities Commission even modest tools in rulemaking to achieve enforcement.

The committee’s decision to impose an arbitrary price cap of 3 percent on the implementation of the standard diminishes in another way the state’s profile as a place for advanced and renewable energy sources. As Janine Migden-Ostrander, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, explained to the committee on Monday, ”a utility could build an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle coal plant, hit the cap and then never have to provide any renewable energy.”

The governor and his advisers insist that the nearly two dozen states with precise interim goals, plus enforcement mechanisms, fail to account for the uncertainty in the market. The Strickland team cites New Jersey having second thoughts (due to the steep expense) about its goal of tapping solar power for 2 percent of its electricity. Both contentions largely dodge the point. Everyone gets the uncertainty. The purpose of regular benchmarks and enforcement is to signal serious intent, an Ohio as eager as other states to move forward. The mistake New Jersey made was focusing so narrowly on solar.

On Friday, Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland-based think tank, issued a report revealing the puny stake the state has made in its Advanced Energy Fund, a pool of money designed to encourage investment in clean energy projects. Again, other states do better. They grasp more firmly the potential to leverage private investment dollars.

An Ohio determined to achieve the goal set by Ted Strickland, to be a national leader in clean energy technologies, must have a robust Advanced Energy Fund. It must have clear benchmarks and enforcement mechanisms for developing a portfolio of alternative energy sources.

National legislation to help those facing foreclosure yet to be pushed through; state works on own measures.
By Jessica Wehrman

Dayton Daily News

WASHINGTON — — Over five years, Rex and Janet Puckett of Dayton developed a habit: They would periodically pack up their belongings to prepare for impending foreclosure, then unpack again a few weeks later.

The couple refinanced their three-bedroom ranch home, near Jamaica Run Golf Course southwest of Dayton, in 2001 with the expectation that they’d get $25,000 to do updates including a new roof.

Instead of $25,000, they got somewhere less than half of that, with the rest going to fees. Rex Puckett endured a heart attack and a stroke which doctors pinpointed in part to his high stress levels. The company that renegotiated their loan has since gone out of business, and the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center finally helped the Pucketts renegotiate their loan. The Pucketts kept their house.

No national help yet

As the foreclosure crisis continues to squeeze families like the Pucketts, no relief as yet has come from Washington. Congress has held numerous hearings on the issue, but has yet to send a bill to President Bush for his signature that tightens lending policies or helps homeowners at-risk of foreclosure.

Bush, meanwhile, threatened to veto a House bill passed earlier this fall that forgives the tax burden homeowners face when they are foreclosed upon or when part of their mortgage is forgiven. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is pushing a similar version of the bill in the Senate and said he is working with the administration to iron out disagreements on it.

Voinovich is convinced Congress will not recess for the year without doing something. Thousands of adjustable rate mortgages will reset by the end of this year, putting more homeowners’ monthly payments out of reach. “There’s a crisis out there,” he said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said Congress can only do so much. He said President Bush should use the power of his office to “jawbone” companies into renegotiating loans with homeowners at risk of foreclosure. “The president has not used the power of his office,” he said.

The foreclosure problem is particularly acute in southwest Ohio. According to a Policy Matters Ohio report released last spring, Montgomery County ranked second only to Cuyahoga County in foreclosure filings in 2006, with 5,076 filings. The report was compiled using data from the Ohio Supreme Court.

Katie Turner of Dayton barely escaped becoming one of those numbers. Turner, already struggling with depression, refinanced in the aftermath of her husband’s 1997 death and watched her adjustable rate mortgage go from $527 to more than $865 over a three-year period. When she got behind on payments — a result of her Social Security check being stolen — her mortgage again increased to more than $1,000.

The Miami Valley Fair Housing Center helped her renegotiate her adjustable rate loan with the same company.

It’s sweet relief for Turner, who still remembers how her husband Gil gushed over the two-bedroom home when he bought it in 1988.

“He was like, ‘Wife,’ — he always called me wife — ‘it’s got everything except the picket fence,’” she said. “This is my dream house. I love this house.”

Jim McCarthy, the fair housing center’s president, said the center first started seeing trouble brewing in 1999, when its clients — primarily people who couldn’t get a loan because of low income or discrimination — suddenly became clients who received loans only to see their terms change rapidly.

His agency also suddenly saw older people with long-term, low-interest loans coming in and paying them because they were refinancing into a subprime loan. McCarthy and other center staff investigated, and found they were being push-marketed by subprime lenders. “We were all sort of flabbergasted by the degree to which we were seeing craziness in the markets, craziness in the documents coming into the office,” he said.

By the fall of 2001 the center, with the blessing of the Montgomery County Commission, began working on education, outreach and intervention programs for people at risk of foreclosure. He said so far, the center has helped 361 families or homeowners renegotiate their loans to avoid foreclosure.

“We started sounding the warning to elected officials back in 2000,” McCarthy said. “And here we are in 2007 and now finally some elected officials get it and are saying all the right things, but it’s still going be a long time before we see a real legislative cure to this.”

Why the inactivity?

A host of reasons are given for Congress’ inactivity. First, Congress is wrestling with a slew of other issues in addition to its traditional duties of passing spending and authorizing bills. Many of them are points of contention — Congress and the President are fighting over issues including the war in Iraq and children’s health insurance.

And finally, it’s not an easy issue to tackle: The crisis includes at-risk homeowners, mortgage lenders and brokers, and industries influenced by the subprime market. There’s no easy fix.

Last week, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., introduced a bill that created a new set of consumer protection rules for U.S. mortgage lenders, brokers and investors. The bill would require “a mortgage originator to act solely in the best interest of the consumer, including finding the residential mortgage loan that best meets the needs of the borrower,” and would bar lenders from steering borrowers toward high-cost loans.

In Ohio, Gov. Ted Strickland has asked subprime lenders to work with the state to modify loans, identify and notify at-risk borrowers, waive late fees and penalties and take other steps to prevent foreclosures. If lenders choose not to participate, he said, he will seek legislation to prevent foreclosures. The proposal got a chilly response last week from lenders, who called the proposal well-intentioned but ill-conceived.

Rex Puckett is just glad somebody could help him. A contractor by trade, he’s disheartened by the sight of homes abandoned by homeowners who didn’t escape foreclosure. Even as he and his wife packed and unpacked, he still worked on his beloved home, emptying his savings account to take care of the place where he and Janet raised their children.

“It’s the last little corner of Montgomery County that’s kind of country,” he said. “It’s home and we have good memories here.”

The Akron Beacon Journal

By Dennis J. Willard

COLUMBUS: Pregnant women working for small companies shouldn’t start planning to take a 12-week leave of absence yet.

Yes, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission flexed its muscle last week and used a 1977 law against sexual discrimination to order companies to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to pregnant workers.

But the real showdown on this issue is still coming, probably in early December, and it has all the elements of a political and ideological melee.

Democrats against Republicans, companies squaring off with the workers, the small business owners taking on the moms-in-waiting.

The battle also will once again illustrate the subtle tug-of-war that continues to be waged between the Democrats in Gov. Ted Strickland’s administration and the Republican-controlled state legislature.

And it will also demonstrate once again that rules and laws are flexible, to be bent when convenient, and that the only truth in politics is that power is in the hand of the beholder.

And some people think this is only about whether a mom gets to take time off to have a child.

The fight will take place before an obscure legislative panel the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review with an acronym that sounds like something Lee Iacocca would invent: JCARR.

Until last Thursday, pregnant women needed to rely upon the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to leave the workplace without pay or fear of losing their job or seniority.

Even the federal act was limited, however, to employers with more than 50 workers, and the pregnant worker needed to work at least 1,250 hours in the previous calendar year to be eligible.

A large group of workers in Ohio, around 445,000 according to Policy Matters, are not covered by the federal law, in large part because they work for small companies.

The commission’s rule rectifies that problem by applying the law to companies with four or more employees, and it makes a woman eligible upon being hired.

Small companies can object by claiming the leave imposes an undue hardship on their operations and they can place pregnant women in light-duty jobs.

The civil-rights commissioners maintain they are only clarifying a vague reference in the 1977 law that states companies must provide a ”reasonable” leave of absence for moms-to-be.

Lobbying organizations for small and large companies, like the National Federation for Independent Business-Ohio and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, are taking a different approach to fighting the commission.

They will argue before JCARR that the commission is overstepping its authority and writing, rather than administering, law.

JCARR, created in 1977, or the same year the law cited by the civil-rights commission was passed, is unique because the 10 legislators on the committee act as judges, not as lawmakers.

They decide whether rules implemented by departments and commissions comply with the laws passed by the Ohio General Assembly.

Currently, JCARR has six Republicans and four Democrats, and the GOP members will have to become judicial activists to decommission the civil-rights rule.

This would be a complete flip from just two years ago.

In March 2005, 270 school districts were fighting the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services over $67 million in aid to students with special needs.

JCARR Republicans, with Democrats opposed, exercised judicial restraint, held their hands up and said they had no authority to intervene in the divisive issue.

State Rep. Scott Oelslager, R-Plain Township, was the JCARR chairman in 2005. He repeatedly told witnesses who appeared before the panel, many with children seated in wheelchairs in the hearing room’s aisles, that JCARR does not make policy decisions.

”I know I sound like a broken record,” Oelslager said at one point, then told the witness to take his complaint to one of the legislature’s finance committees.

One Republican state Sen. Tim Grendell of Chesterland did seem to side with the school districts in 2005, but when he pushed the issue too fervently, he was removed from the panel by Senate President Bill Harris.

At the time, Grendell, a graduate of law schools at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia, said, ”I was told I asked too many questions and didn’t understand the workings of JCARR.”

Two years later, Ohio has a Democrat in the governor’s chair and JCARR still has a 6-4 Republican majority.

With big and small business lobbying them on this issue, it will be interesting to see whether the Republicans take a different tack with the civil-rights commission.

It is clear that Democrats have gotten the message.

State Sen. Capri Cafaro, D-Girard, a JCARR member sounding a lot like Oelslager’s broken record noted this week that the committee’s job is not political or ideological.

Cafaro said JCARR only determines whether a state agency or commission is acting within its authority under law.

Need a final interesting twist to keep viewing?

Grendell, the lawyer who asked too many questions and didn’t understand the workings of JCARR, was placed back on the panel this year by the same person who removed him in 2005 Senate President Harris.

At least Grendell has a chance to be consistent.