Homeowners who live in homeowner associations and condo associations could soon have the right to install solar panels on their roofs. With a 32 to 1 vote, the Ohio Senate earlier this week passed Senate Bill 61, a bill making it easier to install rooftop solar. The bill moves to the House of Representatives for further consideration. 

The single ‘no’ in the Ohio Senate came from Republican Niraj Antani (R-Miamisburg). Antani, who previously served three terms as an Ohio House of Representative. Antani made national headlines in 2018 suggesting students over the age of 18 should be able to bring rifles to school.

Antani also in 2018 accepted $7,000 from the Friends of Larry Householder PAC, which has since 2015 received $120,000 in donations from FirstEnergy Political Action Committee ($38,708), the Ohio Coal PAC ($18,700), and the American Electric Power Committee for Responsible Government ($17,500).

Even so, the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors, with a mission to further rooftop solar and advocate for solar policies, told the Free Press that fossil fuel and utility lobbies have not weighed in on the bill.

Somewhere out there in the geopolitical wilderness of Eastern Europe, two powerful beasts stalk each other. One of them is good. One of them is evil. The future of all life on this planet is at stake.

We’ll be back after these messages . . . (or maybe not).

This seems to be the context in which the spectator public gets the details about the re-emerging Cold War, suddenly back from the dead, and the nuclear brinkmanship that comes with it.

Will Russia invade Ukraine? Such an act, according to President Biden, would be “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.”

Wow. Only we get to invade countries, apparently.

WHEN: Thursday, February 17, 7pm
WHERE: Jimmy V's, 1788 West 5th Ave., Grandview
Link to Facebook event here.

A new book features frontline stories from a movement fighting corporate and state power in Ohio.

For over eight years, organizers with the Ohio Community Rights Network (OHCRN) have worked hard with CELDF to propose and pass county charters, city charter amendments and city ordinances recognizing protective local self-governance and the Rights of Nature. In Death by Democracy — we hear directly from them.

Ballot initiatives they advanced, like the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, made international headlines and expanded peoples’ political imaginations. But in the end, a power structure revealed itself that saw all branches of the government of Ohio and corporate interests go so far as to alter state law to repress the movements’ tactics and remove a total of 14 qualified initiatives from local ballots, despite all measures gathering sufficient signatures and satisfying all administrative requirements.