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While it's been 20 years since a Democrat was last elected Ohio governor, this year's race between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton is hotly contested.
During separate endorsement interviews with this newspaper, the two candidates discussed their priorities, their plans and their thoughts on each other.
The rise in property taxes is a major issue in Ohio with average increases of about 45% since 2020 throughout the state. The state Legislature passed a series of bills late last year that is expected to save homeowners more than $3 billion over three years. They change how millage is counted and permits county budget commissions to control levy amounts.
While Ramaswamy and Acton agree more relief is needed, they disagree on how to get that done.
Ramaswamy, a billionaire biotech entrepreneur, said: "One of the things I pledge to do is to reset the property tax baseline to where it was a few years ago, before the end of the pandemic."
Ramaswamy said that would be "the most significant property tax cut Ohio has ever seen in our history.”
He added, "I'm favorably disposed to a plan that would gradually move Ohio towards a system that reduces concentrated dependence on local property taxes to pay for public schools to instead move to a system that looks at other sources of revenue, including on a statewide basis, that would pay for it."
The one-time property tax rollback is part of Ramaswamy's larger tax cut proposal.
It was at Ramaswamy's behest that the state Legislature in late September passed a 90-day Ohio gas tax holiday that eliminates the state's tax on regular gas of 38.5 cents per gallon and 47 cents per gallon on diesel fuel during that time.
The $725 million to pay for the gas holiday will come from surplus in the state budget’s General Revenue Fund.
Acton, best known as the state's health director during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, was the first governor candidate to propose a gas tax holiday, but Republican legislative leadership dismissed that by saying plenty of people called for suspension of the gas tax.
Ramaswamy also wants to eliminate the state's income tax of 2.75% in the next eight to 10 years. The first step, he said, is to get rid of the state's capital gains tax.
Ramaswamy said he is often asked: How will the state pay for all of these reductions?
"The answer is growth pays for it," he said. "If you're steady, if you're measured, and if you're adopting a broad policy agenda that also stands for growth beyond tax policies, which is exactly what we do," then economic growth covers the tax cuts.
The state collected more money for its General Revenue Fund through economic growth, which paid for the gas holiday cost, Ramaswamy said.
Acton said she wants to expand the homestead exemption to help seniors by raising the cap on household income eligibility to $50,000. That will help about 55,000 homeowners, she said.
Also, Acton is proposing a property tax spike rebate of up to $1,000 for households with incomes below $132,000 annually on homes at or below $350,000 if a property tax bill increased by more than 4% over the previous year.
Acton said: "We know that our property taxes are going up because there's so much pressure because of decisions a while back to stop fully funding the local (portion of the costs). That was a mistake. I believe in giving more flexible dollars to local communities because what you need to be doing is very different" in each community throughout the state.
Acton said a reduction in the state's income tax that Ramaswamy wants to implement over time would cause the sales tax to skyrocket.
Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who endorsed Ramaswamy, doesn't support the elimination of the state's income tax, saying business officials never mention it as a concern and it would result in increasing Ohio's sales tax from 5.75% to about 17% to 20%.
Acton said: "My opponent has put forward endless, reckless tax schemes that will do damage to our communities, damage to our state budget and take us backwards. We need to look at being fair at how we do taxes."
Ramaswamy said the "gradual" elimination of the income tax would "allow businesses to make decisions, including businesses and investors who are not yet in Ohio, to make decisions knowing that is where we're heading.
DATA CENTERS
When it comes to data centers, Ramaswamy said they should be built on abandoned industrial sites and not on farmland.
Ramaswamy said the empty brownfields "are already ugly and they'll look good and have their sound insulated" with tree buffers.
Ramaswamy said data centers must pay their full property taxes, must comply with strict air and water quality standards and must provide free electricity for the closest 100,000 residential homes near the facilities.
Data centers could generate power behind their own meter with the excess power credited to the charges on residential customers' electric bills, Ramaswamy said.
The Republican candidate added: "A year from now, hopefully when we're talking to you, we will not be talking about data centers, and we will not be talking about property taxes. We'll be talking about something else. I don't know what it is. But we won't be talking about those two issues because we will have addressed them, fixed the problem and put it behind us to lead forward."
Ramaswamy said: "A year from now, if we're talking about property taxes or data centers, that means I will have failed in my first six months as governor and I don't intend to fail. I haven't failed at much."
Acton said she wants a conditional moratorium on data centers to ensure they cover 100% of their utility costs, that they're exclusively built with union labor, operate with full transparency, adhere to state environmental standards, support the needs of local communities and bring jobs to former industrial areas.
Acton said: "One of the biggest costs we were hearing on the trail were electric bills. We need companies providing their own energy. Bring your own energy instead of tapping the grid and all of us paying for it."
Acton said: "I want to see us prioritize brownfields and other areas. I'm very open for business. I'm going to be a very pro-business governor. I'm also pro-union labor and workers. But we are not for sale and we are not to be exploited and that's my job: to protect our people and our communities."
DEATH PENALTY
While Ohio has had the death penalty since it was reinstated in October 1981, DeWine stopped executions when he became governor in January 2019, after a federal judge ruled on the same day he started his first term that the state's drug lethal injection was inhumane.
DeWine said on June 16 that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime and announced a moratorium on capital punishment during the final months of his term.
Acton said: "I will continue the moratorium on the death penalty. I think Gov. DeWine laid out a very good case. I believe people should be put in prison, life without parole and you throw away the key."
Acton said she would "absolutely consider" abolishing the death penalty in Ohio.
Ramaswamy said: "For the most serious crimes, where every element of the facts and law and appeals have been established beyond a reasonable doubt, it is appropriate in those most egregious of cases to follow through with capital punishment."
Ramaswamy said the state needs to be "certain about the most morally defensible and scientifically defensible way of conducting the execution."
NO DEBATE
Acton refuses to debate Ramaswamy.
Acton said: "That was my decision. I absolutely will never stand on a stage with someone who has lied in the egregious ways he has, who has a chronic history of lying. Debate is meant to be a civil dialogue of great ideas with good, hard disagreement. That I love. But absolutely (am) not giving a platform or normalizing Vivek Ramaswamy's rhetoric. That is dangerous."
Ramaswamy said: "I'm running against a woman who, whichever of us gets elected, is going to have to make tough decisions on the death penalty, tough decisions on whether and how to carry out these executions, tough decisions about the budget. If she is unable to even muster and withstand the pressure of standing shoulder to shoulder with me on a debate stage to talk about these issues, how could she be the person who has the judgment or the capacity to sign off on a capital punishment or the method of execution?"
When Ramaswamy learned Acton wouldn't debate him, he said he "was shocked. A combination of shock and disappointment - not disappointment in my capacity as a candidate, but disappointment in my assessment of just where we are in our state, in our country, in our priorities. This is not the Ohio that I grew up in."
QUALIFICATIONS
Acton said she is a "lifelong public servant. I know how to run the place and I've been trained to run the place."
She added: "I bring the breath of this socio-ecologic model, the social environmental economic determinant and problem solving. I'm a good problem solver. I know how to bring different groups together. I don't mind disagreement."
Ramaswamy said he's founded multiple successful businesses, the largest being in the biotech field.
He said: "There is no one else in our state better suited to do it but me. If I believed otherwise I would be supporting that person. But certainly in this race, I think I am by and away - I think it's black and white, as night and day as it comes - the only person who can bring economic growth and where a state can make a difference, which is not everywhere, but where a state can make a difference, make meaningful cost relief for families that we get next year."
CRITICISMS
Regarding Acton, Ramaswamy said it's "frightening for the state to put somebody who does not have the basic capabilities to run a small business" as governor.
Ramaswamy said Acton "has not held a job for longer than the short stint she served as our health director before, after saying that she trained her entire life for the moment of a pandemic, quitting in the middle of that pandemic when forced to work with the Legislature on more nuanced approach. How could she possibly be entrusted with the responsibility of making these decisions?"
If Acton were to win, Ramaswamy said he wouldn't be worried about himself, but he would for those who haven't already lived the American Dream as he has.
"The woman I'm running against is someone who wears a white coat despite not seeing patients," he said.
Ramaswamy put blame at the feet of the media for not scrutinizing Acton and her qualifications.
He said: "The fact that she has not held a job for longer than her short stint as health director I think is relevant for voters and I do not think (she) has been vetted properly."
As for leaving as state health director, Acton insisted: "I've never quit anything in my life. I've done a lot of hard things in my life and held a lot of hard positions. I ran an agency that had a $1.6 billion budget and thousands of employees and labs and 113 local health departments and all sorts of things we had there. But what I won't do is put the needs of myself or billionaires over the needs of everyday Ohioans. I'll always be fighting for Ohioans."
Acton said she refused to sign orders during the COVID-19 pandemic at the insistence of then-Speaker of the House Larry Householder, who ended up being found guilty in the state's largest government corruption scandal, for a large indoor event with 15,000 people at a building with no masks.
Acton said Ramaswamy's "policies will take the state backwards. He is a danger in my opinion to the state and we really need good public servants up and down the ballot and certainly in the positions that a governor can appoint and that's what you'll see me do."
Acton said: "I am a person here surviving over $100 million today in vicious attack ads. I have loved doing this work. It's the work I've done my whole career."