Ohio governor, legislature double down on JobsOhio, despite weak record: Part 4

In 2013, just two years after it was formed under then-Gov. John Kasich, JobsOhio secured exclusive rights to the state’s liquor franchise.

The economic development entity raised capital through the bond market to obtain the rights for Ohio’s Liquor enterprise through 2038 for approximately $1.4 billion. Today, liquor sales revenue generates approximately $1.7 billion annually for JobsOhio.

The agency is supposed to use the revenue to fund economic development programs. Liquor profits are pledged against bond debt issued by JobsOhio, further shielding it from annual budget review.

“JobsOhio operates behind a wall of secrecy, using public dollars without the oversight Ohio taxpayers deserve,” Ohio Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, said in a February release.

“Before handing over billions of dollars in liquor revenue for another 15 years, we should demand a real, independent evaluation of JobsOhio’s effectiveness and a commitment to full public accountability,” Rader added. “Instead, this extension was rushed through without answering the fundamental question: Is JobsOhio delivering the results Ohioans expect?”

In February, the Ohio Controlling Board agreed to a 15-year lease extension, which now runs through Feb. 1, 2053. The renewal included no additional payments, concessions to taxpayers, or a performance audit, despite JobsOhio failing to meet job creation goals and growing consternation about grant recipients and board conflicts.

While many Ohio politicians are upset at the extension, lawmakers effectively approved it during the last session with the approval of House Bill 33, the state’s budget. Many at the state level are reticent to speak out against the initiative.

According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission review of HB 33, it allows “the state, upon agreement with JobsOhio, to extend the original transfer agreement regarding spirituous liquor distribution in Ohio for an additional 15 years from the end of the original term by entering into a new agreement.” It subjects “any transfer agreement extension to Controlling Board approval.”

In February, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who was running for governor in 2026 at the time, had asked the Controlling Board to delay considering the extension, writing in a letter to JobsOhio President and CEO J.P. Nauseef that he had “grave concerns that this is not a good deal for Ohioans.” While the attorney general didn’t necessarily oppose “the goal of the extension,” he wanted JobsOhio to allocate the $840 million to “expand Ohio’s workforce” over the remainder of its agreement.

“At some level, lawmakers are a reflection of what voters want them to do,” Andrew Wilford, director of the Interstate Commerce Initiative and a senior policy analyst at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, said.

“We often don’t think that because the results are not what we want,” Wilford added. “Ask pretty much anyone; they don’t feel like their elected representatives are doing a good job taking care of their taxpayer dollars. But, at the same time, if lawmakers aren’t being punished at the voting booth for doing things like that, and in fact are being rewarded, it’s not a surprise that this keeps happening.”

In effect, politicians are using economic development programs to generate talking points and press releases that they can use on the campaign trail to demonstrate their effectiveness as leaders.

However, the numbers show that two regional states — Pennsylvania and New Jersey — are outpacing Ohio’s job creation over the last three years.

“One of the standard practices of economic development agencies is that they make these deals, these big headlines and these big press releases, and then down the road, when the plant isn’t built to the size that expect or that not as many people were hired as planned, they just quietly renegotiate the deal with the company down to whatever the actual results were, and then claim success,” John C. Mozena, president of The Center for Economic Accountability, told Ohio.news in an interview.

“They redefine success down to the point where it becomes very difficult to say, ‘X percent of your deals failed,’” Mozena said, noting that economic development officials can say that companies are meeting their contractual commitments, albeit revised commitments.

“Well, their contractual commitments got shrunk down,” Mozena added. “Now, maybe that means they didn’t get as much money as they would otherwise, hopefully. But even when companies just flat out fail, it’s very common for them to get to keep the money, because there’s not a lot of incentive for the politicians and bureaucrats to be aggressive in going after a company to repay the money, because that involves admitting that they screwed up, that there’s problems, that these things don’t always work, that either they or their predecessors botched it.”

The result is stagnant growth in Ohio; its population growth trails boom states like Idaho, Florida, Texas and Utah, which have seen their populations increase by more than 6% between 2020 and 2024.

Mozena pointed to the Lordstown Assembly plant. The state provided GM with $60 million in tax credits for the plant, which was supposed to employ 3,700 workers; however, after closing the plant, GM agreed to repay $28 million of the tax credits and provide $12 million for community support programs across the Mahoning Valley.

Mozena said many states opt not to claw back incentives because they don’t want a reputation that the state is hostile to business.

“I think getting a reputation as a state that you can screw without consequences is a worse reputation in the long run,” Mozena said.