Ohio city of Lima to host State of the State

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Gov. John Kasich has already released his two-year spend­ing plan, his school-funding pro­posal and his pitch to alter Ohio’s tax struc­ture, pos­si­ble new top­ics for Tues­day night’s State of the State speech are anyone’s guess.

It’s more likely the Repub­li­can gov­er­nor will use the address to argue on behalf of his pro­pos­als with an eye toward his re-election cam­paign in 2014.

Kasich planned to deliver the speech, his third annual State of the State address, in the north­west Ohio city of Lima. It’s his sec­ond in a row out­side the State­house fol­low­ing last year’s precedent-breaking speech in Steubenville in east­ern Ohio.

One thing for cer­tain is that Kasich will use the address to pro­mote his $63.2 bil­lion, two-year bud­get. The spend­ing blue­print includes a new school-funding for­mula and expan­sion of the Med­ic­aid gov­ern­ment health-insurance program.

It also changes the tax code to lower rates on income, sales and small-business taxes while impos­ing sales taxes on many new ser­vices, includ­ing hair­cuts and sports tick­ets, and increas­ing the rate on high-volume oil and gas extraction.

The speech was expected to attract pro­test­ers includ­ing Democ­rats, autowork­ers and others.

Last year, Kasich used Steubenville to high­light pos­i­tives he said were tak­ing place in eco­nom­i­cally hard-hit east­ern Ohio, par­tic­u­larly sur­round­ing K-12 edu­ca­tion and oil and gas exploration.

In Lima, Kasich can focus on a man­u­fac­tur­ing hub with sig­nif­i­cantly improved employ­ment, which also sits in the heart of reli­ably Repub­li­can farm coun­try. The new leader of the Ohio Sen­ate that’s some­times blocks Kasich’s plans, Pres­i­dent Keith Faber of Celina, lives nearby.

Located about 80 miles south of Toledo, Lima was built around fac­to­ries that made loco­mo­tives and school buses. Heavy indus­try still dri­ves the city, home to an oil refin­ery, a Ford Motor Co. engine plant and the nation’s only tank man­u­fac­tur­ing plant. It’s also the fic­tional set­ting of “Glee,” the pop­u­lar TV show about high school glee clubs.

Like many of Ohio’s indus­trial cities, poverty is a prob­lem in some neigh­bor­hoods, but the city’s unem­ploy­ment has been nearly cut in half from two years ago and now stands at 7 percent.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Feb 19 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.