Steven Rhodes, local designer and construction consultant, is proud to announce that the Clintonville Passive House project is the first in central Ohio to received Phius ZERO Certification.

Clintonville Passive House is a single-family home designed and self-built by Steven Rhodes at an infill location in Clintonville. This is the first single-family certified passive house in central Ohio. The house is all electric and is projected to use less than half the energy of a similarly sized, newly code-built home. A rooftop solar array adds net zero energy performance to the comfort, indoor air quality, and durability inherent in a passive house. 

Phius Certified Projects have had their designs and energy models approved by the Phius Certification Staff, and have been inspected on-site by certified third-party quality assurance professionals trained by Phius to work on Phius projects. The rigorous Phius certification process ensures the building is designed and built to perform up to the targets determined by the climate-specific, cost-optimized Phius Standard.

Wednesday, January 8, Governor DeWine officially signed the Paystub Protection Act, with Central Ohio Worker Center (COWC) and Policy Matters Ohio staff by his side. In this important move, Ohio now joins 41 other states in requiring employers to provide earnings and deductions statements to each of the employer's employees.

The bill, which received unanimous support in both the House and the Senate earlier in 2024, goes into effect in April. The bill was sponsored by Representatives Dontravius L Jarrells and P. Scott Lipps, with 14 additional co-sponsors. COWC, along with Policy Matters Ohio, have been working to support the act's passage along the way. During testimony to the Ohio Senate in December, Claudia Cortez, Program Director of COWC, shared that this will “help ensure that workers are paid fairly and transparently by providing them with a clear breakdown of wages and deductions. Pay stubs are also often necessary for workers needing proof of income for housing, loans, and other financial requirements.” 

“I left you for God, Daddy.”

Let those words resonate across the planet. The speaker is Yahya Al-Batran, a Palestinian man – a dad – imagining the words his newborn son would have said. The boy, Jumaa, froze to death in the family’s tent. The infant had a twin brother who was also lying still in their bed one morning recently. The parents rushed the boys to a functioning hospital, where Jumaa’s brother, at the time NBC’s story came out last week, was still fighting for his life.

Jumaa was one of half a dozen Palestinian babies (so far) who have frozen to death in their family’s tents since the onset of winter – just one more fragment of hell the Palestinians are enduring as Israel’s US-complicit genocide continues . . . one death at a time.

Ohio’s Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones wants to restart his ICE contract during the second Trump presidency. However, Butler County Jail officers abused immigrants and violated the jail’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) repeatedly during the first Trump administration.

In 2021, Sheriff Jones claimed he terminated the Butler County Jail’s ICE contract himself after claiming the Biden administration was going to fire him. A lawsuit to hold this jail accountable for abuses against immigrants remains pending in federal court.

Sheriff Jones – as many Ohio immigrants know too well – is an ultra-conservative anti-immigration blowhard from outside Cincinnati who is a regular guest on right-wing media such as Glenn Beck. He has been referred to as Ohio’s “mini-Trump” and has struck fear in hardworking Ohio immigrants who work jobs rejected by white American workers. Butler County, for instance, has a large chicken rendering plant where many workers are Hispanic.