Kasich recasts himself as healer
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STEUBENVILLE, Ohio -- Ohio Gov. John Kasich spent much of his first year in office pushing a law to rein in public-employee unions. Now, with voters having shot it down, the 59-year-old Republican is recasting his agenda to include "tough environmental rules" and pleas for bipartisanship.
"You look at what's happening in Washington," Mr. Kasich said during a speech to lawmakers gathered Tuesday in the Steubenville High School auditorium in eastern Ohio. "Do we want to be them? They can't get out of their own way; the country's losing faith. So, together, we've got to make sure that we move forward."
Republican governors' efforts to restrict unions have split citizens along partisan lines. Gov. Mitch Daniels championed Indiana's transformation to a right-to-work state, a vote that Democratic lawmakers stalled with weeks of boycotted sessions. Gov. Scott Walker faces a possible recall in Wisconsin after GOP-majority lawmakers approved his bill curtailing government workers' collective-bargaining rights.
Since Mr. Kasich's rebuff in November, he has said he wants Ohioans to come together once more. "I think you've got to steer clear of mindless partisanship," he said. "They don't give you awards for being a partisan."
The governor's speech fits the mood of voters tired of infighting, as well as the perception that Republicans overreached last year, John C. Green, a University of Akron political science professor, said. "One goal of the speech may have been to stress the governor's willingness to cooperate on legislation."
Mr. Kasich, a former Fox News commentator elected in 2010, gave the annual State of the State address to a relocated joint session of the Legislature in Steubenville, about 150 miles east of Columbus, Ohio's capital. It was the first time the governor's annual speech wasn't delivered at the Capitol, Ohio Historical Society spokeswoman Jane Mason noted.
The governor said he wanted to relocate his speech because Steubenville's Wells Academy, housed at the high school, is the state's highest-ranking elementary school as measured by test results, according to the district's website.
The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Armond Budish and Eric Kearney, respectively, questioned whether Mr. Kasich could live up to such inspirational and bipartisan ideals after he "rammed through" his anti-union legislation. "He can say bipartisanship, but he doesn't act like it," Mr. Kearney said, adding that the governor hasn't responded to a jobs plan Senate Democrats offered.
Steubenville sits atop natural gas deposits in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations. Mr. Kasich has said they may lead Ohio to an economic resurgence thanks to hydraulic fracturing, in which chemical-laced water is used to free trapped gas.
Millions of dollars have flowed into southeast Ohio in bonus checks of as much as $5,500 an acre that drilling companies, including Chesapeake Energy Corp., have been paying landowners, Tiltonsville farmer and lawyer Larry Piergallini, 57, said. Some, though, have blamed the drilling firms' wastewater disposal wells for a rash of earthquakes in the state, and protesters repeatedly interrupted the governor's remarks to complain about the shale gas operations.
"Kasich is selling out Ohio,'' one shouted as she was led from the school auditorium by security.
While Mr. Kasich is placing a lot of his economic hopes for eastern Ohio on the boom in shale deposit oil and glass exploration, many of the more than 150 protesters who were penned into a street across from the school, as well as the few that got inside the auditorium, were primarily concerned about the use of hydraulic "fracking" to get at that oil and gas.
The Kasich administration has issued a moratorium on the operation of ignition wells that receive mining waste from inside and outside Ohio, but the industry has suggested that the Youngstown-area earthquakes and wells aren't necessarily related, let alone whether waste from fracking operations is the problem.
First Published February 9, 2012 12:00 am
