America's Talking - Ohio's $16 million to celebrate country's birth has limited oversight

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

(The Center Square) -- Ohio's elected leaders have earmarked more than $16 million to commemorate the nation's 250th birthday next year – significantly more than some of the first U.S. states. And they have committed those funds over the course of five years to a commission that is outside of typical state oversight and that is spending significant amounts of money on projects that are not directly related to the country's founding, according a Center Square review.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxRead more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/ohio/article_e21fab01-fd15-4a99-a135-c5267aea7eef.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America's Talking. My name's Arcane. I'm managing editor of investigations at the Center Square, and I'm joined by one of my reporters, Jared Strong. Jared's been looking into Ohio and their celebration for the 250-year anniversary of the United States. He's found some really interesting things, including that they're about to spend $16 million on the celebration. Jared, how did you get on to this story? And what have you found?

Well, just as a normal course of our reporting, we're looking at how states are spending money and big programs and small. This would be on the smaller side, but it's still not an insignificant amount of money. Ohio, the 17th state to join the union turns out is spending considerably more than some of the nation's first states to commemorate the U.S. semi-quincentennial. and that their spending has less state oversight than normal because the money is flowing through a nonprofit organization. And there's a decent amount of spending on things that are not related to the nation's birth, like Ohio goes to the movies, which is the most expensive part of their celebration that they've listed in the budget this year. And it's going to cost about $1.4 million. So I assume all these are like super U.S. movies about the Revolutionary War and all the other stuff, or not? It's all over the place.

One of the first ones that's going to be shown is close encounters of the third kind. Spielberg, there's an Ohio connection there. I haven't gone through to look at the entire movie list yet to see how strong the connections are. But it's safe to say that there aren't very many that are tied to the. nation's birth. So a science fiction movie seems pretty tenuous other than the director might have spent some time in Ohio. What do they justify that kind of spending for to show people movies that have nothing to do with, I'm not going to try to pronounce it, but 250th anniversary of the country of the country? Well, when lawmakers created this commission, which it was formed in

2022. You know, they gave it the task of one celebrating the nation's birth, but also highlighting, you know, highlight the great things that are happening and have happened in Ohio. So that is where the movies programming would fit along with a lot of other programming too. They've spent a decent amount of money, plotting routes that people can drive across the state to see interesting things. Um, so yeah, so it's, uh, it's about promoting the state, uh, more than the nation's birth. And then they just decided to use the 250 year thing as a time peg or what was their, uh, thinking? Yeah. I mean, some other states are doing this to, uh, to a lesser extent. Uh, but then you have states, uh, like Delaware and Connecticut spending way less money. I mean, Delaware was the first state to join the union. They're spending, I think they planned a total of a, uh, a million dollars. Connecticut's been allocating about $100,000 a year. But then you get a state like Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. They're spending tens of millions of

dollars, but a lot of that spending is tied to some major events that are going on there next year, including World Cup soccer, MLB's All-Star game, and March Madness games. So now, well, just for the 250th celebration, it was, it's basically big, big tourist attractions. So talk a little bit about this committee. There's some pretty healthy salaries that come along with being on this committee. That's that they're suspending the $16 million. Yeah, so the commission has 29 people, I think, and they are not paid, they're reimbursed for their expenses, but they have staff. They have a staff of about 10 that I think is going to grow or has grown since then.

And, yeah, so the executive director who was appointed, it was not a competitive application process. He's making $131,000 a year. There are three other staff members that each earn more than $100,000 a year. And like I alluded to before, the state is not really tracking all of this stuff. Um, the, uh, the state's office of budget, uh, and management, uh, doesn't have any of the salary information. Uh, they're not tracking how the money is being spent, uh, despite doing that for other state agencies. And that's because this money is flowing through, uh, the nonprofit, uh, which is the Ohio history connection. And so when it's not tracked like that, how do taxpayers

know that it's not being misspent? Or, I mean, even, I guess if it's spent on, you, what they say it's going to be spent on or what's intended to be spent on. That's one thing, even if you agree or disagree. But what if it gets spent on, you know, something completely out of hand or stolen or things like that? If there's no tracking, what's the mechanism to make sure that the taxpayers aren't completely out of bunch of money? Well, I will say we are looking into how the money is being spent, how each dollar is being spent. But then also lawmakers did, they have a requirement for an annual audit that's done in conjunction with the Ohio History Connection annual audit. And I've reviewed those audits and the audit reports released annually do not even mention the commission.

So I'm not exactly sure how much of that spending has oversight at this point. Oh, that's really concerning when you're talking about $16 million. dollars worth of taxpayer money and no way to audit it or no way to review what the spending is. So I assume when you started doing the story, they were super helpful and wanted to talk to you all about it and did some interviews and were just opening their books. Is that how that went down? I mean, there were some delays at first. They were somewhat cooperative, but now the big ask is pending. We're looking to see how each dollars being spent. Jury is still out on that. We'll see what we find when we get the data. Did they do an interview with you and at least

explain why this was necessary? Yeah, I mean, one commissioner who leads the commission, he did talk to me. He was unable to answer some specific questions about the financial oversight, but he justified all of the spending saying it's a great opportunity to promote Ohio. Well, great, Jared. Good work. Keep on digging. Have a great holiday. And that was America's talking for this week.