Monday afternoon, August 28th, back at our cozy, trendy little digs in The Tower Press Building, suite 105, we talked to Debbie Phillips from Athens County, up here for a fundraiser at Massimo’s to benefit her campaign and Matt Barrett’s, sponsored for them by Mike Foley and Mike Skindell. Debbie’s website can give you more details about her run for the Ohio house in the 92nd District, which includes Athens, Meigs, Morgan, and western Washington counties. She is presently on leave from her position as executive director of The Ohio Fair Schools Campaign, where another of our blogger-friends, Scott Piepho of Pho’s Akron Pages. Debbie also brought with her one of the most energetic young campaign managers we’ve seen in a while, Kyle Smiddie of Pomeroy, and it turned out he has strong Cleveland ties as well. But back to Debbie.
We got into the nuts and bolts and basics of the 1997 Ohio Supreme Court ruling on funding education in Ohio, probably better than we have any other time, and in that respect alone this podcast will be instructive—Debbie knows it inside and out. We spoke of things like property wealth, phantom revenue, millage, tax increases, why peoples’ eyes glaze over, Ted Strickland and SE Ohio, megafarms and sources of renewable methane, Ted Celeste, the Al Gore movie, C8 contamination and DuPont, childhood asthma, June Holley and ACE-net [www.acenetworks.org], Athens city council, clean energy and renewable energy and the potential of 22,000 jobs, Athens being a company town, Ohio University, diagnostic hybrid companies, biotech, arts and culture and Nelsonville, the nonprofit sector and careers in advocacy, the form 990 for Ohio Fair Schools, Emily’s List training, Strickland’s upcoming education debate, how rural and urban are pitted against each other perniciously, the acronym LASER for Legislators Advocating Sensible Education Reform, a key distinction of “having better things in common,� OLE!, Federal Reserve Bank studies on children’s first five formative years, charter schools not being the grassroots entities that we envisioned, “costing studies� being incomplete in Ohio, the skills people need in a knowledge-based economy, two-way videoconferencing to share teachers, the potential impact of affordable healthcare, “THICK-IT� not being covered by Medicaid, and long-term care for seniors.
Kyle, eye on the time and ear to the cellphone, whisked Debbie off to her fundraiser, and we hope they did well. We need Debbie Phillips’ voice in the state legislature for schools and for people, too. She’s rational and practical, she speaks plainly and to the point, she means what she says, and she’s more of a spokesperson than we regular citizens have had for a long time. The 92nd district house election has statewide implications.
Part 1. Time: 13.18
Part 2. Time: 15.04
Part 3. Time: 10.52
Part 4. Time: 14.40
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