Good morning, Cincinnati! Here are your morning headlines.
A new poll found the majority of Hamilton County voters say they would vote against an increase in sales tax to extend the city's bus service. Well, that is, until they were told what extended bus service would actually look like. Most people were cool with it then. In the poll commissioned by the Southwest Regional Transit Authority, Hamilton County voters were first asked about the sales tax increase to fund bus services without giving any information about it. The majority opposed a 0.25 percent increase (50.6 percent) or a 0.5 percent increase (54.4 percent). But when they were told extended bus service would mean more morning, evening and weekend service and expanded crosstown routes, more hopped on board with it. SORTA found that 51.7 percent favored the 0.25 percent tax increase and 57.6 percent favored the 0.5 percent increase. Extended public transportation appears to be sorely needed in the greater Cincinnati area. A study of Metro last year commissioned by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber found that only 23 percent of the city's jobs are easily accessible by public transit. It found 40 percent weren't reachable via public transit at all.
• January is already one of the most depressing months with the plummet into cold weather surrounded by massive post-holiday hangovers. But to make it worse, it seems more Cincinnatians were also without a job that month. New numbers from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services show Greater Cincinnati's unemployment rate spiked in January to 5.2 percent, an increase from 4.3 percent in December. The hardest hit area was professional and business service jobs, which lost 8,000 positions.
• Here's your primary election updates for the week: Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, won three more states' primary elections held yesterday in Hawaii, Michigan and Mississippi. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who currently is running hard to catch up to Trump managed to score a win in Idaho. Ohio Gov. John Kasich failed to get the second place victory he was hoping for in Michigan, just barely losing it to Cruz, who got 25 percent of the vote compared to Kasich's 24 percent.
Democratic nominee Vermont Sen. Bernie upset competitor Hillary Clinton, just barely squeaking out a victory in Michigan, while Clinton won by a landslide in Mississippi, winning 83 percent of the vote. Candidates are focusing now on the upcoming Ohio primary, which will take place next week on March 15. Sanders opened up a campaign office in downtown Cincy yesterday. Kasich is hoping an Ohio victory can put him back in the GOP race. But polls so far are showing that Clinton and Trump are leading in Ohio.
The presidential candidates continue to bicker over the hot-button topic of immigration angering Democrats and Republicans over whether or not the U.S. be providing paths to citizenship for undocumented immigrants or forcing Mexico to pay for an pretty-much-impossible-to-build wall on the border. Some of Trump's anti-immigration messages have stirred up Latinos so much that the New York Times is reporting that some are seeking out citizenship just to vote against him.
Meanwhile, Canada, our often-forgotten neighbor to the north, has decided to double the number of refugees it will take this year. Canadian immigration minister John McCallum says the country aims to take in 57,000 new refugees this year, in addition to the 26,000 Syrians it had taken in in the last three months.
