The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously dismissed a request to compel JobsOhio to disclose various documents.
The court argued the Republican-controlled General Assembly largely exempted JobsOhio from public records law and therefore allowed the agency to keep most of its inner workings secret.
The decision was a major loss for advocacy group ProgressOhio, which claims the documents should be on the public record.
The Republican-controlled legislature, with the support of Republican Gov. John Kasich, in 2011 established JobsOhio, a privatized development agency, to replace the Ohio Department of Development. The JobsOhio Board of Directors is chaired by wealthy Ohio businessmen.
Republicans argue JobsOhio’s secretive, privatized nature is necessary to quickly foster economic development deals across the state. Democrats say the anti-transparency measures make it far too difficult to hold JobsOhio accountable as it recommends how to spend taxpayer dollars.
An Oct. 23 report criticized JobsOhio and other privatized development agencies around the country for consistently displaying conflicts of interest and other scandalous behavior. The report came from Good Jobs First, a research center founded in 1998 that scrutinizes deals between businesses and governments.
Kasich previously touted JobsOhio as one of the reasons Ohio’s economy quickly recovered following the Great Recession, but recent indicators show the state’s economy is now slowing down. Ohio is one of five states whose economy
worsened in the past three months
, according to an index from the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia that combines four economic indicators to gauge states’ economic health.
Others have more directly questioned the Kasich administration’s claims to success. An Oct. 29 investigation from
The Toledo Blade
found jobs numbers from the Ohio Development Services Agency are vastly inflated, indicating that the state government isn’t producing nearly as many jobs as it claims.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2013.