George Nemeth: Hi. This is George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily. I am here with a number of Northeast Ohio bloggers at Talkie’s Coffee, in the front room, and everybody has a cup of coffee (I am drinking an Americano), and we are here with Senator Marc Dann, who is running for Attorney General. I wanted to ask the first question, because I was looking at your website, and actually it wasn’t your website; it was like the Ohio.gov website, and you are eligible to be in office through 2008, and I was wondering why you are not… I mean because it seems like you are on a lot of panels (I am sorry; committees), and I am wondering why you don’t want to continue as a Senator and go to an Attorney General.

Marc Dann: Well actually I love being a Senator and, by the way, all the Democrats, there are only 11 of us out of 33, so we are all on a lot of committees, because there are certain committees that require statutorily there be Democrats, and so we all have multiple responsibilities. And I absolutely love my work as a State Senator, and the hardest part of making the decision to enter the Attorney General’s race was in fact the decision, facing the possibility that I haven’t quite come to grips with in my mind that I might have to leave the Senate as a result of winning. What I came to the conclusion was, though, that we will be in the minority in the State Senate at least until 2010, when the redistricting takes place, or 2012 when those elections take place, and that would be my last term in the legislature, and so my ability to effect public policy from a constitutional office is significantly higher than my ability to effect public policy as a minority member of the State Senate.

I feel like I have really done a great job at making the best of being in the Senate, and using both the bully pulpit of the ability to criticize and to advocate for certain policies with my own colleagues, as well as the amendment process. We have learned the rules in the State Senate in the last year, and we have used the rulebook on the floor to try to draw attention to some of the hypocrisy of what people are doing, at least I believe that the Republican leadership has done in the State, as well as to make our points, as well as to win some parliamentary battles and to force process to take place. And I have consistently, for example, for the first time, filed protests on the journal of the Senate relating to bills that have pieces of them that are not single subject, because the notice issue is a huge constitutional issue in the State that people really don’t pay a lot of attention to, but the fact is that if they are amending things into a bill at the last minute for which the people who are affected by that Amendment have no notice (that, by the way, includes the minority members of the legislature, because we often don’t see the Amendments until they arrive on the floor), the Supreme Court of Ohio, even the very conservative Republican Supreme Court that we have right now, has consistently said that that is violative of the single-subject rule in the Ohio Constitution, yet they persist in doing it over and over and over again. So raising those issues, making people play by the rules a little bit. I think to some degree, with Republican control for so long, my colleagues have been kind of sucked into the Stockholm Syndrome, and have kind of identified with their captors. Some of them hope to get a job, an appointment…

George Nemeth: That’s an interesting way to put it.

Gloria Ferris: Whoa.

Marc Dann: …from a Republican Governor down the road. And I think I have done a good job of changing that dynamic in the Senate since I have been there. I am very proud of the work that I have done in that regard. We get more, and frankly I feel like I have accomplished more, because they fear me, than because I am willing to go along and get along on even small issues relating to the rules and relating to timeframes and so forth, and we have hopefully improved the quality of debate that goes on. And when you do that, sometimes good ideas, even though it may take years, percolate to the top, and so things have happened in the legislature. The example this weekend, to give you a headline here on Predatory Lending. We have made small incremental progress on the Predatory Lending bill this week. That would not have happened had we not continued to introduced bills, bills that we knew would never get enacted, had we not continued to offer amendments on other bills as they were pending. Again, keep raising the issue and re-raise the salience of the issue to the point, where even Bob Taft realized that in Ohio there is a problem with predatory lenders driving homeowners out of our cities.

So we have had, I think, a real good… I love being in the Senate. I know that’s a real long way around the question. I love being in the Senate, so that was the hardest part of this, but I do think I can continue to work on so many of these areas in the Attorney General’s office.

Tim Russo: Gloria, did you want to follow up on the predatory lending?

Gloria Ferris: Yes. I think that since you brought up the predatory… Gloria Ferris at GloriaFerris.net. Yes. Since you brought up the predatory lending, there was a small, (what is this thing?) an editorial in the Plain Dealer this morning that talks about that bill, and it says that the law will fall heavily on mortgage brokers, who are not always the bad guys. They said a perfect bill would also include the banks and their subsidiaries, which often have reputations as bad as the most egregious mortgage brokers. So do you want to address that as to why that isn’t in the bill?

Marc Dann: Well the fact that we have a bill at all is a step, and the fact that mortgage brokers are going to now going to be able to be held accountable, not just by the State Department of Commerce, who regulates mortgage brokers and by the way who have not brought an enforcement action ever against a mortgage broker in the State, or referred it to the Attorney General, or taken any step. So the scheme, the regulatory scheme, that we have had with mortgage brokers is not working very well. And it also includes mortgage lenders who are not affiliated with nationally chartered banks. So there are a number of packagers of loans, resellers of loans and originators of loans that are not mortgage brokers, but actually lenders, who will fall under the bill as it has been revised. And, again, I haven’t seen the final language of this, but I have been engaged in a lot of the negotiations around it. They will be included under the Consumers Sales Practices Act, which Ohio has a great Consumers Sales Practices Act.

One of the attractions, again, of moving into the Attorney General’s office is the fact that the AG has a role to play in enforcing the Consumers Sales Practices Act, but its best use is by private Attorneys General, who use the Consumers Sales Practices Act to bring cases in when there are not necessarily high stakes. A mortgage broker, for example, will make a $3,000 or $5,000 fee in the case, and if all you can recover by breach of contract claim or even a fraud claim against a mortgage broker is that $3,000 or $5,000, it doesn’t make it very attractive to bring the case. The cost to the Plaintiff, the cost to the lawyers, there is no incentive for lawyers to bring these cases. What the CSPA does is it, in cases of unconscionable acts, in cases of fraud, in cases where contracts differ from oral agreements, it allows courts to award treble damages, attorney’s fees and punitive damages, and very specifically in those cases. And so while it sets a little bit higher bar for proof, it is an access to the courthouse for people, including people who are subject to predatory lenders. So I would have preferred that we have a bill that incorporated banks as well as non-banks.

The argument the banks make (I am not espousing this argument, but I am trying to explain it) is that under their federal regulatory scheme, they are under much stricter regulations about the kinds of loans that they can issue and, frankly, I think that’s just a red herring, and we tried to cut through it. But I introduced a bill, Senate Bill 199, which is now totally incorporated into the new bill, which went short of going after the banks under the CSPA, because frankly their lobbyist is simply too powerful to overcome, especially for a minority member of the State Senate, but what I am proud about is the entirety of my bill is now in the new bill. So not only are we going to have the non-bank lenders and the mortgage brokers covered under the Consumers Sales Practices Act, but there is another really important part. Right now, the regulatory records of the Department of Commerce, who regulates mortgage brokers, are not public. My bill makes those records public.

Tim Ferris: The Department of Commerce comes under the AG, or the Secretary of State?

Marc Dann: No, the Department of Commerce comes under the Governor.

Tim Ferris: The Governor. Ok.

Marc Dann: The Governor. Right. Yes. The Department of Commerce comes under the Governor, and the Department of Commerce is charged with licensing and regulating mortgage brokers, appraisers and lenders, and now lending officers, under certain statutes. The problem is, if you have a mortgage broker that is repeatedly being complained about, there was no way for a new customer to be able to determine whether or not the person they were dealing with had had any State complaints because the records were secret. So my bill, and now the bill that is going to be moving forward, will open up that process. You will find some consistent themes in the work I have done in the Senate, and the kinds of things I will do as Attorney General. One of them is transparency in government. I come to that pretty honestly. My wife is a journalist, and so she teaches Journalism and she teaches Press Law actually at Youngstown State University. So that is why the transparency piece is important. So it is a lot better than it was. I am not a big fan of incrementalism, and I think we were pretty clear on our criticism of that bill as it has been reconstituted. But we are going to vote for it, because it is better than the law today.

Gloria Ferris: It’s better than nothing.

Marc Dann: Right.

Tim Ferris: If you would be elected AG, is there anything you can do with regard, not to the predatory lending, but to say the Third Party Administrators that handle the loans and the Third Party Administrators as the loan is sold and sold and sold and sold, and also the other ones. Once a loan goes into foreclosure, you have a separate Third Party Administrator, and from what I have seen the past couple of years working with people in the area, there is no fiduciary standard of even due care. Can you address that as Attorney General?

Marc Dann: Right. Yes.

Tim Russo: That was Tim Ferris, blogger support for GloriaFerris.net.

Tim Ferris: Thank you.

Marc Dann: Actually, one of the details that we are still ironing out on the rewrite of that predatory lending bill is to deal with the loan processing companies, the Witten Loans of the world that take the bundled loans of Fannie Mae and Jennie Mae loans, resale them to other people and then service those loans, because you’re right. A lot of the roadblocks that people have towards maintaining ownership of their house come at that level.

I want to add another layer to this, and I know this is already a complicated discussion, but the change in the federal bankruptcy law has also… Kind of the last resort for homeowners was bankruptcy, especially when they had no equity in their house, because with no equity, they could either reaffirm on that loan or challenge the loan in the Federal Bankruptcy Court, if they were eligible to file bankruptcy. Since the U.S. Congress has taken away the right of working class people to file bankruptcy, essentially, under the rules as they existed before, we have lost that remedy. That enhances the need to have this bill now. So, yes, we are looking at the processors, but it is tricky, and you are exactly on the right track. We are looking at the fiduciary responsibilities…

Tim Ferris: I want to add one more element to this.

Marc Dann: …and of the appraisers and of the mortgage brokers.

Tim Ferris: Ok, now as Attorney General, you are the head of all the attorneys in the State?

Marc Dann: No, the Supreme Court is in charge of the attorneys in the State.

Tim Ferris: Ok, well that’s the other layer too. That is the foreclosure attorney working with the TPAs, working with the bank, working with the foreclosure TPAs, and creating a briar patch out of which the average person cannot get out.

George Nemeth: What is a TPA?

Tim Ferris: Third Party Administrator, and it is just an insidious mess, and everybody is blaming it on the predatory lenders. Not that they should be blame-free, but there are so many other things, and I think you understand.

Marc Dann: There is a broken process here. Add on top of it the fact there are 40,000 foreclosures pending in Cuyahoga County, and Jim Rokakis has a great bill that he has brought to us in the legislature to change the… It has already passed the House. It is now in the Senate, to speed up that process of tax foreclosures only on abandoned properties. So to get your justice, even… If something, if the Third Party Administrator has done you wrong and you end up in a foreclosure situation, it could take you in current levels in Cuyahoga County or in Trumbull County where I practice, it could take you years to just get your day in court, when you are absolutely right, even if you file a summary judgment motion. Even if you can afford to hire a lawyer, which, of course, most people in that situation cannot, and we’re talking about complex legal arguments that are made.

Tim Ferris: We have people who have tried to pay, and the payments are lost, the payments are not credited. It is just a mess and we need really to drill down into the process and not really just the initiation of the process, which is the lender. May I bring up Tort Reform?

Tim Russo: Let’s move on to another question.

George Nemeth: As long as we keep asking questions, that’s fine.

Tim Ferris: Yes. Ok. Go ahead Bill.

Bill Callahan: My name is Bill Callahan. I am with Callahan’s Cleveland Diary.

George Nemeth: And the Free Times.

Bill Callahan: I am with Callahan’s Cleveland Diary today, and since we are talking about legislation, at some point we are going to get to the Attorney General’s office, but that was actually a terrific discussion of one issue, and I would like to raise another, and actually the idea of themes that you intend to take from the Senate to the Attorney General’s office is kind of framework for this. You were one of four Senators, Democratic Senators, who voted for Senate Bill 82, which passed I believe by three votes. All of your votes were necessary to pass it, as I understand. Senate Bill 82 is the bill which removes the power to impose residency requirements from the category of Home Rule for cities, and so I wanted to ask you first to talk about why you supported that bill in a critical vote, and secondly what that says about your views of Home Rule as a legal principle in this State, and how you would approach that as Attorney General?

Marc Dann: That’s a great question. I thought it was going to be the first question, but it turned out to be the second, so I will take my solace in that. I voted for the Residency Bill, the removal of Home Rule power over Residency, which, by the way, the Constitution anticipates that there are certain subjects that the State will retain control over, and certain subjects that are delegated to municipal corporations and to the grant of Home Rule power to localities. So the Constitution anticipates a scheme where there is a changing… There are potentially changing levels of Home Rule, so what I did was, I believe very constitutionally appropriate, even if you may disagree with the policy objectives of it, and the policy reasons why.

And the reason why I did this is because I believe we ought to have the best and brightest people in law enforcement in this State, and that my orientation, because I serve as a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee on Criminal Justice, and my orientation because I am one of the few lawyers in the Senate, I kind of been stereotyped into kind of the law enforcement role for the Democrats in the Senate. It is my belief that I want to have no impediments to the best people serving in law enforcement, because law enforcement jobs don’t pay as well as some jobs do. It is often very demanding physically, demanding time away from the family, and what I had heard consistently from my constituents and from people around the State is that this was causing people to leave the profession who were capable of doing a great job, doing great work as first responders in a time where those folks are very important.

So that was the primary reason that I took it on. I am very reluctant in my philosophy, regardless of whether a city is a charter city or non-charter city or how the delegation of Home Rule from State, because all power, of course, originates with the State government first, I am very reluctant to interfere with local government decision-making, and I have been frankly offended at the number of times the folks who I assumed… You kind of, when you think about Republicans, right, you think about people who are for local control. I mean that is kind of a basic tenet of what I always perceived to be Republican philosophy in this State and, frankly, it is a baseline philosophy of mine. And you have to have exceptional reasons in order to interfere with local decision-making about anything, at least in my view, and what I thought was. But whether it was oil and gas wells, there was a vote last year to remove the power of local municipalities and townships to regulate zoning around the location of oil and gas wells, things that could blow up. There was a removal of power, or an attempt to remove power to regulate adult entertainment businesses, and to take away and set State-wide standards of six-foot distance between dancers and what…

Tim Russo: Let me just interrupt quickly. Tim Russo, DemocracyGuy.com. How does that reconcile with the vote on Senate Bill 82?

Marc Dann: What it means is that I had to be pretty well convinced that there was a significant problem.

Tim Russo: So you are convinced the problem is that law enforcement and fire fighters are leaving the profession because of this rule.

Marc Dann: In some cases, and I can only tell you what I know from my own district. By the way, we do not have charter cities that have residency requirements in my district, so at the time, I certainly…

Tim Russo: Do you have one neighboring your district?

Marc Dann: Youngstown. That’s right. I do, but I don’t represent Youngstown. I represent Trumbull County, so the residency rules are…

Tim Russo: So was this a vote to bring people into Trumbull County from Mahoning County?

Marc Dann: No. I wish I was so callous and so thoughtful about economic development, but I didn’t even consider that. I really looked at it from purely from a law enforcement perspective, and I believe a compelling argument was made that we don’t have sufficient people. We are not bringing in people into law enforcement; difficulty recruiting people into those jobs.

Bill Callahan: Then I want to ask a follow up question to that. If the policy issue was law enforcement (two-part question), first isn’t that preeminently a question for the municipalities which are having hiring problems, and wouldn’t it be the case that if those municipalities were having those problems they would likely have seen the wisdom of this more than they apparently did? And secondly, in Cleveland, even though a very large portion of the General Fund Budget is law enforcement, the very large number of people who were affected by this are not law enforcement personnel, and my understanding is that a number of down state municipalities, villages in particular, the only personnel that are going to be affected are village managers, all of whom were included in this sweeping bill to eliminate any kind of Home Rule that makes anybody live anywhere closer than the next county. So do you think that this is a good narrow tool for dealing with the narrow issue that you were concerned about?

Marc Dann: Let me kind of give you a subsidiary analysis to this that I did, and I wasn’t going to talk about it, because it is a little uncomfortable, because I am criticizing friends of mine, but I also believe that this residency rule has allowed municipalities to become a little bit lazy, in terms of I think that Warren, Ohio, which has a residency rule in my district, ought to strive to be the best place to live that it can possibly be. Now the urban centers struggle with that more than non-urban places do, but the fact is that it becomes to some degree a crutch for municipalities that aren’t reaching and probing and trying to change the dynamics of what is going on.

For example, I live in an aging urban township of Liberty Township, which is adjacent to the City of Youngstown. One of the things we are trying to do is working with the Trustees. We are trying to come up with ways to set our township apart as a place that people ought to want to live. We are talking about doing wireless Internet, for example, in our community, and I have been an advocate of free wireless Internet. We are right off the highway. I was thinking you put the billboards up saying, “Come to our township. Eat. Go to our Denny’s, and you can have free wireless Internet here.� Not that that is going to solve the problem.

I think it will be interesting to see how many people actually move as a result of this change in the law, because I think that some of the predictions that have been made, at least based on my experience in my district with people I know, I don’t think we are going to see the mass exodus, certainly from Warren and Ashtabula, that have the residency rules in my district that people have predicted.

Bill Callahan: So I understand what you said, because my question was, how you see the broad scope of the residency rule addressing the narrow issue, or the narrower issue of law enforcement recruitment that you were talking about. Now as I understand, the second problem you are talking about is to create some sort of better framework to cause municipalities to work harder to have more attractive places for city personnel to live?

Marc Dann: I think you want to have… It would seem to me that I want to have people who want to live in my community, and I think having police officers who are living in… It also creates a whole level of fraud. I know when I represented the City of Youngstown in the Law Department that we would send out detectives to go look at where police officers were living, which is kind of a cat and mouse thing…

Bill Callahan: Senator Dann, I’m sorry, but I think you understand that what I am trying to get at is you were just saying that Home Rule is a very important principle where you need to have a compelling public policy reason to violate it, and I guess I am asking whether you think, your sense that municipalities have become lazy, or should have a better reason or whatever, is a compelling public policy reason to override the ability of other elected public officials and voters in those municipalities to make their own decisions about those issues?

Marc Dann: Or to allow the individuals in those municipalities to make their own decisions about where they are going to live, first of all, and secondly, no. The compelling reason that took me over the top of, and which was in response of your first question, was the fact that we want the best and brightest people in law enforcement, and the municipalities that have these Home Rule restrictions on residency tend to have the more sophisticated, more complicated and greater law enforcement needs, so there is a… I believe there is a compelling State interest in making sure that we have safe cities and that we have the best people in law enforcement, so that we can minimize the risk to the entire State.

Jill Miller Zimon: Hi. I am Jill Miller Zimon from Writes Like She Talks. I have two questions. Well actually I have three. I have a feeling I am not going to get to all three, but I have two questions that both deal with education, but different issues. So would you like them one at a time?

Marc Dann: However you want to.

Jill Miller Zimon: The first question is… It has to do with No Child Left Behind, and the issue of it being underfunded. There are a number of states which have considered, either have considered or have filed lawsuits against the government because of that underfunding. I believe Connecticut is one of them, and the Attorney General there is Dick Blumenthal. I would like to know, if you become Attorney General of this state, would you consider joining or filing on behalf of Ohio a lawsuit regarding the underfunded nature of No Child Left Behind?

Marc Dann: The answer is, the day that I read that Dick Blumenthal filed that lawsuit, I introduced a resolution in the State Senate calling on the Attorney General to… And I have already just done sponsor testimony on that resolution, calling on our Attorney General to join that lawsuit, or to file a separate lawsuit. There are some technical differences between Ohio’s situation and Connecticut’s. Connecticut is out of compliance with the reporting requirements, and there is a cost associated with those, and the primary focus of that lawsuit is on the reporting requirements, but the claim has been made in that lawsuit on the bigger issue that affects Ohio. Ohio is underfunded by $1.4 billion, at least the most recent analysis that I have seen, to comply with the intervention requirements under No Child Left Behind. And so at the moment, in fact on my BlackBerry, I was reading Yahoo News. I remember the moment, and I saw this article on Yahoo News. I called my staff. I had them send me the longer version of the article, and from the car, I sent a memo to LSC to have them draft that resolution, and so that is exactly the kind of thing the State Attorney General ought to be doing.

Jill Miller Zimon: And what happened to the resolution?

Marc Dann: Well it is pending in the Education Committee.

Jill Miller Zimon: And what would be, if there were not a change in the Attorney General in this state, what would you expect to happen to that resolution?

Marc Dann: Well if Betty Montgomery is returned to the Attorney General’s office, she has told the Toledo Blade that if she is guilty of anything, it is of doing nothing, and I think that that is probably what she would be doing when/if elected.

Jill Miller Zimon: And she would continue to be guilty and do nothing?

Marc Dann: And do nothing, be guilty of doing nothing. So I would expect her, if she is… We missed… I mean whether it is the Rhode Island Attorney General going after (she had three questions, she said) lead paint…

George Nemeth: We will get back to Jill. It’s an hour.

Marc Dann: Right, but it is the Attorney General of Rhode Island going after lead paint manufacturers to get money to remediate lead paint in houses in that State, Ohio is nowhere to be found. In the Delphi case, we have 13,500 Delphi workers in Ohio. In the Delphi case, ironically the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation owns 180,000 shares of Delphi stock, which is of course worthless, but long before the bankruptcy, Mississippi and Oklahoma, not exactly bastions of (if I run for President, this is will come back to hurt me, I suppose, some day; which I never will, so it will be easy), but not exactly bastions of great legal forward thinking in Oklahoma and Mississippi, both have filed fraud lawsuits involving the Delphi spin-off from General Motors. You know, we’ve got 13,500 people’s jobs at stake. Even symbolically to have a seat at the table in that bankruptcy in the adversary proceeding would be meaningful, I think, to those workers, and the Attorney General of Ohio is nowhere to be found.

Tim Russo: Let me just quickly switch gears on that.

George Nemeth: Wait a second, Tim. I want to pick up the BlackBerry thing real quick. If you are Attorney General…

Jill Miller Zimon: What happened to education?

George Nemeth: We will get back to education.

Tim Ferris: BlackBerry is educating.

George Nemeth: Well, no, I would like to know if there is anything you could do as Attorney General about the BlackBerry issue that the Supreme Court of the United States doesn’t want to hear, because as far as I am concerned, you know, going back to the consumer stuff, right, a lot of people are BlackBerry users?

Marc Dann: I am a BlackBerry user. I am about to buy a new one. In fact, mine is like dying.

George Nemeth: Why would you buy a new one with all this stuff pending?

Marc Dann: Well why not? Notice that I haven’t, but I mean if I don’t hold it the right way, sometimes it just like goes black, and so I need at some point to get one. Just as a side note, we spent $50 million in the last three years in State government on intellectual property outside legal counsel. Often, as you have read in the Plain Dealer, with people who have no business doing that kind of legal work, doing legal work for us. You would think in that $50 million we could perhaps, somebody would have given us the answer to the BlackBerry question. But I don’t know. I don’t know whether there is a role for the State in that. If there is a consumer fraud issue, certainly we could look at that, but this is a trademark patent fight between two rich sumo wrestlers, and I think at the end of the day, somebody is going to end up paying and there are enough people like me who are fond of their BlackBerrys that they are going to pay. So my legal analysis is that they won’t shut off the technology.

George Nemeth: We are going to take your word for that.

Tim Russo: That may or may not be a legal analysis.

George Nemeth: Yes, we are going to come to you if BlackBerrys are __.

Marc Dann: I will be honest. I am a little emotional about the BlackBerry, ok, so it does…

George Nemeth: And that’s why I preempted our education __.

Tim Russo: We just had a good interview with Subodh Chandra, who is also running for Attorney General in the Democratic primary, and one of the things he said about his candidacy was that as a former prosecutor, he recognized the importance of the Eliot Spitzer style of Attorney General, and that that was the kind of Attorney General that he wanted to be, activist, turning the Ohio Attorney General’s office into the largest public interest, public affairs law firm in the country. Talk a little bit about how your view of the AG’s office compares with that.

Marc Dann: I share some of Subodh’s interest in doing that, but I think we have to also understand that we are in Ohio, not in New York, so that there are… While I will be a much more, dramatically, 150,000% more activist Attorney General than we have had since Lee Fisher, and maybe I think I would probably be more activist in terms of the plaintiff side of the office than Lee Fisher.

Ohio is gradually coming to the conclusion that the Attorney General’s office has to be as focused on fighting political corruption and fighting corporate greed as they are in fighting street crime, but historically the voters of the State and citizens of the State have not been ready for that. So part of our ability to do that well is going to mean an Attorney General that is sensitive to the fact that the idea of the Attorney General taking on General Motors and Delphi, the Attorney General taking on the paint manufacturers (some of whom are headquartered here), the Attorney General taking on the insurance industry that employs 20,000 people in Columbus is a) an appropriate part of the role of the Attorney General and b) is done in a way that fits making sure that people in Ohio are able to continue to keep their jobs and go to work.

So I think there is a balance that needs to be struck in looking at it, and I don’t think that Ohio’s Attorney General’s office, and if you tried to make Ohio’s Attorney General’s office the largest public interest law firm in the country, I think that you might end up out of office very quickly, because I don’t think the people in the State, first of all, are prepared to dedicate the State resources necessary to do that, but I do believe that we need a lot more Eliot Spitzer in how we do business.

Gloria Ferris: To follow up on that, when you were ticking off the corporations, Maryland has taken Wal-Mart to court on their healthcare policies and those kinds of things, and you know here in Northeast Ohio we have had a Wal-Mart issue. What would you say? And personally I think Wal-Mart is just the big gorilla that is just like all the other corporations. If they can get away with not paying healthcare anymore, and those kinds of issues, they would do it and put it off onto the social service system of our state. What would your view be on those kinds of issues, when you found corporations that were not doing right by their employees, but expecting the State to take over the social services?

Marc Dann: Well to the extent that the State had a legal claim, I would pursue the legal claim against Wal-Mart. The problem is that we have a legislature that is dominated by companies like Wal-Mart: high gross, low margin companies with low wages. So I have introduced legislation along with Senator Hagan to change that dynamic, and to actually increase, to either require those companies, as Maryland’s bill does (and then, by the way, that took legislation in that state in order for that to happen), and if that legislation is enacted, I would do everything I can to enforce it.

You can’t make up lawsuits. I mean I would love to sue Wal-Mart, because I don’t think that they are stimulating our economy in a way that is positive and that is allowing people… I mean one of the criticisms that has been leveled at me in this campaign is say, “Well how can a guy like you that has had a drive up to the door general law practice (and you can literally drive up to the door at my law office) run a big complicated, sophisticated Attorney General’s office like we have in Ohio? And the fact is that I think my experience is absolutely the best possible experience.

I have seen people who have gone from having $25 an hour jobs to $15 an hour jobs and are losing their marriage because of that, or filing bankruptcy because that has happened to them, or facing foreclosure because that has happened to them. I have actually represented those people, seen the look in their eyes, and I understand that the Attorney General has a tremendous ability. So to the extent that it is possible to intervene on behalf of the quality of life and the dignity of the people of the State of Ohio, I am going to do that.

Tim Russo: Do you see a way that the Attorney General’s office could intervene on education funding in the State, not at the federal level?

Marc Dann: Yes, absolutely. Actually, the Attorney General’s office has an interesting role that I think that they fail to play thus far in the whole education funding debate, because I believe, with my orientation, viewing this office as the people’s lawyer, based on my practice orientation, as opposed to a lawyer for a set of government institutions, I think you have to, and understand that you make an oath to the Constitution as well as to your legal duties to represent your clients being in the State government, that you can do a lot to compel the legislature and the Governor to propose budgets and to enact budgets that are constitutionally compliant. The ones that have been enacted so far are not, and I don’t think that there is anybody in the legislature that would argue that they are not.

Tim Russo: So as an AG, what would you do on the education funding?

Marc Dann: The first thing, I think the AG should be involved at each stage of the budgeting process, so when the Governors and the Blue Book, which is now the Blue Disc, the Blue CD comes, analyze the CD against the matrix of what the case law is and the constitutional requirements for providing an adequate education for every Ohio student, and give the legislature a legal analysis of where the Governor’s budget falls, and then when the budget comes out of the House, analyze that budget and lay it out to the legislature, because I think one of the lawyer’s jobs… The best lawyering I do is when I help my clients understand and prevent them from making a mistake, prevent them from violating the law or the Constitution, rather than defending them later on.

Tim Russo: But Senator Dann, the State of Ohio is in violation of four consecutive court orders to reform the education funding system in the State, and the AG coming in in the fall of 2006, that’s what I am asking you.

Marc Dann: The AG comes in in fall of 2006. The Governor’s Executive Budget is due in March of 2007, and that is the first encounter.

Tim Russo: So your first attempt at this issue would be to review the budget of the State?

Marc Dann: As it relates to the constitutional obligations to provide an adequate and equitable education to every child in the State, and to the prior Supreme Court decisions in the Duroff case and others, and federal court decisions, interpreting other state Constitutions, and squarely, because I don’t think… One of the things the AG could have done here that could have changed the debate around school funding is to squarely put it in front of the legislature: “If you do this, you are voting for an unconstitutional budget, client,� in a very public and a very transparent way, that would happen. You have three opportunities, actually four opportunities to do that, because you have the Executive Budget, you have the House passed version and the Senate version, and then you have the Conference Committee Report, all of which have to be then followed by votes of members of the legislature. So at least those 129 people will have four opportunities to understand that, “Hey, this is not a budget that I can defend constitutionally in court.�

Jill Miller Zimon: Well I had a comment on that, and then I want to ask my second question. The comment is that it is well and good to look at the State budget as it compares to the constitutional requirements for providing public education; however, since (I don’t know what it is) anywhere from 65% to 75% of public school education is paid for by the local entities, if you don’t know what is going on and what is available in the local entity that is going to be added to the State portion, I am not sure looking at the State budget is going to be…

Marc Dann: We do know all that. We have all that in front of us.

Jill Miller Zimon: At the same time that you look at the State budget?

Marc Dann: At the same time we make a budget vote, all of that information…

Jill Miller Zimon: The local numbers are in there?

Marc Dann: All that data is there and available, and it is critical to the constitutional analysis. Without getting back into the issue of Home Rule, it is the State’s duty, not the local school district’s duty, to provide that…

Jill Miller Zimon: Right, to provide it. I understand that.

Marc Dann: So we have to take into consideration what they are doing, and we have to take into consideration how they are getting it, because the Supreme Court said that the accessing of funds through the local property tax in the proportion that it is being accessed is inequitable. So we have got big problem right there.

Jill Miller Zimon: Ok. I am going to move off the funding for a minute.

Tim Ferris: I want to get back. I want to square up a little bit on Eliot Spitzer’s style before we move too far. Can I do that?

George Nemeth/Jill Miller Zimon: No.

Tim Russo: Jill’s got the mic.

Jill Miller Zimon: I am under orders to be mean.

George Nemeth: Yes, mean.

Tim Ferris: Ok, well then hurry up and get there. Get moving.

George Nemeth: Be mean and fast.

Jill Miller Zimon: I think it will be a short one. Governor Taft is now on record as saying that he would like to see review of Ohio’s Science Content Standards, and whether or not they are constitutional. I would like to know, if you are elected Attorney General, what would the Attorney General’s office do to review the constitutionality of the Science Content Standards as it regards the lesson plans and the benchmarks that include the ability to test or teach intelligent design and creationism?

Marc Dann: I think the case law is pretty clear that that violates the U.S. Constitution.

Jill Miller Zimon: What would the Attorney General’s office do to come up with an opinion on that? What would you review? Would you look at the Dover lawsuit? Would you look at…?

Marc Dann: Right, and who knows what is going to be there by ’07, so I mean this is a lawyerly answer, which nobody expects from me, but the fact is I think we have to wait to see what is there at the time, because law is a changing state, and so there may be cases from now until then that might change that analysis, but we would look at everything. I mean the Attorney General’s job, and the Attorney General’s job is not to necessarily wait until you are asked, and I guess that’s a difference, and that is not exactly Eliot Spitzer, but it is a difference in a way an activist Attorney General would deal, an Attorney General interested in public policy would deal with his job. I am not going to wait until I am asked by Governor Taft to tell him. If they are passing standards that are unconstitutional, I am going to tell them whether they want to know or not.

Jill Miller Zimon: The legislature had an opportunity, as far as these standards go. Did anybody from the legislature ever consider submitting a question to the Attorney General’s office to get an opinion on this?

Marc Dann: Not that I am aware of. What I am aware is that the State school board just voted down that standard just a couple of weeks ago.

Jill Miller Zimon: No, what they did was they voted to not consider whether or not to eliminate the language, but there is another meeting Monday and Tuesday, and it is expected that it is going to come up again, even though it is not on their agenda.

Marc Dann: Right. I wouldn’t wait to be asked. I would tell them what the state of the law is, before they…

Jill Miller Zimon: You would not wait to be asked.

Marc Dann: Correct.

Jill Miller Zimon: Where do your kids go to school?

Marc Dann: My kids go to Liberty local schools. My wife is on the School Board, where I was before I was in the State Senate.

Jill Miller Zimon: Yes, I saw that. Thank you.

Tim Russo: Tim, did you have a question?

Tim Ferris: Sure. I want to go back to Eliot Spitzer’s style.

Marc Dann: Although my son wants to play football for Ursuline, so we are going to have a big fight probably this year.

Tim Ferris: You talk about being a people’s lawyer, and in the same breath you say you might want to emulate some Eliot Spitzer style. What I have seen of Eliot Spitzer is he makes a charge and the company says, “Oh, we didn’t do that,� then they say, “Well maybe we did that. Instead of fighting you and the unlimited power and resources of the State of New York, we will capitulate and we will give you $1.3 billion and we will say nothing one way or the other.� Now Spitzer gets some publicity in that and the State gets some money, but I don’t really see how the consumer benefits, because all I know is the cost of insurance products is going up as a result of this. Commerce has slowed down. The cost of mutual funds is going up as a result of Eliot Spitzer, and performance is going down. Eliot Spitzer style, how would you parse that and reconcile that and square it up with being a people’s lawyer?

Marc Dann: Well I think that is what I was trying to say here, that Ohio being the state that it is, that I don’t think Eliot Spitzer would last six months here, and because I don’t think the people of the State would tolerate that approach, kind of slash and burn approach…

Tim Ferris: But it’s disingenuous. He never takes these cases to trial. It’s extortion in court.

Marc Dann: My measure for whether to bring a case, whether it is a lead paint case or intervening in the Delphi case, or taking on the tobacco industry, or whatever the next case is, is going to be, “How am I going to improve the quality of life of people in this state? How am I going to improve the economic condition and the quality of life for people in the State of Ohio?� That has got to be the measure. Let me give you an example. When I was with the West Virginia Attorney General’s office, I was the Director of Anti-Trust, right out of law school, which is something you apparently can only do in West Virginia, and the three of us in the Anti-Trust Division of the West Virginia Attorney General’s office filed a motion for an injunction in federal court to stop the merger of coppers with another (and I don’t remember the name of it) producer of the wood additives, and the reason we did that was because in West Virginia, the quality of the wood was such that the lumber industry would really have been hampered if the price of that additive of that (what we have now found out to be toxic chromium copper arsenate), if the price of that went up too dramatically, West Virginia would no longer be able to be competitive in selling timber in the U.S. market. So we looked at it, not necessarily… You know, West Virginia had no business messing in this merger, in my opinion, unless there was some direct impact or a unique impact on the citizens of that state. People worked in that industry; people worked in the wood treatment business in West Virginia in the industry, and so on that basis, we brought that case and we were able to achieve concessions and safeguards so that there would be price protection on the outcome of that merger, because they were the two top producers in that field. That’s the matrix through which I would analyze these cases.

Tim Ferris: And that would be good, and that leads into the next thing that we started talking about amongst ourselves lately. As a people’s lawyer, what can you do about Tort Reform and caps on awards and that type of thing? Right now in the campaign, Subodh is bringing that up as part of the dialogue.

Marc Dann: Well it’s funny, because I spoke to a group of trial lawyers on Ground Hog Day. I feel like the movie Ground Hog Day. I have been through six tort reform fights. There are actually only two lawyers, practicing lawyers in the State Senate right now. Three, because we just added Eric Kearney.

Jill Miller Zimon: Goodman?

Marc Dann: Goodman is not practicing. Goodman is not practicing. Make sure somebody sends that to him.

Jill Miller Zimon: He was the last man __.

Marc Dann: Ok. I am sure that helped your ranking class. I love David, but the fact is that we are not… So I spent a lot of time teaching like first-year torts, is what I do in Judiciary Committee, over and over and over again. It is the same scenario. They tell their antidotes. We tell our antidotes. We try to bring the insurance industry in. They say they have nothing to do with this. We ask the Department of Insurance to tell us what the statistics are in terms of settlements and judgments. They say they don’t collect that data, and then we vote to limit people’s rights and access to the courthouse.

Tim Ferris: Oh my.

Marc Dann: Over and over. I mean it is absolutely… Somebody should come and… Next time there is a Tort Reform bill, somebody should come, anybody who is interested should come watch the hearings, because there is absolutely not one piece of data that flows through that anybody, on either side, can properly analyze. Now on the medical malpractice area, finally compelled the Department of Insurance to start collecting data and to start analyzing settlements as well.

Tim Russo: Can I ask you about the medical malpractice real quickly?

Marc Dann: Yes.

Tim Russo: There was a real crisis in this state a couple of years ago (maybe it is still going on) of doctors leaving the practice because of their malpractice insurance premiums. Is it your opinion that that is a litigation problem, or is that an insurance industry problem?

Marc Dann: I have a bill that is like about this thick that I am going to introduce at some point, and I have kind of been looking for the right moment to introduce and talk about it, because of course the bill won’t become law during this session, but I want to start the dialogue about it, and I think at some point this may be the father for an important ballot initiative in this state, a really defining ballot initiative in the state in terms of business regulation. But, you know, I have asked the State Department of Insurance to send me the last ten rates that they rejected for being excessive, because the statute says clearly the Department of Insurance has to evaluate rates that are proposed and policies that are proposed and determine whether or not the rates are actuarially excessive for what they charge. Do you know what they told me?

Tim Russo: “We don’t keep that information�?

Marc Dann: They have never rejected a rate. In the entire history of the Ohio Department of Insurance, never. Not homeowners, not casualty, not property, not health insurance.

Tim Ferris: Well that’s not true. In 1988 they rejected Golden Rule’s request for medical insurance increase and Golden Rule failed to support all the business in the State. We had to go out and rewrite a bunch of cases of people who were not all rewriteable.

Marc Dann: They withdrew that request. The Department told them that they were going to reject it and they withdrew it. That’s their process.

Tim Ferris: Ok. Well that’s just a technicality. As a matter of fact, there was a whole bunch of people running around with no insurance, some of whom could not get new insurance. So that was a canard.

Gloria Ferris: That is what they are saying.

Marc Dann: But my point is that we need to have consumer input into rate set, whether it is the Medical Association collectively, or individual rate payers. We need to have regulation over reimbursements and payments. We need to have laws that address cancellation of policies.

Tim Russo: Well as AG, what would you do on that issue?

Marc Dann: Well it is an interesting issue. When I was with the West Virginia Attorney General’s office (by the way, I don’t know if Ohio was in the case or not; I can’t remember), we did join a national class action case, an anti-trust case, over the pricing of commercial general liability insurance, where we alleged in the federal court that there was collusion in the pricing of that. So I think using the Anti-Trust powers and some other areas, there are some places to hold insurance companies accountable, but frankly I think that the role of the AG will be in advocating for a different scheme, and maybe even using the AG’s office in the Department of Insurance in trying to intervene in rate cases, much like the Consumers’ Counsel does with the PUCO. I mean when you have two or three med mal insurers in the state that are actually writing business, it is almost like a monopoly situation. It is almost like the public utility at that point, and so I think if you have a legitimate challenge to the actuarial assumptions on which these assumptions are based, that there ought to be a forum in which to present that, and that the State Department of Insurance ought to hear that.

Bill Callahan: Well since you mentioned the Consumers’ Counsel, let me segue to the issue of utilities. As I understand it, the Attorney General appoints the Board that hires the Consumers’ Counsel and governs it and also is the actual employer of a number of the Counsel who work for the Public Utilities Commission as well as other departments. We have a situation in Northeast Ohio, or northern Ohio, where there is a pretty substantial rate differential between here and southern Ohio, and much of which is the rates which northern Ohio consumers are still paying for what were supposed to be stranded costs, but which are now something else, as a consequence of a decision by the Public Utilities Commission, which I think is still on appeal before the Supreme Court by the Consumers’ Counsel. Do you have an opinion, an approach, a sense of how the Attorney General would deal with utility rate issues that is different from what we have now?

Marc Dann: Well let me tell you this, that FirstEnergy is for Betty Montgomery for Attorney General, because she did nothing as Attorney General as it relates to utility rate regulation. We have an empty… I don’t know if anybody has driven on the bypass around Warren. There is a CSC, an old copper weld plant, CSC, a brand new, $90 million continuous caster located in that facility. Since I have been in the Senate… In fact, I actually had a plane ticket to go to Uzbekistan where the owners of this facility, the people who bought this from the bankruptcy auction live to go to try to talk to them about selling it to somebody so that people could go to work and use it. Every company that we brought into the process of operating that continuous caster weren’t complaining about the labor environment in the Mahoning Valley, which is what you would often hear people complain about, but were most concerned about the fact that the utility rates were so uncompetitive with the rest of the country.

So 100 people would be working right now at CSC, I believe, running that continuous caster, if our utility rates were more competitive. And to the point where even I even consulted with the City of Niles about running lines from their municipal power facility to Champion Township and apparently in the scheme for public power that’s not allowable in the way we have it. But we need to really look at how we can create a competitive environment in the provision of utilities in the State. We need to, I think, look again at how we can enhance municipal power alternatives to form. Given the fact that the utility industry has changed so much since the last time the State has looked at all these issues, I think there is a lot we can do in that regard.

Tim Ferris: You have a monopoly there, though, and the monopoly goes ahead. It charges a very, very high rate. It pays a huge dividend. It has made no capital improvement since when? It hasn’t made capital improvements. We are not competitive by the way we deliver power. Now that is one company that has a virtual monopoly, and what could you do about it as Attorney General (because they are going ahead and taking from the public)? They are giving to the investors, and they are putting nothing into the company.

Marc Dann: Well you are forgetting the most important part, and this is part of why I am in this Attorney General’s race, they’re also giving you the politicians. Now I have gotten some checks from FirstEnergy and other utilities in the State, certainly not as much as my Republican colleagues have gotten, but the fact is, these folks are buying their way through this. So some of that money is going into a transaction cost of political activity. You will look at the largest… One of the largest most active PACs in the State is the FirstEnergy Political Action Committee, and I know we have contribution limits, but you can see executives of those companies giving to the Governor’s race on both sides, by the way, Democrat and Republican side. We have Congressmen and Senators that are unwilling to take on, and members of the House of Representatives, unwilling to ever take on one of the public utilities, because it is an easy check at the end of the day. If we can change the pay to play environment that is in Columbus, if I can be the skunk at the garden party, which I believe I have already started to be, that is one of the transaction costs that we can take out of that matrix. Now it is a small piece, but it is a piece.

But getting back to your education question, because I think it is the same analysis, if we are paying more for everything we buy in State government, because it is much worse in contracting than it is in the regulatory structure, and it is much more direct. You give me a contract, I give you a contribution. That is what is happening in Workers’ Comp and School Facilities Commission, charter school decision making, and across the board. Think about this. In a $50 billion two-year budget, there has got to be $2 billion or $3 billion slipping through our fingers that we are overpaying, because you have to pay somebody enough to make a contribution to make a profit, and make enough of a profit they are willing to make the risk of what they are doing in terms of that transaction. That $2 billion can go a long way to reducing property taxes and increasing the State share of public education financing. Two billion dollars would take our tuition down every year at State universities. I mean that is money that could be used to make investments.

Bob Taft, because nobody has been watching the store, there is nobody who is calling people as it is on these corruption issues, at least in the constitutional offices, by the time he gets to the budget, he is handcuffed. He owes so much to so many that if he wanted to make investments in higher ed or wanted to change the school funding matrix, the money doesn’t exist to do it, short of raising taxes.

Tim Ferris: What about the suitability of these investments too? Does the AG control the suitability? We have had rare coins and all kinds of garbage in there. You have no insured investments either. All these investments, I have looked into… I have tried to play, and I just don’t have enough money, but the thing is, there is a vail over who gets the investments and why, and what is the nature of the investment to, and it is beginning to blow up. Can you as AG go ahead and actually bring more scrutiny to that and more disclosure?

Marc Dann: I have actually introduced a bill that requires the Attorney General to approve, much like the City Law Director does, the form of all contracts over a million dollars, and to post those contracts on the Internet, both in their pursuit as well as in their final formation, so that it again creates some transparency around contracting issues. Getting in the room is the first step, because that enables you then to screen, if there is something inherently wrong. I mean I would never approve a contract that had domicile in Bermuda. I would never approve a contract that was open-ended in the way that rare coin contract was open-ended. But think about this. They created this system exclusively for fundraising. If you have $15 billion to invest, there is no reason to do anything… The only advantage of having that much money is you can reduce the cost of the investments, and the only reason to have 156 investment managers and 30 different stock brokers handling the stock transactions separate from the investment managers is that you want 186 people to solicit campaign contributions from, and that is what they did. I mean this was set up exclusively for that. But the Charter School scheme was set up for that, so was the scheme for School Facilities Commission. These things were set up with a design of actually using it as campaign fundraising mechanisms. That is where the Attorney General can play a role, because he can just simply a) expose it (nobody wants to be caught doing it), and b) be able to draw the connections, do the research, use BCI, hand the cases to the Prosecutor. Even the Franklin County Prosecutor would have to bring them.

Bob Aber: This is Bob Aber. I don’t have a blog, currently at least.

George Nemeth: Then you can’t ask a question.

Bob Aber: Well you can, I guess, determine if you are going to answer it or not.

George Nemeth: I have two blogs.

Bob Aber: There you go. This is about ballot initiatives that you brought up earlier on. Can you talk to just the legality of those, and I am going to say sloppy legislation. That is my own term. But if you could just talk to your thoughts on those, and we have six coming up.

Marc Dann: On the initiative process?

Bob Aber: The initiative process. I mean what do you think about five guys in a bar coming up with a constitutional amendment and getting some signatures and taking it down to Columbus?

Marc Dann: Well when they did Issues 2, 3, 4 and 5, they must have been really drunk, is all I can say.

Bob Aber: Herb Asher was a professor of mine.

Marc Dann: I know those people, and I went to one of those meetings and I was about ready to jump off the bridge afterwards. So the answer is it is a terrible way to legislate, but we have really locked ourselves into a bad situation in this state. The legislature is so controlled by the expense of running these races. We are spending a million dollars on a State Senate race with regularity. We are spending half a million dollars on a House race with regularity. Term limits mean that nobody in the legislature has any background experience or history. It defines us as that in the State legislature, and it is a disruptive process. I can tell you that this has been an expensive thing for me to do. I love being a legislator, and I have wanted to do this for a long time and I am really proud of what I am doing, but it is costing me money. It is costing me money from my law practice to be able to take time and do this. So you are losing, I think, the quality of people that could possibly serve in a legislature, and as a result, you are getting legislation that is controlled by the banks and insurance. I mean for the same reason that I almost, like it was okay, said to you, “Well I didn’t put the banks in it, because I didn’t want their foot up my rear end,� because it would never even have gotten a first hearing, or would never have gotten incorporated into the bill, and that’s the truth of it. It is easy to kind of get sucked into that.

So what alternatives do you have? I think the referendum process is actually probably a preferable process, and that is what brought us probably the best thing that we have done in State government in the last decade, which is the discount drug program for senior citizens, Ohio’s Best Rx, which by the way they have corrupted now. I can talk about that for a minute, if you want. But the referendum process forces the legislature to address, and then if the legislature doesn’t address it, then you have got something to work with, and you have got a year to vet it.

Tim Russo: Could I just ask one quick follow up on that? You said that you didn’t put the banks into the predatory lending bill because you didn’t want the banks’ foot up your rear end. I can understand that, and I can definitely sympathize, but isn’t that…? You’re in the minority, right? It is not going to get through anyway. Why not put together the best bill possible?

Marc Dann: Here’s why. Tom Roberts had the best bill possible, which was Senate Bill 185. Not 185. It was a previous bill. Tom Roberts is a Democratic colleague from Dayton. The whole, everything was in there from the Predatory Lending Study Commission. Taft said, “It’s time to put lenders under the CSPA,� ok? I took what Taft and Montgomery (well not Montgomery, but it was Petro at the time said) and I put it in a bill. I said, “Ok, here are the two narrow things that these people said that they would do. Here it is in front of you. Do it.� So it was more of a tactical Senate decision than kind of a broader decision. It was there. And the banks have swarmed the legislature for the last six weeks, and there was no way that that bill was moving with banks…

Tim Russo: Just quickly on that, one of the things, problems that I have had with the political process, having been involved with it for a long time, is that there is this assumption that this tiny amount of money, which is called a PAC check, which in the big picture is really a small amount. I mean it is not… Five thousand dollars is nothing really to FirstEnergy or to Bank One or KeyBank, but this small amount of money is able to turn legislators into these caricatures…

Marc Dann: Wait a second. Wait a second, Tim. Think about this. We have term limits. People are on two terms in the Senate. We have Caucuses, and the leadership has tremendous power. The way to become a Committee Chairman in the Ohio Senate is to take all of the money that you raise in your campaign and give it to the Caucus, and if you have a difficult race, the Caucus will then decide whether or not to give it…

Tim Russo: How many of these districts are gerrymandered to be safe seats?

Marc Dann: Almost all of them.

Tim Russo: So why does it matter to anybody that they get $5,000 from KeyBank?

Marc Dann: Because it is five times 22. There are 22 Republican Senators. That is $110,000.

Tim Russo: That’s fine, but if the guy is not going to lose his seat under any circumstance, why does $5,000 suddenly make you interested in KeyBank?

Marc Dann: Because then the next pressure on you, if you want any bill of yours to move and you’ve got to stay in good keeping with the leadership of the Republicans in the House and the Senate, and it is still the same as it was under Householder. Householder was just a little more open about it. Then in your second term, you immediately spend your time (at least the people that I have observed) lobbying for an executive appointment, because that is the way to keep your PDRS and to continue after government. So you have to behave at that point in order to get your executive appointment, and it attracts lemmings to the legislature. My colleagues are a bunch of frickin’ lemmings, and it is really sad, on both sides, to some degree.

George Nemeth: I’ve got my blog.

Marc Dann: You’ve got that one?

Gloria Ferris: No campaign contributions from his colleagues.

Marc Dann: I mean but think about this. In a safe district, there is no incentive, except to go along. So it all goes back to the redistricting issue, which is why I am such a strong advocate on 2, 3, 4 and 5, because it really does come back to having competitive elections. Competitive elections which, even those legislators, Armbruster in Lorain County, from a competitive district, has a whole different set of sensibilities than somebody has from a totally Democratic district like mine, or a totally Republican district like Amstutz in Wooster.

George Nemeth: Tim, I wanted to find out if that was your last question.

Tim Russo: That’s my last question.

George Nemeth: Ok. Gloria, do you want the last question (because it has been an hour)?

Gloria Ferris: You can have it.

George Nemeth: No, I don’t have one.

Gloria Ferris: The Attorney General has a lot of clout, and we talked a little bit about the Workman’s Comp fiasco, that scandal and some of the others, and it really concerned me that Attorneys General, the Attorney General’s office and the Auditor’s office had people appointed to those Boards and they allowed those kinds of things to happen under their watch. And I can understand where the Attorney General could not do that himself or herself, and would have to rely on people that work for them. What would you do as Attorney General to make sure that all of the people that work for you were on the same page, and your education person knew what you wanted, and the Workman’s Comp would know, the PUCO, the Consumers’ Counsels. How would you ensure that your group of employees did what the Attorney General wanted?

Marc Dann: Well my paradigm would be a little bit different than yours. I would like to be the dumbest guy in the office. I want to have really bright people working in the Attorney General’s office, and I want to be stimulated by their ideas about how to do things and how to approach issues. One of the problems we have, the pay is low, and because of the outsourcing of legal work and anything the least bit sophisticated or complicated is being sent to special counsel, because what a brilliant thing this is. It reduces the Attorney General’s budget, because the Attorney General is only responsible for the attorneys they pay. So if you had hired special counsel, it comes out of the Agency’s budget. So when Jim Petro tells you in his commercials that he has reduced the budget in the AG’s office, he has actually increased the net spending on legal representation. He has just shifted it to Agency budgets, and of course employees are prohibited from contributing to you and special counsel are not. So he then creates, every time he ships out a piece of legal work, somebody who can potentially write a campaign contribution to his campaign. And now there are certain rules and restrictions around those, but they found that they are very easy to get around, and they have done that, and by pooling and aggregating and all kinds of other things that they have done. Some of the things that frankly I am going to have to do to get elected to this job in the short term for people that may end up being special counsel for the State at the end of the day, because there is not a scenario that I can imagine under which there would be no special counsel. I think we need to really look very carefully at what we do there.

So you have no sophisticated work and you have low pay. You are not attracting the kind of folks that I would want in those positions to be making those decisions. I want there to be 200 applications for every job in the AG’s office, and I think I can create an environment where that happens. The intellectual property work we talked about, were joking about before, but the fact is, $50 million of that going out the door. What if we hired two hotshot intellectual property lawyers for $200,000 a year each, and then went out to the law schools and recruited and said, “Do you want to work for these two guys (or two women)? Here they are,� ok, in Toledo maybe, or in Cleveland or in Youngstown. We are having a core of bright, young, Ohio State top of the class or Harvard-educated intellectual property lawyers might actually stimulate the economy when they leave the Attorney General’s office. We are going to shut up our own shop. We are going to represent Ohio State University and Kent State and Akron. In our little law firm there, we could create a little boutique law firm for about a tenth, maybe less than a tenth of the price of what we are paying for it now. It is with that kind of creativity that can draw people into that office in the Agency representation context, without necessarily having to reach out and sue AIG and sue all these… Not that we wouldn’t want to do that in the right circumstance, but you don’t have to do that to create a work environment that stimulates that kind of interest and excitement. So that is kind of the broad philosophy that I would bring to the office. So I want to have people there that are challenging. I have always had a rule in anything I have ever done, is that “You don’t get in trouble for doing too much. You only get in trouble for doing too little,� and I think I would probably approach the AG’s office in the same way.

George Nemeth: Senator Dann, thanks for meeting with the bloggers today.

Marc Dann: Thank you.